Payday 3: We've Been Robbed

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Payday 3: We've Been Robbed

«‹›515 »

padijun: Feb 5, 2004; murderbears forever

ZeusCannon posted:

I always liked the mechanic because it meant you had to talk to your team

It'd be cool if we had a way to do that!

# ? Nov 15, 2023 23:23

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ? May 15, 2024 05:37

EorayMel: May 30, 2015; WE GET IT. YOU LOVE GUN JESUS. Toujours des fusils Bullpup Fran�ais.

Well payday 3 is now 20% off and payday 2 is down to 2.50 USD for this week for anybody who cares :confuoot:

# ? Nov 21, 2023 20:42

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Sorry, got derailed by other projects. I'll give my summary of the drill debacle this weekend.

# ? Nov 22, 2023 07:29

Shooting Blanks: Jun 6, 2007; Real bullets mess up how cool this thing looks.

-Blade

RandolphCarter posted:

https://twitter.com/redarcherlive/status/1724430614865047588?s=21&t=y15l4QqGceLuoaJ9AVfNIg

Neat.

Not the heists I would have expected for early re-releases. I don't think either of those were particularly popular, were they?

# ? Nov 22, 2023 11:32

Grimthwacker: Aug 7, 2014

Cook-Off's always been a nice, simple loud way to get money/exp in PD2, while Murky Station's the same for stealth. Both fairly easy to update/port over into PD3, and you please both the loud and stealth players.

# ? Nov 22, 2023 13:10

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

I should note that these are completely new asset/geometry setups, so the general layouts and some of the objectives are the only stuff getting "ported".

# ? Nov 25, 2023 20:43

Lord_Hambrose: Nov 21, 2008; *a foul hooting fills the air*

Cooking Meth is the ultimate way to relax with friends.

# ? Nov 25, 2023 20:53

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

The Payday Drill Debacle
There's enough moving parts to this story that I know I'm misremembering and forgetting some things, but this is my best attempt, making a number of simplifications to keep this readable. I'm going to start with some scene-setting, then go over the event and how it went down publicly. I'll follow up by explaining what I've been able to piece together about what was happening behind the scenes at Overkill.

Early warning signs
Several factors were publicly influencing community expectations going into this event.

1. Launch promises. During the 2012-2013 launch period of Payday 2, microtransactions, even without pay-to-win connotations, had a really terrible reputation. This reputation was mostly built on PvP games, but it was still in effect for PvE. Almir Listo responded to a microtransactions question by saying "We've made it clear that Payday 2 will have no microtransactions whatsoever (shame on you if you thought otherwise!)". During the same period, the initial game director, David Goldfarb, responded to a similar "will there be microtransactions" question with "No. No. God, I hope not. Never. No."

2. The Secret. The end of Payday the Heist and the launch of Payday 2 heavily involved elements of The Secret ARG. This was a core plot element that drove a lot of user interest, and users were salivating for it.

3. The hype train. An event from early 2015 tied to the release of the Hoxton Revenge map encouraged players to earn pooled "hype fuel" by, essentially, giving Overkill money. This unlocked "free" shared community unlocks, which would otherwise be sold to players. The community awards included "Paydaycon", an event in LA, and the "Car Shop heist," a noticeably badly made heist that introduced driveable vehicles. Bear this in mind.

One method of purchasing hype fuel was by buying the limited edition "Completely Overkill Pack". Overkill artificially induced scarcity for this pack by only allowing 50,000 people to buy it. It included four masks and a surprise cosmetic item. Again, the developers promised this was cosmetic only. This event, which was basically an Overkill fundraiser, hit a sour note with a number of people in the community, in part because it was basically pre-funding promised ongoing content development, or "unlocking" stuff that was already intended for release. This was worsened because...

4. The Payday community is toxic. Not as toxic as some of the worst out there, but still, really, really bad. This is in part directly attributable to a practice by the devs of using community influencers who were hardcore challenge run players, the sort who would stream themselves trying to survive for an hour ingame without leaving a dumpster, and, more importantly, treated their abilities ingame as some sort of badge of honor. Almost all of these users maintain their audience by continuously seeking harder challenges, and by instigating conflict with the development team. Coupled with a number of poor balance decisions, by Crimefest 2015 a part of the playerbase were already primed to take any change to the game in the worst possible way.

The Road to Crimefest
First there was a trailer. Check that swelling operatic score.
Crimefest 2015 was pre-announced as the biggest one yet, with statements showing that the gang were going to discover secrets of the ARG that had been teasing the community for years, exploring an ancient vault. As a runup to the event, the playerbase was also encouraged to complete various ingame goals to unlock free rewards that would be provided during the event. Exactly what was being unlocked was not clear: as goals came with silhouettes that, when unlocked, displayed cryptic clues about the ultimate reward.

A number of things already started to go off the rails:

Obviously false representations
Overkill made statements as if things the community did not unlock would either never be developed and implemented in the game, or that they would become paid DLC. The latter was at least plausible, but alienating; the former was obviously false, as the short timeline to the event made it clear all of the things being teased were already made. This was also true of the Hype Train event, and it bred a general sense among the more skeptical parts of the playerbase that overkill were misreporting telemetry in order to show people were hitting the required targets (there was no sign this actually happened, fwiw).

Idiot sexism
As a part of this process, new heister Clover played a prominent role, seeming to replace Wolf as a member of the main four crewmembers fort the event. Gamergate behing alive and well in the playerbase, this drew attention from the sort of assholes who profit off of eliciting rage about the presence of women in games. This was a pretty minor factor in what followed, but it was present and worth noting.

Terrible event design
The initial set of community objectives included a combination of very aggressively paced ingame actions, unlocked sequentially (e.g. "kill a million enemies with this bad melee weapon, then ziptie 300,000 civilians, then...". These were doable (and of course Overkill wanted the community to finish all of them), but they required a lot of effectively grinding the game. Also included were engagement objectives like following individual character voice actors on social media. These objectives (which apparently weren't discussed with the actors first) resulted in unwanted harassment and were replaced partway through the event.

So after all of this, we had a community that's extremely hyped and invested (including with time and money), expecting a massive, ten-day event focused on a plot reveal involving an ancient crpyt and providing heaps of free content...but with a sizeable contingent of users who were ready to get angry at Overkill no matter how good the event was.

Crimefest 2015 Day 1
Click here for the Black Market Safes announcement site.

Click here for the main trailer announcing the safes.

The event starts, and the community is given a trailer announcing that the contents of the Ancient Secret Vault are...Crates and Keys! Players will get "safes" from different collections at the end of heists, and can spend Actual Dollars on "drills" to open them. These safes contain weapon skins of randomized type and quality (with anything other than mint condition looking terrible). Additionally, some of the skins include stat boosts making the weapons very slightly better than other weapons. All of this, weapons, safes, and skins, will be tradeable on the Steam Marketplace. Like similar drop systems for counterstrike, the best-looking "legendary" skins are incredibly rare, skins that don't spawn with ugly wear and tear are rare, and the versions with stat boosts are even rarer, creating a lottery effect. Also in line with counterstrike, the update teases having members of the community design skins for future "collections".

Users who had purchased the Completely Overkill Pack learn that they, and only they, will each receive a single Completely Overkill Safe and Drill, getting a single free gun skin from a collection that would never be available to other players, except by sale. Skins from this safe were all at least "rare" rarity, but were not otherwise subject to statistical controls. Most of them also looked like poo poo (literally, in the case of the "brown river" skin). Most players who had spent additional money on this exclusive pack wound up getting poor condition skins for weapons they did not use. The rarity system was such that no one received one of the "legendary" skins. That skin simply does not exist other than in the inventory of some of the developers.

As you can imagine, this did not go over well. Further rubbing the community's faces in this matter was a launch trailer that was borderline incoherent: Chains enters the ancient vault (which is for some reason a high tech vault bearing branding from a modern security firm) and meets Vlad, who is so off-model that he's depicted in shadow the entire time. The trailer then immediately transitions to a completely zero-context flashback, shot with actual human actors, of Vlad accosting Chains while disguised as a homeless person for some reason, talking euphemistically about working with Valve to implement the safes system.

The other "reward" that the community "unlocked" on this day is a weapon rebalance that the devs had already been promising for a long time.

I don't really have words to describe how terrible the initial reaction to this is. Even the relatively sane users were incandescent. Reddit in particular was flooded with rage and memes about overkill "rewarding" the community with a pay-to-win microtransaction system, and, of course, the original quotes from the developers about "no microtransactions, shame on you for thinking otherwise" are on everyone's lips. It's worth noting that in 95% of cases, the stat boosts provided by weapon skins were miniscule and worthless- but the exceptions were significant, and were assigned outsized value. This was made worse because the game's top difficulty is poorly balanced and these stat boosts were seen as a (paid) way for people to succeed on that difficulty.

And all of this was day one of the event.

