YMMV / PAYDAY 3

• Critical Dissonance: While the average Metacritic score for the game is 67, there were several outlets that either had unanimous praise for the game or rated it higher than that (GameInformer, ScreenRant and PCGamesN all rated the game 80/100). The current average score for players however is 3.0 out of 10, and Steam reviews and scores for the game barely crack a 40% rating on average (As of 22/04/2024, it's sitting at 39.65%). Critics praised the new mechanics, updated graphics and visuals, while players criticised the changes to be always-online, the lack of voice chat, the lack of a day one patch to fix issues, among many other grievances. That said, critics did mention some of the faux pa's players picked up on, but the average score doesn't really reflect that too well.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: Before patch 1.1.0 (or the Syntax Error DLC) added Infamy Points to heist payouts, leveling up could only be done by doing various challenges. The majority of these challenges are loud-oriented. Naturally, many people camped in the bathrooms of Touch The Sky with a couple of hostages^note which was mainly done to prevent enemies from throwing gas grenades, the one counter to this strategy to rack up the required kills for their primary and secondary weapons for maximum points.
• Demonic Spiders: Most of the special units from the previous games are back, and they brought with them new tricks:
  • Shields can be shot through their visor, but its still a small weakpoint to a enemy that is completely bullet proof from the front. Options for bypassing the shield are far less common (Shield surfing is extremely risky because the shield can stun players who get too close), and cops now actively seek cover behind them.
  • Tasers (Renamed to Zappers) are mostly the same, and they now have battery on their belt that can be shot to kill them and harm surrounding cops. They may seem weaker at first, but they can scatter traps across the map that can electrocute you even if you are not within reach of the Zapper. The traps are weaker than being directly tased, but they still make you waste precious ammo.
  • Cloakers are WAY more aggressive in this game. They will pretty much go for a kick as soon as they have clear line of sight or you wander too close to their hiding spots. The helmet's feedback was notably muted, so like the only sign of a Cloaker's presence is the "WULULULULU-". The kicks by themselves no longer chunk off massive portions of HP, but if you take too long to shoot the Cloaker off, he cuffs the heister and immediately sends them into police custody. On top of this, they bounce off the walls like the first game and can destroy your support gear with acid. The only saving grace is that Cloakers no longer show up in the first assault wave, along with Bulldozers, speaking of which...
  • Bulldozers were also massively souped up. Their devastating charges from the original are back, they now have significantly more hp and faceplate armor, and all of them use auto shotguns like the Black Dozers, but can fire it even more rapidly. Shade warns you when these guys show up for a good reason.
  • Snipers are unchanged, but because the game is incredibly stingy about armor regen, every shot they land is effective HP you are not getting back without Armor Bags.
  • Introduced alongside Syntax Error, the brand new Techie will hide in an out-of-the-way area and rapidly swarm you with drones once in position, shredding your armor until she's taken out. If you see your HUD begin glitching out, search for her immediately.
• Good Bad Bugs: It's generally safe to assume that any unintended aspects that players exploit will be quickly fixed in a patch or two. The following bugs were patched out:
  • In the technical playtest of the game, if you get caught in a private area, a guard will escort you out. While it's already a good strategy to distract them, players quickly noticed that the guard plays an animation of getting pushed back when they close the door on him. Since he will never notice the player doing this so long as they're in a public area, this was naturally abused to stall the guard returning to his regular patrol for way longer than the game intended. This was fixed in the full release to have the guard attempt to arrest you if the door slams in his face more than a couple times.
  • In Road Rage, going to the south-side of the bridge and camping on the scaffolding where Bile can possibly be waiting will result in the police strangely leaving you alone. They won't attack your position at all except for Snipers, which can be a life-saver for some players, especially on Overkill.
  • After you complete the heist in stealth, you are prompted to escape like usual. However, on this specific heist, constantly going in and out of the escape point would keep adding more EXP to your weapons. Doing it for long enough will gain you enough EXP for max level in one heist, significantly cutting down on the grind.
  • The security room in 99 Boxes is behind a door that requires a keycard from one of the guards who spawn in the crate yards... At least, that was the intention. In reality the door wasn't locked at all, letting you take out the camera operator before entering the storage yard..
  • On Very Hard or Overkill, the Lead Guard is your biggest threat during stealth and can't simply be killed. If a player does so, his pager will endlessly activate around every minute, putting them on a time limit for the rest of stealth...unless they had the Cover-Up skill that instantly answers a pager when they do a takedown. When the Lead Guard is taken down via takedown with this skill, his pager will only activate once like the other guards.
