Payday 2 is an FPS co-op game developed by Overkill Software and published by Sony in 2011. Payday’s game play featured several innovative takes on the standard first person shooter game, such as the hostage system, in which players may take a certain number of civilians hostage. If a team member dies, the remaining players can release one of their hostages in exchange for a respawn.
Possibly most unique to the series however, as developer David Goldfarb said in a today published interview with Polygon, is that, “[t]he exciting thing about heist games is the potential for failure. When we started working on this we asked, how do we achieve that fantasy of robbing a bank in a perfect way without killing everybody? How do we make it feel like failure is OK and rewarding, like in Dark Souls? Having watched the development of this game, I think people have the most fun when they’re failing, which is weird and transgressive for a game. In most games, you want to succeed, but for us, failing in interesting ways is the fun part.”
With this in mind, Goldfarb has sought to combine the “heist-gaming” atmosphere found in Payday: The Heist with the beloved RPG customization formula found in games such as Dark Souls for Overkill’s newest Payday 2. He hopes that the combination will result in a hyper-attached player experience, in which the player simultaneously wants their painstakingly developed characters to succeed and to fail.
How do you feel about this combination of gaming styles?