Crimefest 2015 Day 2

Five additional "unlocks" were provided this day, consisting of five separate individual masks vaguely relating to Vlad. By this point players figured out how to use cached versions of the game from steam to set up a parallel version of the game pre-crimefest and set up their own subreddit, one of several communities entirely defined by hating Overkill.

Crimefest 2015 Day 3

With a bizarre trailer consisting of a slow panning shot of a single room, Overkill announced the "Aftershock" heist, in which the gang goes to LA during a massive earthquake and steals...the incredibly unpopular microtransaction safes. For Vlad. Yes, the players are literally made to carry microtransaction crates on their backs while Vlad talks about how heavy they are. No, you don't get to keep them. No, you don't get drills for playing. Yes, there is a literal achievement for taking a homeless person hostage that makes fun of counterstrike knife skins. No, this "community unlock" does not help smooth things over. By this point antisemitic memes about "Oyveyshill" started to spread.

Attentive modders notice there are signs the environment used for the heist was originally designed for some other multi-day planned heist. Meanwhile, the general community is, well, more and worse.

Crimefest 2015 Day 4

The community learned that the day's grand "unlocks" are the ability for AI players to trade hostages, and a server filter function that had been requested for years. Hey, by the way, did I mention that each day of the event comes with a forced, large filesize update to the game that takes forever to unpack? Yeah, that's happening too alongside all the rest of the anger.

Crimefest 2015 Day 5

The community received a Light Machine Gun and, for all LMGs, a bipod attachment that lets players go stationary for major stability and accuracy benefits. While buggy, this was a welcome and unexpected addition that would have gone over very well in any other event. As it stands, it made very little difference. By this point the community was largely a roiling turd bowl, with toxic users who think that overkill is deliberately fleecing players shouting down differently toxic players who think the devs can do no wrong.

Crimefest 2015 Day 6

Overkill announces a surprise! The Dallas Pack, coming with a free community heist not tied to any of the previously "unlocked" events! Using a weird cartoon Dallas as the logo, the "Dallas Pack" is a remade version of First World Bank from Payday: The Heist. Unlike its forebear, the heist was doable in stealth or loud. Also unlike its forbear, the heist crashed frequently for no clear reason, necessitating several additional hotfix updates through the rest of the event.

More importantly, Overkill had another announcement: Wolf Cards! Wolf will now occasionally drop a drill, for free, at the end of a heist, meaning that payments are not necessary to unlock skins!

...Remember how I said things were bad at this point? It's day 6. The community has been allowed to believe this was a pay-to-play microtransaction environment for five days, and for that period, it was - people undoubtedly spent money on drills that they didn't have to. The community reacted by developing a conspiracy theory: that the drills are something invented by Overkill to save face after the disastrous microtransaction rollout. Users pointed to the short, strangely animated trailer for the update as a sign that it was quickly made, and even the broader press covered the event as if it was a "reaction" (I am confident this wasn't the case for reasons I'll get into later on). At the same time, it satisfied no one- people who were angry for clicks still had an incentive to get angry, the drill drops were opaque (and, from the perspective of users, rare compared with safe drops), and of course there was still an advantage for people who could pay. There were still safes and crates. Nothing really improved, no one changed their mind.

Crimefest 2015 Day 7
The "unlocked" events were a collaboration with Le Castlevania, the musician behind some well-known soundtrack pieces from John Wick, and a "preferred character" function for players entering lobbies. These are, again, welcome updates that made no sense as gated community unlocks, and did nothing to address the white-hot rage of the userbase. By this point players have noticed that Ulf Andersson, the brother of CEO Bo Andersson and major programmer on the games, left Overkill earlier in the year. His departure is attributed to the safes and weapon skins debacle (and iirc he did indicate this was part of why he and another founding dev, Simon Viklund, left the company).

Crimefest 2015 Day 8
Overkill announced a rebalance to SWAT turret enemies and four weirdly, loosely hollywood-themed masks "unlocked" by the community. The turret changes are probably objectively good, but the now dominant angry parts of the community are not exactly in a receptive mood at this point. Also they introduce new crashes and require another hotfix update. Overkill also announces a limited time 30 day special "event safe" in First World Bank that will unlock a special one-chance safe and skin collection in that heist. Like the Completely Overkill Pack, the plan is to let players have only one shot at the collection, inducing scarcity. It will shock you to learn that this also doesn't go over well.

Crimefest 2015 Day 9
Surprise, it's another oddly buggy Payday the Heist remake! Slaughterhouse is added to the game and while it's not got as many crash issues as First World Bank, it's still got severe issues. Additional Groucho Marx glasses and a pair referencing Vlad's homeless person disguise are added as "community unlocks".

Crimefest 2015 Day 10
The grand finale of Crimefest 2015, now a total omnishambles...is third person jumping animations. This also closes out the event with another event safe in Slaughterhouse and four masks referencing internet memes.

Overkill would eventually make safes open without drills, and would let the community get additional drops from event safes, tanking the market and removing most of its appeal for the sort of people who gamble with ingame purchases (or use them to launder money). The studio would mostly back away from extended multiday events, and would proceed to continue to eat crow for other poor decisions relating to this time period for years to come. I'll get into how Overkill was nowhere near as bad as people thought, and in other ways, much worse, in my next post.

Behind the scenes at Overkill
A lot of the below information is inferred from data leaks or statements from former devteam members. I think most of it is true, but some specific details may be incorrect.

The Original Plan
Payday 2 was designed as a Games As A Service (GaaS) product, meaning that it was intended to run for as long as possible, making money by providing expansions and additional content. To accommodate this process, the overarching plot and progression of the game needed to be set up in advance to be flexible, and this was the case. Based on leftover code from early launch versions, launch era plot material and other sources, the original idea behind the plot of Payday 2 was that eventually, the gang's safehouse would be attacked and burned down and Bain would be kidnapped or killed by Murkywater. The gang would lick their wounds outside DC and ultimately return to perform the White House heist with the help of Vlad, who was keyed into the whole Secret thing. In this telling, the Elephant played the same role ultimately played by the Dentist, who did not originally exist.

As time went on and the game succeeded beyond anyone's expectations, the plot expanded like an accordion and new characters and game elements were added to fill this space with content and, well, profitability for Overkill. Many of these deals came from tie-ins, cameos, new characters and crossover events agreed to by CEO Bo Andersson. In practice, it seems as if Bo accepted virtually any offer that crossed his desk. To be clear, many of these agreements turned out very well- for example, the Hotline Miami 2 DLC apparently was an indefinite license and involved no payments to Devolver Digital, meaning from OVK's perspective it was a free, massively popular crossover event that greatly boosted sales for both parties with no pushback. Other deals were less clearly related or successful, and engendered massive controversy within the studio because they made actual development hard to predict. Crimefest 2015 appears to have been a casualty of this process.

The Hollywood Event
Heading into late 2014, it appears that Overkill were planning to make Crimefest 1015 the end of act 1 and a turning point for the game - the gang would leave DC (possibly with or without Bain) and go to LA, where Vlad was likely to play a much larger role in future activities. The event was not going to be themed around an ancient vault, but was instead based on Hollywood, with a large number of film tie-ins planned over the following years, maximizing GaaS opportunities, promotions and benefits. Even before Crimefest was teased, the schedule and plan for associated content was in a constant state of flux, producing acrimony within the studio. Numerous projects associated with this "LA turn" were subject to large amounts of development time before being scrapped or delayed for years; it appears likely that by this point, internal development had already begun on the Scarface Mansion and Reservoir Dogs heists, for instance, and the Car Shop heist was the reused leftovers from some sort of cut down heist project that included a live film trailer. The Payday the Heist remake heists were going to be film-themed (as the original game had been, to a degree), and part of this movieland promotional activity was an animated film by Harry Partridge that was ultimately delayed by production issues for several years (this was the source of the cartoon Dallas used atop the Dallas Pack). The "Dallas Pack" was labeled as such because it was apparently once intended as separate, standalone DLC.

References in Overkill sites and the codebase indicated that a "hollywood" heist was planned, possibly for the event or as standalone DLC involving an assault on a producer's mansion and the theft of film memorabilia. This got so far into development that an associated set of masks were created (used for the crimefest 2015 event) along with a set of never-released melee weapons, including a filmreel, film scissors, Oscar, and director's folding chair. By what little info I've been able to pull out, it was rumored that the hollywood heist was cut was because it was disastrously unfun to play. At least one day of this heist involved some sort of forced stealth process, robbing a location at the same time as another group of criminals and dealing with the issues they created. One feature of this lost DLC that's particularly mourned by modders and filedivers was "xeno", an accurate and player-useable pulse rifle (as in the one from Aliens) that was fully modeled and never implemented ingame.

A disastrous reordering
With the above cuts and shifts, there was never enough material to go into Crimefest 2015, and presenting it as a series of "community unlocks" tied to the ARG was always going to go poorly. Overkill appear likely to have done everything possible to fill in the gaps with what they could. Live action footage of Chains talking with Vlad, remade heists, LA-themed material and part of an unfinished LA heist were all crammed together and loosely tied to the new "ancient temple" setting, but its ultimate reception was made much worse by reversing the planned order of release, seemingly days before the event started.