  • After leading a guard to a secluded area by distracting him, try hacking his radio and hitting or sprinting into him while you're masked up, then get out of sight. For some reason, doing this will freeze the guard in place for the remainder of the heist despite being "alerted." He won't move back to his previous patrol spot and, depending on where he's frozen at, you won't have to worry about him for the rest of the heist. Just don't let him see you or he'll become unfrozen. This only works temporarily on the Lead Guard, as he will eventually become unstuck as you make progress in the heist, but you can simply use the Cover-Up exploit to permanently dispose of him that way.
  • On Touch The Sky, you were able to perform a Sequence Break by clipping through the panic room door using a Micro-Cam, allowing you to skip straight to stealing and decrypting the SSD. This clip was fixed in Update 1.1.0.
  • The following is currently unpatched as of V1.1.0:
    • Distracting a guard by using a throwing knife with the Retriever skill will have him activate Search Mode if the player doesn't pick it up. If they pick the knife up while the guard has the radio symbol above his head, then the guard will return to his previous spot like nothing happened and stay in that spot for the remainder of the heist instead of patrolling. They won't bother to investigate any suspicious sounds either, leaving you free to do what you please around them so long as you're out of sight. Just keep an eye out for the Lead Guard, as he will unfreeze himself as you make progress in the heist.
    • Just like in the previous game, players have to deal with the security guard monitoring the cameras in order to disable them. You can shoot him in the back of the head to permanently shut them off if you got a pager to spare...or you can just throw a suspicious bag in his line of sight and pick it up when he notices. If the security room is a private area instead of a secure area, you can also intentionally let him spot and escort you out. Due to an oversight, the cameras will permanently remain disabled even though the guard is alive, saving you a pager. While the bag effect was removed and the camera operator will turn the cameras back on after an escort after Patch 1.1.0, throwing knives with the Retriever skill still achieves the same effect. Throw it in his line of sight, wait until the radio symbol pops up, then pick the knife up.
    • When caught in a private area, the guard will escort you back to a public area. If you try to leave the circle, the guard will stop in his tracks, warn you to keep following him, and will attempt to detain you if you ignore him after five seconds. This timer resets when you re-enters the circle and since you can do this as much as you like, you can lead the guard away from your fellow heisters for much longer than intended and even leave him stuck in a loop at the end of the escort by simply walking in and out of the circle.
    • In Touch The Sky, with a few disabled cameras and well-placed gunshots to lure every guard in the map to specific points, it's possible to trap all but one of them behind a breached door and then take out the two remaining guards, including the camera guy. After grabbing the QR code and blue keycard from the pile of guards, you're free to stealth the rest of the map worry-free.^note You don't have to worry about the alerted civilians running off unlike the other maps as the front door to the suite is locked, disabling the only route for them to escape and set off the alarm.
    • The addition of Adrenaline and the Fortitude skill tree introduced one in Road Rage. By positioning yourself just right when the armored truck drives in the map, it's possible to clip out of bounds and access the loot that's normally inaccessible until the truck is opened, skipping most of the objectives. The latter normally wouldn't be possible as the loot is below the bridge, but the Adrenaline from the Medic Bag allows you to survive fatal heights and jumping off the bridge entirely with another Medic Bag to teleport yourself back in-bounds. With consistent movements, it's possible to complete the map in around five minutes.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • Infinite double barrel shotgun ^ExplanationPeople have noticed in the first trailer that in a clip, a player fires a double barrel shotgun three times, which some theorizing it might be due to a unknown skill. Once this trend continued into dev diaries, people joked that this would be a Running Gag for pre-release footage, such as the shotgun firing more than three times. This behavior would be explained when the Closed Beta launched, as the Ammo Funnel skill causes any ammo that is picked up to be automatically loaded into the weapon first, with anything in excess then going to reserves as usual.
  • Smug Joy ^ExplanationOn the day of Joy and Pearl's reveal, Plaion tweeted about their inclusion, which included a image of Joy inexplicably having a shit eating grin on her face on her unmasked image. People took a liking towards this expression, to the point of some finding her more endearing as a result. Of course, this led to some memes about her smug grin.
  • Stealing Starbreeze's servers^ExplanationAfter the game was released, the game was plagued with server problems where barely anybody can matchmake into a lobby, if at all. These problems persisted for days after launch, resulting in various memes about the matchmaking system and how the Payday gang broke in and stole Starbreeze's servers.
