Developer Starbreeze Studios and publisher Plaion have announced a new initiative to respond to community feedback for co-op shooter Payday 3. The initiative, dubbed Operation Medic Bag, involves a team within the studio having reviewed and revisited all aspects of Payday 3, and reprioritising development pipeline for upcoming updates.
Operation Medic Bag is split into four major categories: Optimisation and Reliability, Teamwork and Co-op, Replayability and Progression, and Fantasy and Heisting. Each of the categories will see the studio working on different aspects of Payday 3 in order to bring more meaningful and impactful changes to the game as has been requested by the community.
Goals for the various categories in Operation Medic Bag range from improving the game’s performance and consistency in matchmaking, UI improvements and technical issues, to bringing in new communication tools like text chat, all the way to changes to the infamy system and ensuring that playing as a group is more fun.
Changes to Payday 3 will be made through free updates over the course of 2024, and to start with, the studio will be focusing on features including a new version of Quickplay, an unready button, a play again feature, the ability to vote kick disruptive players, loadout renaming, controller improvements, smaller content drops that happen more often, rotating stealth modifiers, daily activities, a mask vendor with a rotating weekly inventory, the ability to merge players into a party after a match, and improvements to the communications wheel.
One of the bigger new features coming to Payday 3 is a new solo and offline mode. This feature will be rolled out in two distinct phases, with phase one requiring an online connection for progression and unlocks, and phase two bringing an offline mode to the game. The offline mode will still need players to occasionally connect to the game’s servers to keep a track of player progression, however.
The announcement comes shortly after Starbreeze Studios spoke about the game performing at much lower levels than anticipated. The game has seen multiple patches since its release, and December saw the release of its first paid DLC in Syntax Error.
Payday 3 is available on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S. For more details, check out our review.