The live action trailer, the Aftershock heist, even the last-minute animated trailers, all made more sense if they were teasers, and the entire microtransaction update- crates, keys, and free keys- was going to be the final day of the ten day event. The microtransaction system would have been revealed all at once, after the community received nine days of free, much-demanded game improvements. Vlad's slimy microtransactions deal was going to be presented with the immediate revelation that "don't worry, gently caress Vlad, Wolf is going to make sure you get skins for free."

Instead, for some reason, Overkill decided to announce the microtransactions without a free version on day one of the event and delay the announcement of the free key dynamic for an additional five days. The effect was to make a maximally predatory version of the microtransaction system the headline of the grand community event, and made the free skins seem like a face-saving afterthought. In this way, Overkill took a losing hand and made it much, much, much worse for themselves.

Long term pain
The initial change in plans that pushed back or removed so much planned content, and forced a months-long crunch to make up for it, appears to have been at least as much reason for an exodus of former Overkill leadership in early 2015 as the use of microtransactions. At a minimum, the crates and keys system was already planned and under implementation by the Hype Train event. This sudden scrambling of the planned order of release, however, put Overkill team members under an incredible burden to produce a Crimefest worth of material, with a different theme, and different content, in an impossibly short amount of time. That exodus, coupled with other business decisions unrelated to Payday which may have also caused the exodus, caused the near-dissolution of the studio. Those decisions, which were imo even worse than all this microtransactions stuff, are better left to another post.

Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 18:10 on Nov 26, 2023

# ? Nov 26, 2023 05:05

Pharmaskittle: Dec 17, 2007; arf arf put the money in the fuckin bag

Discendo Vox posted:

The Payday Drill Debacle
There's enough moving parts to this story that I know I'm misremembering and forgetting some things, but this is my best attempt, making a number of simplifications to keep this readable. I'm going to start with some scene-setting, then go over the event and how it went down publicly. I'll follow up by explaining what I've been able to piece together about what was happening behind the scenes at Overkill.

Early warning signs
Several factors were publicly influencing community expectations going into this event.

1. Launch promises. During the 2012-2013 launch period of Payday 2, microtransactions, even without pay-to-win connotations, had a really terrible reputation. This reputation was mostly built on PvP games, but it was still in effect for PvE. Almir Listo responded to a microtransactions question by saying "We've made it clear that Payday 2 will have no microtransactions whatsoever (shame on you if you thought otherwise!)". During the same period, the initial game director, David Goldfarb, responded to a similar "will there be microtransactions" question with "No. No. God, I hope not. Never. No."

2. The Secret. The end of Payday the Heist and the launch of Payday 2 heavily involved elements of The Secret ARG. This was a core plot element that drove a lot of user interest, and users were salivating for it.

3. The hype train. An event from early 2015 tied to the release of the Hoxton Revenge map encouraged players to earn pooled "hype fuel" by, essentially, giving Overkill money. This unlocked "free" shared community unlocks, which would otherwise be sold to players. The community awards included "Paydaycon", an event in LA, and the "car shop heist," a noticeably badly made heist that introduced driveable vehicles. Bear this in mind.

One method of purchasing hype fuel was by buying the limited edition "Completely Overkill Pack". Overkill artificially induced scarcity for this pack by only allowing 50,000 people to buy it. It included four masks and a surprise cosmetic item. Again, the developers promised this was cosmetic only. This event, which was basically an Overkill fundraiser, hit a sour note with a number of people in the community, in part because it was basically pre-funding promised ongoing content development, or "unlocking" stuff that was already intended for release. This was worsened because...

4. The Payday community is toxic. Not as toxic as some of the worst out there, but still, really, really bad. This is in part directly attributable to a practice by the devs of using community influencers who were hardcore challenge run players, the sort who would stream themselves trying to survive for an hour ingame without leaving a dumpster, and, more importantly, treated their abilities ingame as some sort of badge of honor. Almost all of these users maintain their audience by continuously seeking harder challenges, and by instigating conflict with the development team. Coupled with a number of poor balance decisions, by Crimefest 2015 a part of the playerbase were already primed to take any change to the game in the worst possible way.

The Road to Crimefest
First there was a trailer. Check that swelling operatic score.
Crimefest 2015 was pre-announced as the biggest one yet, with statements showing that the gang were going to discover secrets of the ARG that had been teasing the community for years, exploring an ancient vault. As a runup to the event, the playerbase was also encouraged to complete various ingame goals to unlock free rewards that would be provided during the event. Exactly what was being unlocked was not clear: as goals came with silhouettes that, when unlocked, displayed cryptic clues about the ultimate reward.

A number of things already started to go off the rails:

Obviously false representations
Overkill made statements as if things the community did not unlock would either never be developed and implemented in the game, or that they would become paid DLC. The latter was at least plausible, but alienating; the former was obviously false, as the short timeline to the event made it clear all of the things being teased were already made. This was also true of the Hype Train event, and it bred a general sense among the more skeptical parts of the playerbase that overkill were misreporting telemetry in order to show people were hitting the required targets (there was no sign this actually happened, fwiw).

Idiot sexism
As a part of this process, new heister Clover played a prominent role, seeming to replace Wolf as a member of the main four crewmembers fort the event. Gamergate behing alive and well in the playerbase, this drew attention from the sort of assholes who profit off of eliciting rage about the presence of women in games. This was a pretty minor factor in what followed, but it was present and worth noting.

Terrible event design
The initial set of community objectives included a combination of very aggressively paced ingame actions, unlocked sequentially (e.g. "kill a million enemies with this bad melee weapon, then ziptie 300,000 civilians, then...". These were doable (and of course Overkill wanted the community to finish all of them), but they required a lot of effectively grinding the game. Also included were engagement objectives like following individual character voice actors on social media. These objectives (which apparently weren't discussed with the actors first) resulted in unwanted harassment and were replaced partway through the event.

So after all of this, we had a community that's extremely hyped and invested (including with time and money), expecting a massive, ten-day event focused on a plot reveal involving an ancient crpyt and providing ten days of free content...but with a sizeable contingent of users who were ready to get angry at Overkill no matter how good the event was.

Crimefest 2015 Day 1
Click here for the Black Market Safes announcement site.

Click here for the main trailer announcing the safes.

The event starts, and the community is given a trailer announcing that the contents of the Ancient Secret Vault are...Crates and Keys! Players will get "safes" from different collections at the end of heists, and can spend Actual Dollars on "drills" to open them. These safes contain weapon skins of randomized type and quality (with anything other than mint condition looking terrible). Additionally, some of the skins include stat boosts making the weapons very slightly better than other weapons. All of this, weapons, safes, and skins, will be tradeable on the Steam Marketplace. Like similar drop systems for counterstrike, the best-looking "legendary" skins are incredibly rare, skins that don't spawn with ugly wear and tear are rare, and the versions with stat boosts are even rarer, creating a lottery effect. Also in line with counterstrike, the update teases having members of the community design skins for future "collections".

Users who had purchased the Completely Overkill Pack learn that they, and only they, will each receive a single Completely Overkill Safe and Drill, getting a single free gun skin from a collection that would never be available to other players, except by sale. Skins from this safe were all at least "rare" rarity, but were not otherwise subject to statistical controls. Most of them also looked like poo poo (literally, in the case of the "brown river" skin). Most players who had spent additional money on this exclusive pack wound up getting poor condition skins for weapons they did not use. The rarity system was such that no one received one of the "legendary" skins. That skin simply does not exist other than in the inventory of some of the developers.

As you can imagine, this did not go over well. Further rubbing the community's faces in this matter was a launch trailer that was borderline incoherent: Chains enters the ancient vault (which is for some reason a high tech vault bearing branding from a modern security firm) and meets Vlad, who is so off-model that he's depicted in shadow the entire time. The trailer then immediately transitions to a completely zero-context flashback, shot with actual human actors, of Vlad accosting Chains while disguised as a homeless person for some reason, talking euphemistically about working with Valve to implement the safes system.

The other "reward" that the community "unlocked" on this day is a weapon rebalance that the devs had already been promising for a long time.

I don't really have words to describe how terrible the initial reaction to this is. Even the relatively sane users were incandescent. Reddit in particular was flooded with rage and memes about overkill "rewarding" the community with a pay-to-win microtransaction system, and, of course, the original quotes from the developers about "no microtransactions, shame on you for thinking otherwise" are on everyone's lips. It's worth noting that in 95% of cases, the stat boosts provided by weapon skins were miniscule and worthless- but the exceptions were significant, and were assigned outsized value. This was made worse because the game's top difficulty is poorly balanced and these stat boosts were seen as a (paid) way for people to succeed on that difficulty.

And all of this was day one of the event.

Crimefest 2015 Day 2

Five additional "unlocks" were provided this day, consisting of five separate individual masks vaguely relating to Vlad. By this point players figured out how to use cached versions of the game from steam to set up a parallel version of the game pre-crimefest and set up their own subreddit, one of several communities entirely defined by hating Overkill.

