While much of the week saw Microsoft bearing the brunt of criticism for its Game Pass changes, Starbreeze also made headlines for canceling Project Baxter. The co-op Dungeons and Dragons title is no longer in active development, with employees redirected to commit to Payday’s future (those who weren’t laid off, that is).
However, that doesn’t mean Payday 3 will be receiving one of its most-requested features: Offline mode. General manager Jonas Skantz and community manager Elisabeth Elvestad addressed this in a recent stream (transcription via WCCF Tech), with the former confirming that it’s “not feasible.”
“So, offline mode. Let’s talk about that. 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.
“I’ll explain what I mean. First of all, we have a finite number of people. We want to ensure that they work on the most valuable things for the game; these are the things that we will talk about: progression, core loops and so on. More importantly, we have an updated model where it takes us weeks to get a client update out. This is a bit technical; it means that if we discover today that, ‘hey, this value is wrong,’ it takes us a very long time to fix that. That’s not because we are slow, it’s just because updating the first-party and so on takes weeks.”
The part about having a “finite number of people” is odd, considering the recent lay-offs. However, the team ultimately wants to move to a model where it can “work with the community and make sure that we can update things fast, and to do that, we need to update things from the backend. We need to be able to tweak the game from the backend to ensure we can get things out faster.
“If we can get at things more early, and have the confidence that we can change it, then that would give us much more speed. It would also bring more meaning to player feedback. That doesn’t mean that we are not doing things to improve online, but that’s what makes it not feasible to do.”
While this is all well and good, Payday 3 continues to struggle in play numbers compared to its predecessor. Its recent 24-hour peak on Steam is a measly 2,123 concurrent players, while Payday 2 hit 29,702 concurrent players. And that’s with the latter suffering its own controversies with the Infamous Collection seeing a price increase and a new subscription service for all DLC.
It’s interesting to see how game development decisions evolve. While it’s unfortunate about the offline mode for Payday 3, I’m curious to see how the game will shape up with the current direction. Thanks for sharing this update!