  • "Its on the table"^ExplanationA frequent response to community requests, which eventually led to a lot of table jokes.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • In order to restart a heist, every player in the lobby has to agree to it. If even one person in a full lobby disagrees for one reason or another, the vote will fail. For example, if the alarm goes off during a heist and one person in the lobby wants to do loud despite everybody else wanting to do stealth, their only options are to just grit their teeth and follow along, praying that the player decides to press that restart button at some point if asking them doesn't work, or simply leave completely. God help you if the restart button bugs out and doesn't activate the vote at all.
  • The fact that the game requires a persistent internet connection has been met with a lot of backlash, not unlike the Safes and drills fiasco of Crimefest 2015. The primary concern being that the game would be rendered unplayable if the servers go down for maintenance (or if the game goes defunct in the future) and people with poor internet having a bad experience, with no signs of an offline mode being announced. The fact that the first two games have an offline play option (even post-Update-237, Payday 2 still has the ability to play solo with bots) has made fans very uneasy on supporting the game. While the servers during early access were stable, the servers couldn't handle the amount of players trying to matchmake come release day, resulting in people either waiting a long time to join a lobby or just outright not being able to join one at all. These problems persisted for days, worsening the already fiery backlash.
    
    Making things worse is that Almir (one of the PR managers) tried to claim that the game needs to be fully online to leverage cross-play^note already a rather sour topic with PAYDAY fans owing to the aforementioned Update-237 and cross-saving. This is in spite of several games having Local Play or offline modes and supporting the same features; Rocket League is outright DRM-Free, has cross-play/ progression, and can be played locally with bots or with friends on a couch. Even Hitman 3, a game that is also dependant on an always-online connection, has a functional (albeit barebones) offline mode, and has cross-play/ progression via the Xbox Cloud service (I.E, Xbox to PC), disproving their reasoning.
  • When the game launched, the progression system met with heavy backlash as players were forced to grind out challenges in order to level up and stealth was heavily discouraged (due to most challenges being loud-oriented).
• Tainted by the Preview: Oh boy, where to begin...
  • The game released with a lot of post-launch monetization. There are five editions at release (Base, Silver, Gold, Day One and Collectors, complete with the "Pre-Order Content Spreadsheet" that Ubisoft made a faux-pa with almost a decade ago), as well as having a season pass (included in all but Base in varying ways), and DLC's that are featured in the season pass will also be able to be separately purchased. There is also the upcoming inclusion of Microtransactions (which are set to be added sometime post-release; a practice that is remarkably similar to what Activision did with Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled to avoid various rating boards' rules about disclosing additional monetisation in the game). While the presence of any one of these features has been seen as not a huge problem (even the microtransactions have their defenders, as people often defend their strictly cosmetic nature), the whole package put together has made some fans very uneasy on buying the game. In fact, the only monetization not in the game is any kind of Rewards Pass (something that is otherwise common to see in modern "Live Service" games), and Loot Boxxes (though the fact various world governments are looking into the fact they are unregulated gambling has tainted that mechanic from being used in paid games).
  • Throughout the Closed and Open betas of the game, Denuvo, a much-maligned and controversial DRM scheme, was confirmed to be added to the game and was removed a week before release due to the backlash this caused. Said backlash was due to the DRM isn't well liked in the PC space as developers appear to have a hard time implementing it without harming performance, and many fans opted to blame the publisher, Deep Silver, for this decision. At the time, Starbreeze had to assure people during the Technical Test and Open Beta that they had been testing with it enabled in their internal builds to make sure it didn't affect performance for the final release, though players remained unconvinced, in part because Payday 3 is still slated to be always online, meaning adding a defense against pirates who won't be able play the game offline came off as pointless and misguided.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Certain changes have not been received well by some players:
  • Some see the HUD as a downgrade from Payday 2, with many pointing to the iconic Police Assault In Progress icon in the top-right corner of the screen being changed to a generic white text.
  • Some criticized the inability to chat in the pre-heist lobbies, a feature that was present for Payday 2 at launch day. While this isn't a massive issue if you're with friends, it is an issue if you're with random people who aren't going to be on the same page with one another, leading to quite a number of people equipping stealth builds when others equipped loud builds, with predictable results.
  • Some others have found it rather disappointing that loot bags don't display some sort of value upon being secure, making your total at the end of the heist a bit of a guessing game and lessening the impact of collecting loot.

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