Crimefest 2015 Day 3

With a bizarre trailer consisting of a slow panning shot of a single room, Overkill announced the "Aftershock" heist, in which the gang goes to LA during a massive earthquake and steals...the incredibly unpopular microtransaction safes. For Vlad. Yes, the players are literally made to carry microtransaction crates on their backs while Vlad talks about how heavy they are. No, you don't get to keep them. No, you don't get drills for playing. Yes, there is a literal achievement for taking a homeless person hostage that makes fun of counterstrike knife skins. No, this "community unlock" does not help smooth things over. By this point antisemitic memes about "Oyveyshill" started to spread.

Attentive modders notice there are signs the environment used for the heist was originally designed for some other multi-day planned heist. Meanwhile, the general community is, well, more and worse.

Crimefest 2015 Day 4

The community learned that the day's grand "unlocks" are the ability for AI players to trade hostages, and a server filter function that had been requested for years. Hey, by the way, did I mention that each day of the event comes with a forced, large filesize update to the game that takes forever to unpack? Yeah, that's happening too alongside all the rest of the anger.

Crimefest 2015 Day 5

The community received a Light Machine Gun and, for all LMGs, a bipod attachment that lets players go stationary for major stability and accuracy benefits. While buggy, this was a welcome and unexpected addition that would have gone over very well in any other event. As it stands, it made very little difference. By this point the community was largely a roiling turd bowl, with toxic users who think that overkill is deliberately fleecing players shouting down differently toxic players who think the devs can do no wrong.

Crimefest 2015 Day 6

Overkill announces a surprise! The Dallas Pack, coming with a free community heist not tied to any of the previously "unlocked" events! Using a weird cartoon Dallas as the logo, the "Dallas Pack" is a remade version of First World Bank from Payday: The Heist. Unlike its forebear, the heist was doable in stealth or loud. Also unlike its forbear, the heist crashed frequently for no clear reason, necessitating several additional hotfix updates through the rest of the event.

More importantly, Overkill had another announcement: Wolf Cards! Wolf will now occasionally drop a drill, for free, at the end of a heist, meaning that payments are not necessary to unlock skins!

...Remember how I said things were bad at this point? It's day 6. The community has been allowed to believe this was a pay-to-play microtransaction environment for five days, and for that period, it was - people undoubtedly spent money on drills that they didn't have to. The community reacted by developing a conspiracy theory: that the drills are something invented by Overkill to save face after the disastrous microtransaction rollout. Users pointed to the short, strangely animated trailer for the update as a sign that it was quickly made, and even the broader press covered the event as if it was a "reaction" (I am confident this wasn't the case for reasons I'll get into later on). At the same time, it satisfied no one- people who were angry for clicks still had an incentive to get angry, the drill drops were opaque (and, from the perspective of users, rare compared with safe drops), and of course there was still an advantage for people who could pay. There were still safes and crates. Nothing really improved, no one changed their mind.

Crimefest 2015 Day 7
The "unlocked" events were a collaboration with Le Castlevania, the musician behind some well-known soundtrack pieces from John Wick, and a "preferred character" function for players entering lobbies. These are, again, welcome updates that made no sense as gated community unlocks, and did nothing to address the white-hot rage of the userbase. By this point players have noticed that Ulf Andersson, the brother of CEO Bo Andersson and major programmer on the games, left Overkill earlier in the year. His departure is attributed to the safes and weapon skins debacle (and iirc he did indicate this was part of why he and another founding dev, Simon Viklund, left the company).

Crimefest 2015 Day 8
Overkill announced a rebalance to SWAT turret enemies and four weirdly, loosely hollywood-themed masks "unlocked" by the community. The turret changes are probably objectively good, but the now dominant angry parts of the community are not exactly in a receptive mood at this point. Also they introduce new crashes and require another hotfix update. Overkill also announces a limited time 30 day special "event safe" in First World Bank that will unlock a special one-chance safe and skin collection in that heist. Like the Completely Overkill Pack, the plan is to let players have only one shot at the collection, inducing scarcity. It will shock you to learn that this also doesn't go over well.

Crimefest 2015 Day 9
Surprise, it's another oddly buggy Payday the Heist remake! Slaughterhouse is added to the game and while it's not got as many crash issues as First World Bank, it's still got severe issues. Additional Groucho Marx glasses and a pair referencing Vlad's homeless person disguise are added as "community unlocks".

Crimefest 2015 Day 10
The grand finale of Crimefest 2015, now a total omnishambles...is third person jumping animations. This also closes out the event with another event safe in Slaughterhouse and four masks referencing internet memes.

Overkill would eventually make safes open without drills, and would let the community get additional drops from event safes, tanking the market and removing most of its appeal for the sort of people who gamble with ingame purchases (or use them to launder money). The studio would mostly back away from extended multiday events, and would proceed to continue to eat crow for other poor decisions relating to this time period for years to come. I'll get into how Overkill was nowhere near as bad as people thought, and in other ways, much worse, in my next post.

Behind the scenes at Overkill
A lot of the below information is inferred from data leaks or statements from former devteam members. I think most of it is true, but some specific details may be incorrect.

The Original Plan
Payday 2 was designed as a Games As A Service (GaaS) product, meaning that it was intended to run for as long as possible, making money by providing expansions and additional content. To accommodate this process, the overarching plot and progression of the game needed to be set up in advance to be flexible, and this was the case. Based on leftover code from early launch versions, launch era plot material and other sources, the original idea behind the plot of Payday 2 was that eventually, the gang's safehouse would be attacked and burned down and Bain would be kidnapped or killed by Murkywater. The gang would lick their wounds outside DC and ultimately return to perform the White House heist with the help of Vlad, who was keyed into the whole Secret thing. In this telling, the Elephant played the same role ultimately played by the Dentist, who did not originally exist.

As time went on and the game succeeded beyond anyone's expectations, the plot expanded like an accordion and new characters and game elements were added to fill this space with content and, well, profitability for Overkill. Many of these deals came from tie-ins, cameos, new characters and crossover events agreed to by CEO Bo Andersson. In practice, it seems as if Bo accepted virtually any offer that crossed his desk. To be clear, many of these agreements turned out very well- for example, the Hotline Miami 2 DLC apparently was an indefinite license and involved no payments to Devolver Digital, meaning from OVK's perspective it was a free, massively popular crossover event that greatly boosted sales for both parties with no pushback. Other deals were less clearly related or successful, and engendered massive controversy within the studio because they made actual development hard to predict. Crimefest 2015 appears to have been a casualty of this process.

The Hollywood Event
Heading into late 2014, it appears that Overkill were planning to make Crimefest be the planned end of act 1 and a turning point for the game - the Gang would leave DC (possibly with or without Bain) and go to LA, where Vlad was likely to play a much larger role in future activities. The event was not going to be themed around an ancient vault, but was instead based on Hollywood, with a large number of film tie-ins planned over the following years, maximizing GaaS opportunities for promotions and benefits. Even before Crimefest was being teased, the schedule and plan for associated tie-ins were in a constant state of flux, producing acrimony within the studio. Numerous projects associated with this "LA turn" were subject to large amounts of development time before being scrapped or massively delayed by years; it appears likely that by this point, Bo had already negotiated and begun internal development of the Scarface Mansion and Reservoir Dogs heists, for instance. The Payday the Heist remake heists were going to be film-themed (as the original game had been, to a degree), and part of this movieland promotional activity was an animated film by Harry Partridge that was ultimately delayed by production issues for several years (this was the source of the cartoon Dallas used atop the Dallas Pack). The "Dallas Pack" was labeled as such because it was once intended as separate, standalone DLC.

References in Overkill sites indicated that a "hollywood" heist was planned, possibly for the event or as standalone DLC involving an assault on a producer's mansion and film memorabilia. This got so far into development that an associated set of masks were created (used for the crimefest 2015 event) along with a set of never-released melee weapons, including a filmreel, film scissors, Oscar, and director's folding chair. By what little info I've been able to pull out, it was rumored that the hollywood heist was cut was because it was disastrously unfun to play, involving some sort of forced stealth process involving robbing a location at the same time as another group of criminals and dealing with issues they created. Particularly mourned by modders and filedivers was "xeno", an accurate and player-useable pulse rifle (as in from Aliens) that was fully modeled and never implemented ingame.

A disastrous reordering
Crimefest 2015 was always going to be rocky- with the above cuts and shifts, there was never enough material to go into the event, and presenting it as a series of "community unlocks" tied to the ARG was always going to go poorly. Overkill appear likely to have done everything possible to reuse and fill those gaps with content that had already been produced, and rushed to fill in the gaps with what they could. Live action footage of Chains talking with Vlad, remade heists, LA-themed material and part of a heist were all crammed together to fit the new "ancient temple" setting, but its ultimate reception was made much worse by reversing the planned order of release, seemingly days before the event started.

