The studio originated out of the modding community for the Payday games, and have previously worked on titles like RAID: World War 2. Starbreeze Studios has praised Sidetrack Games’ ability to offer post-launch support for titles over a long period of time, as well as the fact that the team is already familiar with the engine powering Payday 2.

“Sidetrack (formerly known as the M.U.G. Team) is a talented team with deep roots in the Payday modding community,” said Starbreeze in its announcement. “Their work on RAID: World War II showed that they have the skill and perseverance to deliver quality updates over a long time. They know the Payday 2 engine inside and out, and they’ve already gotten started.”

The first update as part of this hand-off is slated for release on October 23, and will focus on stability and general improvements for Payday 2. More precise details about the update will likely become more available as part of a larger set of patch notes alongside the update itself.

As a result of this move, Starbreeze Studios has stated that it intends to “maintain full focus on Payday 3, while Payday 2 continues to deliver value for all players with the dedicated expert support they deserve.”

The announcement comes a few months after Starbreeze Studios announced that it had fully acquired the publishing rights for Payday 3 from Plaion. According to its announcement from back in May, the transaction involved a directed share issue of over 147 million of its class be shares valued at SEK 33 million, which in turn were picked up by Embracer Group for SEK 0.2235 per share. The studio had said at the time that its acquisition of the publishing rights for Payday 3 would allow it more freedom to accelerate its development roadmap for the title.

“This agreement enables Starbreeze to fully acquire the publishing rights to Payday 3 from Plaion, significantly accelerate our content development roadmap, and pursue broader strategic opportunities for the Payday franchise as a whole,” said studio board member Thomas Lindgren. “We appreciate Plaion’s support, which underscores their confidence in Starbreeze’ future and strengthens our strategic alignment with major global industry players.”

More recently, Starbreeze Studios had also announced that it was halting development of the much-requested offline mode for Payday 3, with community manager Elisabeth Elvestad and general manager Jonas Skantz referring to the feature as “not feasible”.

“So, offline mode. Let’s talk about that,” they said in a livestream. “I know that the team had good intentions with that, definitely. And they have been trying to make it happen, but I think we have to face the reality that it is not feasible for where we are going with the game.”

Payday 3 is available on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S. For more details, check out our thoughts on the fall of Payday 3.

Or, well, they should have been, because things have certainly not gone right for the game since it came out in September. From the state that it launched in to the chaos that has surrounding the process of Starbreeze beginning the process of fixing it, Payday 3 has stumbled right out the gate, and so much of the momentum that the franchise had built up over the last several years has dissipated thanks to all of that bad press. The Payday series’ graph, which had been consistently rising for over a decade, suddenly feels like it’s plummeting.

When the first Payday released for PS3 and PC back in the day, it was very much the opposite of a big deal. Coming from a smaller studio and released as a digital-only title (which, back in 2011, was far less common than it is now), it was a smaller-scale title that went on to achieve greater success than perhaps most would have anticipated. While reviews for Payday: The Heist were lukewarm at best, word of mouth was strong, and those who did play the game had plenty of good things to say about its co-op mechanics, entertaining shooting, and tense heists, even if it was a little rough around the edges. Within a year of its release, Payday: The Heist had sold over 700,000 units. Though not an earth-shattering number, those were impressive sales for smaller, digital-only game nonetheless- and most importantly, they were enough to warrant a sequel.

Because that’s where the Payday franchise really took off. A couple of years after the first game’s launch, Payday 2 came out, and marked the beginning of an impressive explosion in popularity for the series. With its pre-orders alone, Payday 2 had sold enough copies to begin turning a profit, and within a month of its release, it had sold 1.58 million units. And that early success was only the beginning, because the game went on to enjoy a far longer tail than most would have expected. In fact, as of early 2023, it had sold over 40 million units worldwide, while also having one of the largest active communities on Steam with over 8 million lifetime players on the platform.

Of course, Payday 2 has had its fair share of ups and downs as well, in spite of the success that it has enjoyed. For starters, the disparity between the game’s PC and console versions is a major issue that plagued the game for years on end, thanks to the frustrating optimization issues across platforms brought about by the Diesel Engine, which the game was developed on. Meanwhile, in 2015, a couple of years after its launch, Payday 2 also attracted plenty of controversy with its inclusion of pay-to-win microtransactions, made even worse by the fact that the game’s developers had said prior to its release that all of its microtransactions would be purely cosmetic. Additionally, even from a content and mechanics perspective, it was clear upon Payday 2’s launch that it was very much a work in progress.

