Ten years after the release of Payday 2, the Payday 3 series returns to us with its most awaited new part, and we got the opportunity to try the beta version during the past days, which surprised us by providing many great features that make us very excited for the full version next September. Here’s our first impression of the Payday 3 Closed Beta.
Payday 3’s gameplay is addictive both in combat and stealth
First let’s talk about the game’s content, which is not much in the beta version. The beta offers you one map that is a bank that you rob to steal the large safe inside it, and unfortunately you can only customize the map by changing the difficulty only, you cannot even change the time of the robbery and choose the night instead of the day.
The beta version also offers a solid selection of weapons and customizations that you can do on them with the money you get through successful heists, with the ability to add skins and weapon variants and even change the appearance of your character or the mask he wears while robbing the bank.
You can, of course, try the game individually, and at that time the game will fill your team with three artificial intelligence bots, but the best experience, of course, will be by enjoying the game with your real friends and doing these operations together, and in the beta version we could only do the operation in two ways, namely direct confrontation, or stealth and infiltration.
The problem here is that stealth and infiltration are not dynamic. Rather, the game lists a set of steps that you must take if you want to finish the task in disguise, and you must follow these steps in detail in order to finish the task correctly, and any error will lead to the police knowing your location and starting direct confrontations With them, this was relatively annoying!
As for the gameplay itself, it was frankly addictive, and confronting the enemies directly had a distinct feel, especially since Starbreeze studio was really able to design the weapons in a fabulous way. Of course, the game is not as realistic as Call of Duty Modern Warfare, but it tries to provide a great mix between realism and arcade, and it undoubtedly succeeded in doing so because the experience was fun as a whole.
The design of the bank map that we played in the beta version was good, although the bank is small, but it has many floors and inner rooms in which you can find a lot of things of value, with a focus of course on the main safe and the small safes around it that are full of money. But we wish the full version was full of bigger maps and more branched banks and with plenty of side quests we could take inside each area or facility we visit to loot.
Unfortunately, not everything was positive with the beta version, although the overall experience was very good and very enjoyable, but the artificial intelligence disturbed us the ideal experience that we dreamed of with Payday 3…
Artificial intelligence needs a lot of improvement
The main problem that made the Payday 3 experience annoying at times is the artificial intelligence. If you decide to try the game by stealth and stealth, you will find that the artificial intelligence here is very stupid even on the highest difficulty, and it cannot catch you easily unless you reveal yourself in a stupid way. It’s easy to sneak behind enemies from a close distance without them noticing anything, which made the feeling of stealing not tense at all!
Even in direct confrontations against a huge amount of enemies on the highest difficulty, you find that they can only shoot you with difficulty, and to solve this matter, the studio resorted to making the damage that enemies shoot at you very high from each shot so that you die quickly, so it seems that the studio already knows that artificial intelligence cannot Shoot the player.
The full version needs to solve the problem of artificial intelligence, especially if we take into account the presence of a lot of talented players who will enter into very difficult robbery missions and take advantage of the stupidity of the enemies to finish them within a few minutes without any danger, and we expect that it will be annoying for players over time after saving maps and so on.
Excellent technical experience in the closed beta version
Visually, Payday 3 looks like any other Unreal Engine 4 game, visually beautiful but not perfect of course especially since the game tends to be a bit more cartoonish than 100% realistic which is a signature style of the Payday series. The exciting thing is Starbreeze Studio promises that it will move to Unreal Engine 5 post-launch, and we expect to see a huge graphical jump.
We did not encounter Bugs or technical errors mentioned in the beta version, and most of them were very minor problems that did not affect the game experience in any way. But perhaps the most remarkable thing was the technical performance, we were able to run the game on a midrange machine with an RTX 3050 card at the highest settings in 1080p resolution and the frames never dropped below 60.
In general, it seems that the length of the development period had an excellent benefit for the game Payday 3 in the end, although we are still in a beta version, the experience in general was technically excellent and this rarely happens with the latest versions of games that come full of problems and we continue to wait after version to be resolved. In addition, the audio experience was beautiful, whether the sounds of the environment itself or the weapons, but what really shined is the soundtrack that you hear when you engage in direct confrontations with the enemies, as it was wonderful, enthusiastic, and increases adrenaline!
What we hope to see in the full version of Payday 3
In the end, the Payday 3 beta version provided a very special experience that brought back a lot of memories we had with Payday 2, and we can’t wait to make more memories with the new part when it launches next September. What we hope from the full version is to solve the problems of artificial intelligence and release them without technical errors, so that it becomes the experience of theft and robbery that we all dreamed of years ago.
We also hope that we will find a lot of diversifications in the quality of tasks and we see a great need for cooperation between the team’s staff and their distinctive characteristics so that they can solve puzzles and enter various places of sequence within banks and facilities, while providing many tools and machines that help in direct confrontation operations against the police forces. But the most important thing is to provide a dynamic experience for the player that makes him able to complete the tasks and operations in the way he sees fit instead of following a set of steps that the studio defines for us!
What we would really like to see in the full version in the bank map that we tried is the ability to try it at night and disconnect the electricity from the entire bank, which makes the experience of stealth and infiltration more tense, especially since all enemies will use searchlights in an attempt to find players, and we in turn use tools that make us see in complete darkness Let’s take down the police or bank security and rob the safe in complete peace!
Payday 3 is available on September 21 on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S, and starts from day one on Xbox Game Pass.