The live action trailer, the Aftershock heist, even the last-minute animated trailers, all made more sense if they were all teasing the big reveal of what was actually in the safes that you were moving for Vlad. It appears all but certain that the entire microtransaction update- crates, keys, and free keys- was going to be the final day of the ten day event. All of these parts were going to be revealed at once, after the community received nine days of free, much-demanded game improvements. Vlad's slimy microtransactions deal was going to be presented on the last day, with the immediate revelation that "don't worry, gently caress Vlad, Wolf is going to make sure you get skins for free."

Instead, for some reason, Overkill decided to announce the microtransactions without a free version on day one of the event and delay the announcement of the free key dynamic for an additional five days. The effect was to make a maximally predatory version of the microtransaction system the headline of the grand community event, and made the free skins seem like a face-saving afterthought. In this way, Overkill took a losing hand and made it much, much, much worse for themselves.

Long term pain
The initial change in plans that pushed back or removed so much planned content, and forcing a months-long crunch to make up for it, appears to have been at least as much reason for an exodus of former Overkill leadership in early 2015 as the use of microtransactions. At a minimum, the crates and keys system was already planned and under implementation by the Hype Train event. This sudden scrambling of the planned order of release, however, put Overkill team members under an incredible burden to produce a Crimefest worth of material, with a different theme, and different content, in an impossibly short amount of time. That exodus, coupled with other business decisions unrelated to Payday which may have also caused the exodus, caused the near-dissolution of the studio. That mess, which is imo even worse than all this microtransactions stuff, is better left to another post.

interesting

# ? Nov 26, 2023 05:18

Pirate Jet: May 2, 2010

Discendo Vox posted:

The Payday Drill Debacle
There's enough moving parts to this story that I know I'm misremembering and forgetting some things, but this is my best attempt, making a number of simplifications to keep this readable. I'm going to start with some scene-setting, then go over the event and how it went down publicly. I'll follow up by explaining what I've been able to piece together about what was happening behind the scenes at Overkill.

Early warning signs
Several factors were publicly influencing community expectations going into this event.

1. Launch promises. During the 2012-2013 launch period of Payday 2, microtransactions, even without pay-to-win connotations, had a really terrible reputation. This reputation was mostly built on PvP games, but it was still in effect for PvE. Almir Listo responded to a microtransactions question by saying "We've made it clear that Payday 2 will have no microtransactions whatsoever (shame on you if you thought otherwise!)". During the same period, the initial game director, David Goldfarb, responded to a similar "will there be microtransactions" question with "No. No. God, I hope not. Never. No."

2. The Secret. The end of Payday the Heist and the launch of Payday 2 heavily involved elements of The Secret ARG. This was a core plot element that drove a lot of user interest, and users were salivating for it.

3. The hype train. An event from early 2015 tied to the release of the Hoxton Revenge map encouraged players to earn pooled "hype fuel" by, essentially, giving Overkill money. This unlocked "free" shared community unlocks, which would otherwise be sold to players. The community awards included "Paydaycon", an event in LA, and the "car shop heist," a noticeably badly made heist that introduced driveable vehicles. Bear this in mind.

One method of purchasing hype fuel was by buying the limited edition "Completely Overkill Pack". Overkill artificially induced scarcity for this pack by only allowing 50,000 people to buy it. It included four masks and a surprise cosmetic item. Again, the developers promised this was cosmetic only. This event, which was basically an Overkill fundraiser, hit a sour note with a number of people in the community, in part because it was basically pre-funding promised ongoing content development, or "unlocking" stuff that was already intended for release. This was worsened because...

4. The Payday community is toxic. Not as toxic as some of the worst out there, but still, really, really bad. This is in part directly attributable to a practice by the devs of using community influencers who were hardcore challenge run players, the sort who would stream themselves trying to survive for an hour ingame without leaving a dumpster, and, more importantly, treated their abilities ingame as some sort of badge of honor. Almost all of these users maintain their audience by continuously seeking harder challenges, and by instigating conflict with the development team. Coupled with a number of poor balance decisions, by Crimefest 2015 a part of the playerbase were already primed to take any change to the game in the worst possible way.

The Road to Crimefest
First there was a trailer. Check that swelling operatic score.
Crimefest 2015 was pre-announced as the biggest one yet, with statements showing that the gang were going to discover secrets of the ARG that had been teasing the community for years, exploring an ancient vault. As a runup to the event, the playerbase was also encouraged to complete various ingame goals to unlock free rewards that would be provided during the event. Exactly what was being unlocked was not clear: as goals came with silhouettes that, when unlocked, displayed cryptic clues about the ultimate reward.

A number of things already started to go off the rails:

Obviously false representations
Overkill made statements as if things the community did not unlock would either never be developed and implemented in the game, or that they would become paid DLC. The latter was at least plausible, but alienating; the former was obviously false, as the short timeline to the event made it clear all of the things being teased were already made. This was also true of the Hype Train event, and it bred a general sense among the more skeptical parts of the playerbase that overkill were misreporting telemetry in order to show people were hitting the required targets (there was no sign this actually happened, fwiw).

Idiot sexism
As a part of this process, new heister Clover played a prominent role, seeming to replace Wolf as a member of the main four crewmembers fort the event. Gamergate behing alive and well in the playerbase, this drew attention from the sort of assholes who profit off of eliciting rage about the presence of women in games. This was a pretty minor factor in what followed, but it was present and worth noting.

Terrible event design
The initial set of community objectives included a combination of very aggressively paced ingame actions, unlocked sequentially (e.g. "kill a million enemies with this bad melee weapon, then ziptie 300,000 civilians, then...". These were doable (and of course Overkill wanted the community to finish all of them), but they required a lot of effectively grinding the game. Also included were engagement objectives like following individual character voice actors on social media. These objectives (which apparently weren't discussed with the actors first) resulted in unwanted harassment and were replaced partway through the event.

So after all of this, we had a community that's extremely hyped and invested (including with time and money), expecting a massive, ten-day event focused on a plot reveal involving an ancient crpyt and providing ten days of free content...but with a sizeable contingent of users who were ready to get angry at Overkill no matter how good the event was.

Crimefest 2015 Day 1
Click here for the Black Market Safes announcement site.

Click here for the main trailer announcing the safes.

The event starts, and the community is given a trailer announcing that the contents of the Ancient Secret Vault are...Crates and Keys! Players will get "safes" from different collections at the end of heists, and can spend Actual Dollars on "drills" to open them. These safes contain weapon skins of randomized type and quality (with anything other than mint condition looking terrible). Additionally, some of the skins include stat boosts making the weapons very slightly better than other weapons. All of this, weapons, safes, and skins, will be tradeable on the Steam Marketplace. Like similar drop systems for counterstrike, the best-looking "legendary" skins are incredibly rare, skins that don't spawn with ugly wear and tear are rare, and the versions with stat boosts are even rarer, creating a lottery effect. Also in line with counterstrike, the update teases having members of the community design skins for future "collections".

Users who had purchased the Completely Overkill Pack learn that they, and only they, will each receive a single Completely Overkill Safe and Drill, getting a single free gun skin from a collection that would never be available to other players, except by sale. Skins from this safe were all at least "rare" rarity, but were not otherwise subject to statistical controls. Most of them also looked like poo poo (literally, in the case of the "brown river" skin). Most players who had spent additional money on this exclusive pack wound up getting poor condition skins for weapons they did not use. The rarity system was such that no one received one of the "legendary" skins. That skin simply does not exist other than in the inventory of some of the developers.

As you can imagine, this did not go over well. Further rubbing the community's faces in this matter was a launch trailer that was borderline incoherent: Chains enters the ancient vault (which is for some reason a high tech vault bearing branding from a modern security firm) and meets Vlad, who is so off-model that he's depicted in shadow the entire time. The trailer then immediately transitions to a completely zero-context flashback, shot with actual human actors, of Vlad accosting Chains while disguised as a homeless person for some reason, talking euphemistically about working with Valve to implement the safes system.

The other "reward" that the community "unlocked" on this day is a weapon rebalance that the devs had already been promising for a long time.

I don't really have words to describe how terrible the initial reaction to this is. Even the relatively sane users were incandescent. Reddit in particular was flooded with rage and memes about overkill "rewarding" the community with a pay-to-win microtransaction system, and, of course, the original quotes from the developers about "no microtransactions, shame on you for thinking otherwise" are on everyone's lips. It's worth noting that in 95% of cases, the stat boosts provided by weapon skins were miniscule and worthless- but the exceptions were significant, and were assigned outsized value. This was made worse because the game's top difficulty is poorly balanced and these stat boosts were seen as a (paid) way for people to succeed on that difficulty.

And all of this was day one of the event.

Crimefest 2015 Day 2

Five additional "unlocks" were provided this day, consisting of five separate individual masks vaguely relating to Vlad. By this point players figured out how to use cached versions of the game from steam to set up a parallel version of the game pre-crimefest and set up their own subreddit, one of several communities entirely defined by hating Overkill.

