izigame.me

Positives:
- Graphics look great
Negatives:
- Everything has been simplified... To the point of butchering any meaningful navigation or friendly user interface.
- Less variety of enemies.
- All the skill trees have been removed, and what we have is closer to basic perk decks that existed in payday 2
- Less weapons, and all very basic. No fun overkill weapons or any special ones (but hope to see these with DLC's). However, combined with the lack of skill tree and lack of customization, everything feels very linear with characters and game play. No variation.
- Little to no customization. They have butchered the whole weapon modding, mask variety, mask and mask part collection, weapon customization and weapon aesthetics
- The AI bots are as bad as ever, and I was hoping for an upgrade. They don't take cover, they don't shoot at snipers, and they'll just die in the middle of an open area. Surely, you could at least make them take cover now that it's payday 3...
- The game difficulties have been tweaked. 'Hard' is far too easy, but 'very hard' is now impossible to do solo, and needs teammates, but the servers are so bad for connecting to others.
- The game makes no attempt to actually reward more for completing higher difficulties. The rewards and progression system is broken. No xp bonus tied to higher difficulties and just slightly more money. This is such a mood killer. It takes away from the high-risk high-reward game play for a robbery game. We used to choose high difficulties to try and level up quicker, doing missions above our character levels.
- Progression is objectively horrible. The only way to progress is to do random challenges and try out every gun in the game. There's no rewards for normal, expected and fun gun or stealth gameplay. You can hit caps on leveling immediately and earn 0 xp for playing with the guns you enjoy. What a stroke of genius that was. I can't believe I have to slide thousands of meters to level up, in a competitive heist environment, as if I'm playing call of duty with 12 year olds.
- Pre-game: Why is there no proper mission setup phase? You literally cannot add assets like Payday 2. You can't talk to each other and discuss who's taking what supplies, or what the entry plan is (either stealth or loud game play or half-half). What's worse is that right now, if you want to change the map, difficulty, or any detail, you can't! You have to disband the lobby and remake it again, hoping you get it all prefect from the start. What a waste...
- Loadout selection: The pre-game loadout selection is horrible. I can't name any of the loadouts to distinguish them and forget which ones are loud versus stealth ones. And the User interface is so bad that I've selected the loadout I want several times, but have forgotten to also press confirm, meaning it previews as if you have the equipment you want on the left, but won't actually bring it into the game. That could be solved if you could 'un-ready up' like payday 2, but here if you ready up, you're stuck. So I've commonly forgotten to 'confirm' my loadout after 'selecting' it, and immediately pressed 'ready up'. that means I'm stuck bringing a stealth loadout into loud game, since you didn't have the foresight of people making mistakes with your unfriendly loadout selection process. Also, speaking of lobby issues, why can't we kick players.... That's a standard game mechanic, both at the lobby and the game. If you have 3 good players and 1 low level, you shouldn't have to choose between disbanding and carrying a low level.
- Post-game: Why are we forced to disband upon completion of a game? And how come we can't add anybody as a friend on the mission completion end screen? I thought the whole point was to encourage community building, and sticking together for a few games, in that same lobby... You know, you find a decent crew and you chat to select a new game and continue together. Why on earth can't we re-select a mission type, change difficulty, or deselect the "ready up" option when in the game screen? Who thought that was a good idea? The public community was quite strong in payday 2, but here it's as if the developers are actively trying to kill it and keep us separate. And why can we not see individual stats upon finishing a game (meaning our kills etc) to compare with our friends and fellow heisters? Is it gonna hurt our feelings or something? To learn the truth?
- Mission Length and Complexity. I'd argue it's less complicated, which is a con since it means less content. In payday 2, missions could be multiple days/levels, for example a jewelry heist intended to be quiet, would get a second mission added just for escaping if it turned to loud. Some missions were 3-4 days long, whereas here we have 8 missions only 1 day long (if even that) - in terms of payday 2 lingo.
- Quality of Life: No crime net means you cannot find any games easily, nor can you see if the lobby is full. Almost every game I find is an empty lobby. We used to have realtime showcase of all possible options for games, which worked out much better. Here, I've only played 1 game with 4 players in 20 hours of gametime (London/EU zone). In payday 2, my condition for playing a game was dependent on whether or not the lobby was full. But here, I just have to accept playing alone mostly. What a shame. And why have they added a silly timer to force us into games in the mission lobby, instead of letting us patiently wait for other heisters to join? It's as if they think we're all part of the tiktok generation that cannot be allowed to sit and wait, or have multiple options... Everything needs to be dumbed down to the most simple and streamlined option, such as the single button to find a lobby... So that no one gets confused. It's quite insulting honestly. The point is to cater to the hardcore fans who will stick with your game for years and many dlc's, not the crowd that will drop your game instantly after the first purchase.
And what you fail to see as developers, is that your choice has created an unnecessary burden for the servers. Everyone has to overload the servers 3 times as much, constantly quitting and re-searching for games since you're created such a inefficient system for finding a lobby, where we're forced to search instead of finding a lobby and sitting and waiting, like payday 2. Get rid of the silly timer for lobbies and let people fill them up to full capacity. What's better, 5000 full lobbies or 20,000 empty ones? It's honestly stupid. And then we're all confused as to why there's no server stability.... And no extra budget to upgrade, since it creates ridiculous spikes for short intervals, that don't justify larger upgrades for most other times. This would also be fixed with having offline play abilities.
And part of the fun of crimenet was intending to play one mission, but upon seeing something else with a good lobby, being ready-to-go, you just changing your mind and jumping right into that instead. It's made everything too linear and predictable and boring. Ie, sucking the fun out, and removing any chance for spontaneity.
- Stealth: I see people praising the stealth but I thinks it's a step down. They've gotten rid of the detection system. Used to be guns and equipment tailored to reduce detection to 3, versus 75. Now, we're always loaded as if 75 (on payday 2 lingo) but we're treated as if on 3. The guards just don't see you and it's game breaking. Stealth is a joke. You can open close doors on guards and sprint past cameras and guards without detection. Look straight at them
Overall:
It seems like the company decided to throw out 10 years worth of feedback given over the course of Payday 2, and tried to emulate the new COD crap and simplified all aspect of the game, to the point of it being a shell of its former self. All they had to do was take Payday 2 and create new missions, new masks/weapons and update the graphics. How can the developer be so out of touch.