In spite of its issues, however, the game had plenty going for it, with everything from its heists to the smart and significant ways in which it expanded upon the original’s co-op formula creating a solid, steady foundation for the game to build on. And build on it did. Payday 2 was supported for several years, far longer than most people would have anticipated- including, funnily enough, the developers. Post-launch support for the game technically ended in late 2018, but a year later, it was announced that support had resumed once again. And when all was said and done, looking back at Payday 2, it was hard not to be impressed with how the game grew and improved over the years.

Enter: Payday 3, a game that very much feels like a case of one step forward, two steps back. Payday 3 surely makes some notable improvements over its predecessors, from its excellent shooting mechanics to some of its more interesting ideas with the Skills system, while playing through heists still remains an exciting endeavor. On the development side of things, meanwhile, with the game having shifted to Unreal Engine, it also has parity across all platforms, something that, as we’ve mentioned, was a big issue with Payday 2.

But those improvements are lost in a glut of poor design decisions, baffling choices, and technical issues, all of which have let down Payday 3 in some fundamental ways. The game’s always-online nature, for starters, has irked plenty of players quite a bit, as have the many connectivity problems it has faced since release. In the days and weeks after its launch, finding a lobby full of players to play with in Payday 3 felt almost like an impossible task, which meant having to play with bots, which in turn meant having to suffer their braindead AI and utter incompetence.

Another major issue that has crippled the game in the early stages of its life is its grindy Infamy progression system, and the inordinate emphasis it places on challenges, which feels like it’s almost missing the point of why people want to play Payday. Add to that some baffling omissions (like there being no quick play options) and the game lacking enough content to keep players occupied for too long, and things have certainly not got off to a great start for Payday 3.

To top it off, all of that has been made worse by the chaos surrounding the release of its first patch, which was delayed multiple times due to what were described as “critical” development errors, only to arrive last week, a month and a half after the game’s release, with over a hundred fixes. Unsurprisingly, the game has drawn widespread criticism from players since its release, and that has been reflected in its numbers. Though it managed to attract an impressive 3.1 million players in September alone, there were periods following its release where its concurrent player numbers were consistently falling below those of Payday 2.

Thankfully, Payday 3 doesn’t seem to be a completely unsalvageable mess. For starters, at its core, the game boasts excellent shooting mechanics, and heists are still a lot of fun (at least when the game is functioning as intended). Of course, it’s everything around that core that needs work. Payday 3 needs a serious injection of quality-of-life features, content, and technical polish, because right now, it’s in very rough shape. If Starbreeze can support it the way its predecessor was supported, we can definitely see a future where the co-op shooter makes an impressive recovery. Will that actually happen? That remains to be seen, but given how big of a money-maker the Payday property has been over the last decade, we’d be surprised if Starbreeze didn’t give it its best shot.

Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, GamingBolt as an organization.

Resident Evil Village

The Resident Evil series has seen its fair share of remakes in the form of the stellar Resident Evil 2 and the disappointing Resident Evil 3, but it has consistently delivered high-quality follow-ups. These include Resident Evil 7 and its follow-up Village, the latter of which represent the best of what the series offers. Resident Evil Village majestically swerves from one kind of horror to the next without any hiccups, and the action keeps pace with the changing scenery and shifting mechanics. The core gameplay of shooting down zombies is much faster than Resident Evil 7, but it retains the heft and groundedness of a survival horror game that comes together to make it one of the best in its class.

Please note that most if not all of these games are really great in their own right, and 100% completion criteria aren’t exactly indicative of the general experience of playing these games.

With that out of the way, let’s begin:

Yakuza 0

The Yakuza games are known for stuffing a ton of content into a rather small open-world space, and Yakuza 0 is no different. Completing the game to a 100% would require completing every side quest in the game, playing through all the minigames, eating all the dishes available at restaurants, and completing all related combat challenges. What makes Yakuza 0 a markedly more difficult game to tackle is the fact that some of this progress isn’t shared between Kiryu and Majima, so be prepared to spend dozens upon dozens of hours doing the same chores again and again if you wish to get that coveted platinum.

The High Octane Tailor Pack features two outfits in 4 varieties each, 6 masks, and 2 pairs of gloves. The general theme for the High Octane Tailor Pack is the biker gang aesthetic.

The High Octane Tailor Pack is a single part of the 4-DLC Lost in Transit bundle, which is going to see content released over the course of three months. The bundle as a whole is already available to buy, priced at $9.99 Buying the whole bundle will get players access to every DLC part of the bundle as they are released.