Crimefest 2015 Day 3

With a bizarre trailer consisting of a slow panning shot of a single room, Overkill announced the "Aftershock" heist, in which the gang goes to LA during a massive earthquake and steals...the incredibly unpopular microtransaction safes. For Vlad. Yes, the players are literally made to carry microtransaction crates on their backs while Vlad talks about how heavy they are. No, you don't get to keep them. No, you don't get drills for playing. Yes, there is a literal achievement for taking a homeless person hostage that makes fun of counterstrike knife skins. No, this "community unlock" does not help smooth things over. By this point antisemitic memes about "Oyveyshill" started to spread.

Attentive modders notice there are signs the environment used for the heist was originally designed for some other multi-day planned heist. Meanwhile, the general community is, well, more and worse.

Crimefest 2015 Day 4

The community learned that the day's grand "unlocks" are the ability for AI players to trade hostages, and a server filter function that had been requested for years. Hey, by the way, did I mention that each day of the event comes with a forced, large filesize update to the game that takes forever to unpack? Yeah, that's happening too alongside all the rest of the anger.

Crimefest 2015 Day 5

The community received a Light Machine Gun and, for all LMGs, a bipod attachment that lets players go stationary for major stability and accuracy benefits. While buggy, this was a welcome and unexpected addition that would have gone over very well in any other event. As it stands, it made very little difference. By this point the community was largely a roiling turd bowl, with toxic users who think that overkill is deliberately fleecing players shouting down differently toxic players who think the devs can do no wrong.

Crimefest 2015 Day 6

Overkill announces a surprise! The Dallas Pack, coming with a free community heist not tied to any of the previously "unlocked" events! Using a weird cartoon Dallas as the logo, the "Dallas Pack" is a remade version of First World Bank from Payday: The Heist. Unlike its forebear, the heist was doable in stealth or loud. Also unlike its forbear, the heist crashed frequently for no clear reason, necessitating several additional hotfix updates through the rest of the event.

More importantly, Overkill had another announcement: Wolf Cards! Wolf will now occasionally drop a drill, for free, at the end of a heist, meaning that payments are not necessary to unlock skins!

...Remember how I said things were bad at this point? It's day 6. The community has been allowed to believe this was a pay-to-play microtransaction environment for five days, and for that period, it was - people undoubtedly spent money on drills that they didn't have to. The community reacted by developing a conspiracy theory: that the drills are something invented by Overkill to save face after the disastrous microtransaction rollout. Users pointed to the short, strangely animated trailer for the update as a sign that it was quickly made, and even the broader press covered the event as if it was a "reaction" (I am confident this wasn't the case for reasons I'll get into later on). At the same time, it satisfied no one- people who were angry for clicks still had an incentive to get angry, the drill drops were opaque (and, from the perspective of users, rare compared with safe drops), and of course there was still an advantage for people who could pay. There were still safes and crates. Nothing really improved, no one changed their mind.

Crimefest 2015 Day 7
The "unlocked" events were a collaboration with Le Castlevania, the musician behind some well-known soundtrack pieces from John Wick, and a "preferred character" function for players entering lobbies. These are, again, welcome updates that made no sense as gated community unlocks, and did nothing to address the white-hot rage of the userbase. By this point players have noticed that Ulf Andersson, the brother of CEO Bo Andersson and major programmer on the games, left Overkill earlier in the year. His departure is attributed to the safes and weapon skins debacle (and iirc he did indicate this was part of why he and another founding dev, Simon Viklund, left the company).

Crimefest 2015 Day 8
Overkill announced a rebalance to SWAT turret enemies and four weirdly, loosely hollywood-themed masks "unlocked" by the community. The turret changes are probably objectively good, but the now dominant angry parts of the community are not exactly in a receptive mood at this point. Also they introduce new crashes and require another hotfix update. Overkill also announces a limited time 30 day special "event safe" in First World Bank that will unlock a special one-chance safe and skin collection in that heist. Like the Completely Overkill Pack, the plan is to let players have only one shot at the collection, inducing scarcity. It will shock you to learn that this also doesn't go over well.

Crimefest 2015 Day 9
Surprise, it's another oddly buggy Payday the Heist remake! Slaughterhouse is added to the game and while it's not got as many crash issues as First World Bank, it's still got severe issues. Additional Groucho Marx glasses and a pair referencing Vlad's homeless person disguise are added as "community unlocks".

Crimefest 2015 Day 10
The grand finale of Crimefest 2015, now a total omnishambles...is third person jumping animations. This also closes out the event with another event safe in Slaughterhouse and four masks referencing internet memes.

Overkill would eventually make safes open without drills, and would let the community get additional drops from event safes, tanking the market and removing most of its appeal for the sort of people who gamble with ingame purchases (or use them to launder money). The studio would mostly back away from extended multiday events, and would proceed to continue to eat crow for other poor decisions relating to this time period for years to come. I'll get into how Overkill was nowhere near as bad as people thought, and in other ways, much worse, in my next post.

Behind the scenes at Overkill
A lot of the below information is inferred from data leaks or statements from former devteam members. I think most of it is true, but some specific details may be incorrect.

The Original Plan
Payday 2 was designed as a Games As A Service (GaaS) product, meaning that it was intended to run for as long as possible, making money by providing expansions and additional content. To accommodate this process, the overarching plot and progression of the game needed to be set up in advance to be flexible, and this was the case. Based on leftover code from early launch versions, launch era plot material and other sources, the original idea behind the plot of Payday 2 was that eventually, the gang's safehouse would be attacked and burned down and Bain would be kidnapped or killed by Murkywater. The gang would lick their wounds outside DC and ultimately return to perform the White House heist with the help of Vlad, who was keyed into the whole Secret thing. In this telling, the Elephant played the same role ultimately played by the Dentist, who did not originally exist.

As time went on and the game succeeded beyond anyone's expectations, the plot expanded like an accordion and new characters and game elements were added to fill this space with content and, well, profitability for Overkill. Many of these deals came from tie-ins, cameos, new characters and crossover events agreed to by CEO Bo Andersson. In practice, it seems as if Bo accepted virtually any offer that crossed his desk. To be clear, many of these agreements turned out very well- for example, the Hotline Miami 2 DLC apparently was an indefinite license and involved no payments to Devolver Digital, meaning from OVK's perspective it was a free, massively popular crossover event that greatly boosted sales for both parties with no pushback. Other deals were less clearly related or successful, and engendered massive controversy within the studio because they made actual development hard to predict. Crimefest 2015 appears to have been a casualty of this process.

The Hollywood Event
Heading into late 2014, it appears that Overkill were planning to make Crimefest be the planned end of act 1 and a turning point for the game - the Gang would leave DC (possibly with or without Bain) and go to LA, where Vlad was likely to play a much larger role in future activities. The event was not going to be themed around an ancient vault, but was instead based on Hollywood, with a large number of film tie-ins planned over the following years, maximizing GaaS opportunities for promotions and benefits. Even before Crimefest was being teased, the schedule and plan for associated tie-ins were in a constant state of flux, producing acrimony within the studio. Numerous projects associated with this "LA turn" were subject to large amounts of development time before being scrapped or massively delayed by years; it appears likely that by this point, Bo had already negotiated and begun internal development of the Scarface Mansion and Reservoir Dogs heists, for instance. The Payday the Heist remake heists were going to be film-themed (as the original game had been, to a degree), and part of this movieland promotional activity was an animated film by Harry Partridge that was ultimately delayed by production issues for several years (this was the source of the cartoon Dallas used atop the Dallas Pack). The "Dallas Pack" was labeled as such because it was once intended as separate, standalone DLC.

References in Overkill sites indicated that a "hollywood" heist was planned, possibly for the event or as standalone DLC involving an assault on a producer's mansion and film memorabilia. This got so far into development that an associated set of masks were created (used for the crimefest 2015 event) along with a set of never-released melee weapons, including a filmreel, film scissors, Oscar, and director's folding chair. By what little info I've been able to pull out, it was rumored that the hollywood heist was cut was because it was disastrously unfun to play, involving some sort of forced stealth process involving robbing a location at the same time as another group of criminals and dealing with issues they created. Particularly mourned by modders and filedivers was "xeno", an accurate and player-useable pulse rifle (as in from Aliens) that was fully modeled and never implemented ingame.

A disastrous reordering
Crimefest 2015 was always going to be rocky- with the above cuts and shifts, there was never enough material to go into the event, and presenting it as a series of "community unlocks" tied to the ARG was always going to go poorly. Overkill appear likely to have done everything possible to reuse and fill those gaps with content that had already been produced, and rushed to fill in the gaps with what they could. Live action footage of Chains talking with Vlad, remade heists, LA-themed material and part of a heist were all crammed together to fit the new "ancient temple" setting, but its ultimate reception was made much worse by reversing the planned order of release, seemingly days before the event started.

