Payday 3 developer reflects on a 'disastrous launch': 'The game felt unfinished... It was a bad experience.'

Payday 3 has been around for just over a month and, to be polite, it's had a rough start. The botched launch resulted in major server issues that made the game unplayable. The overbearing monetisation drove away all the Payday 2 veterans Starbreeze hoped to transfer over. And the cherry on top was a patch delivery issue which meant the first update was weeks late.

Tobias Sjogren, the CEO of the company, left in March of this year due to the fallout. Chairman Torgny hellstrom said at the time that "the board's consolidated evaluation is that the implementation of strategy needs a new leadership." Last month, Miodrag "Mio", the director of Payday 3's game, moved to another role within Starbreeze. How bad are things? Payday 3 has approximately 700 players, while Payday 2 only has a little under 7,000.

Starbreeze is in a tough spot. Lead producer Andreas Penniger and community leader Amir Listo spoke to PCGN recently about what went wrong during the launch and where it can go next.

Penninger remembers the launch: "Our energy was 'we're rock band and we're going onto the stage and we have a new CD'". "And then the entire stage collapsed, and everyone left."

Listo says, "We had major technical problems and the game was unplayable for a few weeks." "When you have an launch like we had--a disastrous one, where nobody was able to play--there's nowhere to hide. It's important to not use the technical problems as an excuse, because we also clearly missed the mark in terms of the experience. The game felt incomplete. It was a bad game for our players."

Listo believes that Starbreeze took the wrong lessons after the 10-year production of Payday 2 and that the non-technical problems in the third game were due to "a lot of little things building up".

Penninger adds, "We built Payday 3 as we tried to understand what our wants were in parallel." "It was a product people didn't like. I think that we were too confident in the success of Payday 2 and made decisions too quickly.

Listo says, "That feeling of tripping over the goal line was the worst possible situation. You work for years and then see it all disappear into nothingness. "If we had buried our heads in sand, the game would have been dead by now. Even the most angry Payday fans are still coming from a good place. Their anger is a reflection of their desire to see the game succeed. They are not just being haters, they are telling us what the game needs to improve.

Penninger does not reveal what the game's future holds, but it seems like the goal will be to reduce the bloat.

Penniger says that while we haven't revealed what the second year might be, I feel like the game is currently suffering from a split-personality, trying to be too many different things at once. "Our focus should be on a stronger fantasy core. Every heist should feel more exciting, open-ended and rewarding.

I played a lot Payday 2; while the additions and progressions were nice over time, the appeal always was that of a palate cleanser. My friends and I would then play other games when we wanted to blast for an hour or so. Payday 3 felt more like a commitment. While some of the new gameplay features are fantastic, they didn't grab me in the same way.

It may be a simple matter of returning to "core fantasy." This would seem to be a good move, but the big question is whether Starbreeze will be able to do anything to bring this back to the level of its still-popular predecessor.