As part of the Lost in Transit bundle, Payday 2 will get the Tijuana Music Pack on August 31, McShay Weapon Pack 2 on September 21, and the bundle will wrap up with the release of the Lost in Transit heist.

Lost in Transit as a bundle is set to be a chapter of the Texas Heat campaign, which will see its story continue over time.

Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain

Kojima’s swansong Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain is a game that actually uses its open-world setting to great effect. Its setting of Afghanistan houses a complex web of interconnecting systems that create a highly dynamic gameplay loop – requiring players to alter strategies on the fly. It’s also filled with a ton of neat little details to signify the outcome of your killings. If you get sloppy and do a lot of killing in your mission, your Demon Points increase which causes the Horn on Venom Snake to grow along with blood smears on his face. After a certain point, the horn will grow out completely and you turn into Demon Snake.

The Bank Job – Dishonored: Death of the Outsider

One of the best missions in the game by a country mile, The Bank Job sees Billie Lurk sneaking into the Dolores Michaels Deposit & Loan Bank to retrieve the Twin-bladed Knife. Entry points include via the roof (and some laudanum), through the sewers or by trash disposal. There are multiple ways to access the vault, like releasing the brakes and causing it to crash all the way down the sewers which also conveniently acts as an escape route. It’s ingenuous and a pinnacle of immersive sim gameplay.

Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory – Panama Bank

Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory had its fair amount of action but the Panama Bank level is where stealth reigned supreme. Your mission was to steal $50,000,000 in bearer bonds, which must be done by authorizing vault access from three different panels in the building. Getting into the bank is going to be your first obstacle – the only real option is through the roof and once inside, you’ll need to deal with laser sensors, cameras, motion sensors and guards. Though Chaos Theory wouldn’t end a mission if an alarm was triggered, Panama Bank was still nerve-wracking in its own right.

Over the years, there’s been several cautionary tales, of sorts, of developers or publishers who grew too fast and ended up crashing because of it. One such unfortunate example was Starbreeze, whose Payday series saw huge success which saw them expand at a rate that eventually came back to haunt them. They seem to be trying to get back on track with reviving active development for Payday 2, but it’s come with some drawbacks on the console side.

As announced via a blog post from the developer, the console versions of the games are soon to be behind update wise. They acknowledge that keeping up with consoles has been a huge issue for them and say that after the current console update 1.5, it may be a good while before we see any significant updates on PS4 and Xbox One.

“Consoles has always been something of an Achilles heel in our production pipeline and while we’ve made several efforts through the years to strengthen the team and effectivising the PC production to better align to consoles, it hasn’t been enough. As of April 2019, the PAYDAY 2: Crime Wave Edition with its DLC’s is almost caught up to PC, but not quite.

“We’ve had to look at the future console updates from our situation as it looks today, with the limitations that we have, rather than looking back at what has been said and done before and make choices accordingly, even though they might not be what we wish them to. We simply have too many constraints in available manpower to be able to fix the situation in the short term. We see this as an opportunity to, at least, be as forthcoming as we can be regarding the road map ahead.

“To be clear as can be, we will out of necessity, at this time, have to accept disparity between the PC and Consoles versions for PAYDAY 2 going forward.”

The Nintendo Switch version of the game is looking to fare even worse as they say due to the outsourced nature of the port, updating it would take too much work. It seems there will be no updates at all for that version going forward.

“We’re very sad to announce that PAYDAY 2 for Nintendo Switch will be very unlikely to see further updates, despite what our initial ambitions were on the contrary. As per above, we’ve been forced to make many hard decisions along the road, and this is yet another. To put the Switch version separately into context, the transfer of the game over to the Switch-platform was not made in-house and would require significant further investments to happen.”

Well, it seems as if the revived development of the game will mostly center around the PC version, as Starbreeze does what it can to get everything back on track. It’s obviously a very disappointing thing for those on consoles, but maybe Payday 3, should it actually happen, will be different.

The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct – Group Hug

Also known as that other game starring Norman Reedus, The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct can be excruciatingly annoying to play. Should you find yourself saddled with it, you can at least unlock one of its easiest Trophies/Achievements. Basically, get close to a group of at least four zombies. A grapple sequence will start, which involves moving the right thumbstick and then stabbing them when the R2/RT prompt comes up. Do this with four zombies, one after the other, and you get the Group Hug Trophy/Achievement.