The live action trailer, the Aftershock heist, even the last-minute animated trailers, all made more sense if they were all teasing the big reveal of what was actually in the safes that you were moving for Vlad. It appears all but certain that the entire microtransaction update- crates, keys, and free keys- was going to be the final day of the ten day event. All of these parts were going to be revealed at once, after the community received nine days of free, much-demanded game improvements. Vlad's slimy microtransactions deal was going to be presented on the last day, with the immediate revelation that "don't worry, gently caress Vlad, Wolf is going to make sure you get skins for free."

Instead, for some reason, Overkill decided to announce the microtransactions without a free version on day one of the event and delay the announcement of the free key dynamic for an additional five days. The effect was to make a maximally predatory version of the microtransaction system the headline of the grand community event, and made the free skins seem like a face-saving afterthought. In this way, Overkill took a losing hand and made it much, much, much worse for themselves.

Long term pain
The initial change in plans that pushed back or removed so much planned content, and forcing a months-long crunch to make up for it, appears to have been at least as much reason for an exodus of former Overkill leadership in early 2015 as the use of microtransactions. At a minimum, the crates and keys system was already planned and under implementation by the Hype Train event. This sudden scrambling of the planned order of release, however, put Overkill team members under an incredible burden to produce a Crimefest worth of material, with a different theme, and different content, in an impossibly short amount of time. That exodus, coupled with other business decisions unrelated to Payday which may have also caused the exodus, caused the near-dissolution of the studio. That mess, which is imo even worse than all this microtransactions stuff, is better left to another post.

lmao

# ? Nov 26, 2023 05:20

Explosionface: May 30, 2011; We can dance if we want to,
we can leave Marle behind.
'Cause your fiends don't dance,
and if they don't dance,
they'll get a Robo Fist of mine.

Discendo Vox posted:

The Payday Drill Debacle
.

Yep, that all rings true to my memories of the time. Funny in retrospect just how badly they hosed it up.

# ? Nov 26, 2023 05:37

UnknownMercenary: Nov 1, 2011; I LIKE IT
WAY WAY TOO LOUD

As the only goon who got deeply invested in the Steam trading side of things, apparently if you bought up and hoarded a bunch of those Completely Overkill DLCs they went for a pretty decent amount. Pennies compared to what the Counter-Strike item market is like now, but at one point the PD2 side of things was way more expensive.

Discendo Vox posted:

The rarity system was such that no one received one of the "legendary" skins. That skin simply does not exist other than in the inventory of some of the developers.

I'm still plugged into the trading discord so out of curiosity I searched and that skin still is not known exist. Unlike with CS there's no huge dedicated following or database to track everything but you figure it would have just shown up on the Steam market by now if it did exist.

# ? Nov 26, 2023 05:44

swims: May 5, 2014; Waiter, this band keeps shooting pearls at me.

I would buy the book.

# ? Nov 26, 2023 11:49

Inexplicable Humblebrag: Sep 20, 2003

Pirate Jet posted:

lmao

# ? Nov 26, 2023 11:56

padijun: Feb 5, 2004; murderbears forever

almir gave me a pikachu mask and a majora's mask during crimefest 2015 so I think it was good overall

# ? Nov 26, 2023 12:46

Danaru: Jun 5, 2012; 何 ??

Discendo Vox posted:

The Payday Drill Debacle

Christ I'd stopped playing by then, and I knew it was bad but didn't realize just how bad :magical:

Speaking of bad, drat I was considering picking up Payday 3 but all I see are complaints about not being able to find a game :smith:

# ? Nov 26, 2023 13:24

Kikas: Oct 30, 2012

The Slaughterhouse remake did give us the best song in the game for a loooooooooooong while, so it was worth it.

# ? Nov 26, 2023 13:29

CuddleCryptid: Jan 11, 2013; Things could be going better

The amazing thing about all of that is that it would have probably gone down fine-ish if they had just released it, which they were extremely obviously going to do from the start. Making people jump through perceived hoops to unlock such mediocre stuff was guarantied to go down poorly, and that's why most games don't do that kind of contest.

Good write up DV

# ? Nov 26, 2023 14:42

Grimthwacker: Aug 7, 2014

God, I remember vividly when my brother tried to tell me what Crimefest '15 entailed. He asked me over Steam chat, "Hey, guess what Payday 2 is getting?" I, jokingly, replied "Crates and keys?"

To which he answered "...GODDAMMIT!", as if he was expecting me to say something different.

Yeah, I could see why that debacle was the end of Crimefest for all time.

# ? Nov 26, 2023 15:07

Elendil004: Mar 22, 2003; The prognosis
is not good.

Insane write up, I missed all that thank god. Thanks!

# ? Nov 26, 2023 15:16

Ratoslov: Feb 15, 2012; Now prepare yourselves! You're the guests of honor at the Greatest Kung Fu Cannibal BBQ Ever!

basically I heard they were adding boxes and keys and I decided 'well, the fun is over' and stopped playing for like four years.

# ? Nov 26, 2023 15:20

ZeusCannon: Nov 5, 2009; BLAAAAAARGH PLEASE KILL ME BLAAAAAAAARGH; Grimey Drawer

I must have left payday 2 before that all happened because i never engaged with the microtransactions but man does that explain why payday 3 was so disappointing.

They went off the rails hard and haven't made it back yet.

# ? Nov 26, 2023 16:00

RandolphCarter: Jul 30, 2005

Console avoided all of that :smug:

also almost all the content :shepicide:

# ? Nov 26, 2023 16:02

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Apologies, I did a lot of skipping around while writing that post so there�s some weird repetition in it- I�ll clean it up a bit when I have time.

# ? Nov 26, 2023 16:04

UnknownMercenary: Nov 1, 2011; I LIKE IT
WAY WAY TOO LOUD

Didn't the numbers for the Hype Train look really bad until they started including Hotline Miami 2 purchases into it? Either way, I agree in hindsight it does feel like they were always going to put out the content that was teased regardless of how things
turned out.

# ? Nov 26, 2023 16:49

HellCopter: Feb 9, 2012; College Slice

Great writeup. From the outside looking in, it was bizarre to see this game that was chock-full of content and a super active community decide to tank itself for seemingly no reason.

# ? Nov 26, 2023 17:11

Atoramos: Aug 31, 2003; Jim's now a Blind Cave Salamander!

Good writeup, accurate to how I remember it as well. I only have six games reviewed on Steam, and the only two negative reviews are for Payday 2 and 3. Payday 2 was a review I left during that event, Payday 3 was for their month-long launch issues.

# ? Nov 26, 2023 17:39

Bhodi: Dec 9, 2007; Oh, it's just a cat.; Pillbug

Discendo Vox posted:

The Payday Drill Debacle
There's enough moving parts to this story that I know I'm misremembering and forgetting some things, but this is my best attempt, making a number of simplifications to keep this readable. I'm going to start with some scene-setting, then go over the event and how it went down publicly. I'll follow up by explaining what I've been able to piece together about what was happening behind the scenes at Overkill.

Early warning signs
Several factors were publicly influencing community expectations going into this event.

1. Launch promises. During the 2012-2013 launch period of Payday 2, microtransactions, even without pay-to-win connotations, had a really terrible reputation. This reputation was mostly built on PvP games, but it was still in effect for PvE. Almir Listo responded to a microtransactions question by saying "We've made it clear that Payday 2 will have no microtransactions whatsoever (shame on you if you thought otherwise!)". During the same period, the initial game director, David Goldfarb, responded to a similar "will there be microtransactions" question with "No. No. God, I hope not. Never. No."

2. The Secret. The end of Payday the Heist and the launch of Payday 2 heavily involved elements of The Secret ARG. This was a core plot element that drove a lot of user interest, and users were salivating for it.

3. The hype train. An event from early 2015 tied to the release of the Hoxton Revenge map encouraged players to earn pooled "hype fuel" by, essentially, giving Overkill money. This unlocked "free" shared community unlocks, which would otherwise be sold to players. The community awards included "Paydaycon", an event in LA, and the "Car Shop heist," a noticeably badly made heist that introduced driveable vehicles. Bear this in mind.

One method of purchasing hype fuel was by buying the limited edition "Completely Overkill Pack". Overkill artificially induced scarcity for this pack by only allowing 50,000 people to buy it. It included four masks and a surprise cosmetic item. Again, the developers promised this was cosmetic only. This event, which was basically an Overkill fundraiser, hit a sour note with a number of people in the community, in part because it was basically pre-funding promised ongoing content development, or "unlocking" stuff that was already intended for release. This was worsened because...

4. The Payday community is toxic. Not as toxic as some of the worst out there, but still, really, really bad. This is in part directly attributable to a practice by the devs of using community influencers who were hardcore challenge run players, the sort who would stream themselves trying to survive for an hour ingame without leaving a dumpster, and, more importantly, treated their abilities ingame as some sort of badge of honor. Almost all of these users maintain their audience by continuously seeking harder challenges, and by instigating conflict with the development team. Coupled with a number of poor balance decisions, by Crimefest 2015 a part of the playerbase were already primed to take any change to the game in the worst possible way.

