I Can’t Believe How Bad Payday 3’s Launch Has Been

Payday 3 bank heist

After a brief early access period, Payday 3 came out on Friday, and was even included in Xbox Game Pass. Having largely enjoyed Payday 2, I was excited to jump into the sequel and get heisting, and spent a large chunk of my weekend digging into it. And by “digging into it” I mean “trying for hours to get into a game and ultimately giving up because it didn’t work.”

To start Payday 3 on Xbox, you first need to download the game. That part was easy! It’s not a huge game, it was pretty quick to download and it didn’t take up much space on my SSD. Then I needed to open the game, which required me to scroll over to the game and press the A button. So far, so good.

After a brief loading screen, the game then asks you to sign a few EULAs, create and/or link an account, and then select an option from the main menu. This is where the roadblock seems to be, because good grief, this game is a mess. If I could get the EULAs to sign properly, and if I could successfully link my account, and if I could get the game to even load the menu, I might have a lot of fun with the game. But we’ll never know, because despite the game launching on Friday, I’ve never been able to actually get into the game part.

Now, Payday 3 is a multiplayer game, with some single-player aspects to it. You might be thinking, “hey, can’t you just play the single-player content?” And yeah, I’d love to! But I can’t. Because the game is always-online, and even launching single-player content needs the servers to be working.

Payday 3 isn’t the first game to lock its single-player content behind an online service. Diablo 4 is technically playable solo, but it’s always-online too. Hitman 3 is entirely single-player, and while you could technically play it while offline, you couldn’t save, a few of the game modes were locked off, and you couldn’t gain any experience. There are dozens more examples, but needless to say, it’s a bit of a trend, and an annoying one at that.

It’s made more annoying by the fact that Payday 2’s heists can be played offline. In this respect, Payday 3 is actively worse than its predecessor. And hey, maybe it’s worse in other aspects too! Or maybe it’s much better. As I said, after three days of trying to play the game, I’ve yet to actually get into it. Friends and colleagues say you can get into a game by repeatedly closing and re-opening the game dozens of times, but I do not have the time for that.

If I weren’t a games writer who needs to play this game for my job, I’d have given up on Payday 3 altogether, uninstalling it and never thinking about it again. I may still do that. Payday 3’s disastrous launch is doing lasting damage to its potential player base, and despite promises from developer Starbreeze that things would be fixed soon, I worry that if it takes too much longer, a potentially great game could get looked over.

But again, I wouldn’t know if it's great. Because I can’t play the thing.