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The developers of Payday 3, perhaps one of the most anticipated first-person shooters this year, recently announced that the game is always online, even if the player is playing in singleplayer. Understandably, fans are not happy with this.
Recently, the global brand director for Starbreeze, Almir Listo, held a livestream on the official Payday YouTube channel. The stream was a Payday 2 stream, with Almir playing. Before he played, however, he was chilling and talking with the viewers and answering their questions. One particular question (timestamped above) asked him “Will Payday 3 have offline mode, like playing solo?” Almir quickly replied with the following answer:
No, you would be able to play by yourself, but I do believe you will have to have a connection in order [to] play because it's made in the Unreal Engine, it's using cross-progression, cross-play. I do believe we need you to be online my dude.
Understandably, this disappointed a lot of fans. This is because the previous two Payday games were playable offline. Players could run the game's various heists with a party of AI-controlled characters. Granted, these bots aren't always the best at their job (it's difficult, if not outright impossible, to do stealth missions with them), but at least players had the option. Thanks to this “always online” announcement, quite a lot of players are no longer looking forward to Payday 3.
A fan in the comments (@AdamSandlerFan) on the Youtube video above said that he “went from willing to spend 90$, to willing to spend 130$, to willing to spend 0$.” Another one (@shaggytoph) described what the game would be like under the “always online” feature:
imagine the servers going down, or your internet drop for 10 secs & you heist is over, you'll lose all your progress. Same if in 3 years the company goes bankrupt & they decide to shut down the servers, nobody would be able to play the game, not even those who already owned it.
Players have also taken to expressing their discontent on social media
https://twitter.com/amematoiYT/status/1680352660451368960
oh
that's payday 3 going online only pic.twitter.com/qQGCFSEo1x— Berto (@bertosdeadacc) July 15, 2023
Missed the announcement that Payday 3 will be online only pic.twitter.com/LmR5IkUvkS
— KingishKing (@KingesqueKing) July 17, 2023
Of course, some players chose to look at the silver lining. Some people were happy about the cross-progression and cross-play, for example. They also said that it would help reduce hackers and cheaters. However, the majority of players still believe that this is a very bad move on Starbreeze's part. This is thanks to the volatility of “always online” games.
Some fans have even said that the game “is on death row“. This is a sentiment that echoes one of the YouTube comments mentioned above. Should the game's servers, for any reason, go down, no one will be able to play it. It's even worse in the future when Starbreeze decides to end support for Payday 3. That would make the game itself unplayable, as players would no longer be able to connect to any server.
We'll have to wait and see if the developers decide to listen to its fans. The situation is somewhat similar to Redfall, who announced that it would always be online. After fans spoke up about it, the developers said they were “looking into” making it playable offline. They still, sadly, haven't made it possible yet. We can only hope that Starbreeze won't make the same mistake.
That's all the information we have about Payday 3 being always online, even in singleplayer. Check out our gaming news articles for the latest in gaming news.