The Road to Crimefest
First there was a trailer. Check that swelling operatic score.
Crimefest 2015 was pre-announced as the biggest one yet, with statements showing that the gang were going to discover secrets of the ARG that had been teasing the community for years, exploring an ancient vault. As a runup to the event, the playerbase was also encouraged to complete various ingame goals to unlock free rewards that would be provided during the event. Exactly what was being unlocked was not clear: as goals came with silhouettes that, when unlocked, displayed cryptic clues about the ultimate reward.

A number of things already started to go off the rails:

Obviously false representations
Overkill made statements as if things the community did not unlock would either never be developed and implemented in the game, or that they would become paid DLC. The latter was at least plausible, but alienating; the former was obviously false, as the short timeline to the event made it clear all of the things being teased were already made. This was also true of the Hype Train event, and it bred a general sense among the more skeptical parts of the playerbase that overkill were misreporting telemetry in order to show people were hitting the required targets (there was no sign this actually happened, fwiw).

Idiot sexism
As a part of this process, new heister Clover played a prominent role, seeming to replace Wolf as a member of the main four crewmembers fort the event. Gamergate behing alive and well in the playerbase, this drew attention from the sort of assholes who profit off of eliciting rage about the presence of women in games. This was a pretty minor factor in what followed, but it was present and worth noting.

Terrible event design
The initial set of community objectives included a combination of very aggressively paced ingame actions, unlocked sequentially (e.g. "kill a million enemies with this bad melee weapon, then ziptie 300,000 civilians, then...". These were doable (and of course Overkill wanted the community to finish all of them), but they required a lot of effectively grinding the game. Also included were engagement objectives like following individual character voice actors on social media. These objectives (which apparently weren't discussed with the actors first) resulted in unwanted harassment and were replaced partway through the event.

So after all of this, we had a community that's extremely hyped and invested (including with time and money), expecting a massive, ten-day event focused on a plot reveal involving an ancient crpyt and providing heaps of free content...but with a sizeable contingent of users who were ready to get angry at Overkill no matter how good the event was.

Crimefest 2015 Day 1
Click here for the Black Market Safes announcement site.

Click here for the main trailer announcing the safes.

The event starts, and the community is given a trailer announcing that the contents of the Ancient Secret Vault are...Crates and Keys! Players will get "safes" from different collections at the end of heists, and can spend Actual Dollars on "drills" to open them. These safes contain weapon skins of randomized type and quality (with anything other than mint condition looking terrible). Additionally, some of the skins include stat boosts making the weapons very slightly better than other weapons. All of this, weapons, safes, and skins, will be tradeable on the Steam Marketplace. Like similar drop systems for counterstrike, the best-looking "legendary" skins are incredibly rare, skins that don't spawn with ugly wear and tear are rare, and the versions with stat boosts are even rarer, creating a lottery effect. Also in line with counterstrike, the update teases having members of the community design skins for future "collections".

Users who had purchased the Completely Overkill Pack learn that they, and only they, will each receive a single Completely Overkill Safe and Drill, getting a single free gun skin from a collection that would never be available to other players, except by sale. Skins from this safe were all at least "rare" rarity, but were not otherwise subject to statistical controls. Most of them also looked like poo poo (literally, in the case of the "brown river" skin). Most players who had spent additional money on this exclusive pack wound up getting poor condition skins for weapons they did not use. The rarity system was such that no one received one of the "legendary" skins. That skin simply does not exist other than in the inventory of some of the developers.

As you can imagine, this did not go over well. Further rubbing the community's faces in this matter was a launch trailer that was borderline incoherent: Chains enters the ancient vault (which is for some reason a high tech vault bearing branding from a modern security firm) and meets Vlad, who is so off-model that he's depicted in shadow the entire time. The trailer then immediately transitions to a completely zero-context flashback, shot with actual human actors, of Vlad accosting Chains while disguised as a homeless person for some reason, talking euphemistically about working with Valve to implement the safes system.

The other "reward" that the community "unlocked" on this day is a weapon rebalance that the devs had already been promising for a long time.

I don't really have words to describe how terrible the initial reaction to this is. Even the relatively sane users were incandescent. Reddit in particular was flooded with rage and memes about overkill "rewarding" the community with a pay-to-win microtransaction system, and, of course, the original quotes from the developers about "no microtransactions, shame on you for thinking otherwise" are on everyone's lips. It's worth noting that in 95% of cases, the stat boosts provided by weapon skins were miniscule and worthless- but the exceptions were significant, and were assigned outsized value. This was made worse because the game's top difficulty is poorly balanced and these stat boosts were seen as a (paid) way for people to succeed on that difficulty.

And all of this was day one of the event.

Crimefest 2015 Day 2

Five additional "unlocks" were provided this day, consisting of five separate individual masks vaguely relating to Vlad. By this point players figured out how to use cached versions of the game from steam to set up a parallel version of the game pre-crimefest and set up their own subreddit, one of several communities entirely defined by hating Overkill.

Crimefest 2015 Day 3

With a bizarre trailer consisting of a slow panning shot of a single room, Overkill announced the "Aftershock" heist, in which the gang goes to LA during a massive earthquake and steals...the incredibly unpopular microtransaction safes. For Vlad. Yes, the players are literally made to carry microtransaction crates on their backs while Vlad talks about how heavy they are. No, you don't get to keep them. No, you don't get drills for playing. Yes, there is a literal achievement for taking a homeless person hostage that makes fun of counterstrike knife skins. No, this "community unlock" does not help smooth things over. By this point antisemitic memes about "Oyveyshill" started to spread.

Attentive modders notice there are signs the environment used for the heist was originally designed for some other multi-day planned heist. Meanwhile, the general community is, well, more and worse.

Crimefest 2015 Day 4

The community learned that the day's grand "unlocks" are the ability for AI players to trade hostages, and a server filter function that had been requested for years. Hey, by the way, did I mention that each day of the event comes with a forced, large filesize update to the game that takes forever to unpack? Yeah, that's happening too alongside all the rest of the anger.

Crimefest 2015 Day 5

The community received a Light Machine Gun and, for all LMGs, a bipod attachment that lets players go stationary for major stability and accuracy benefits. While buggy, this was a welcome and unexpected addition that would have gone over very well in any other event. As it stands, it made very little difference. By this point the community was largely a roiling turd bowl, with toxic users who think that overkill is deliberately fleecing players shouting down differently toxic players who think the devs can do no wrong.

Crimefest 2015 Day 6

Overkill announces a surprise! The Dallas Pack, coming with a free community heist not tied to any of the previously "unlocked" events! Using a weird cartoon Dallas as the logo, the "Dallas Pack" is a remade version of First World Bank from Payday: The Heist. Unlike its forebear, the heist was doable in stealth or loud. Also unlike its forbear, the heist crashed frequently for no clear reason, necessitating several additional hotfix updates through the rest of the event.

More importantly, Overkill had another announcement: Wolf Cards! Wolf will now occasionally drop a drill, for free, at the end of a heist, meaning that payments are not necessary to unlock skins!

...Remember how I said things were bad at this point? It's day 6. The community has been allowed to believe this was a pay-to-play microtransaction environment for five days, and for that period, it was - people undoubtedly spent money on drills that they didn't have to. The community reacted by developing a conspiracy theory: that the drills are something invented by Overkill to save face after the disastrous microtransaction rollout. Users pointed to the short, strangely animated trailer for the update as a sign that it was quickly made, and even the broader press covered the event as if it was a "reaction" (I am confident this wasn't the case for reasons I'll get into later on). At the same time, it satisfied no one- people who were angry for clicks still had an incentive to get angry, the drill drops were opaque (and, from the perspective of users, rare compared with safe drops), and of course there was still an advantage for people who could pay. There were still safes and crates. Nothing really improved, no one changed their mind.

Crimefest 2015 Day 7
The "unlocked" events were a collaboration with Le Castlevania, the musician behind some well-known soundtrack pieces from John Wick, and a "preferred character" function for players entering lobbies. These are, again, welcome updates that made no sense as gated community unlocks, and did nothing to address the white-hot rage of the userbase. By this point players have noticed that Ulf Andersson, the brother of CEO Bo Andersson and major programmer on the games, left Overkill earlier in the year. His departure is attributed to the safes and weapon skins debacle (and iirc he did indicate this was part of why he and another founding dev, Simon Viklund, left the company).

Crimefest 2015 Day 8
Overkill announced a rebalance to SWAT turret enemies and four weirdly, loosely hollywood-themed masks "unlocked" by the community. The turret changes are probably objectively good, but the now dominant angry parts of the community are not exactly in a receptive mood at this point. Also they introduce new crashes and require another hotfix update. Overkill also announces a limited time 30 day special "event safe" in First World Bank that will unlock a special one-chance safe and skin collection in that heist. Like the Completely Overkill Pack, the plan is to let players have only one shot at the collection, inducing scarcity. It will shock you to learn that this also doesn't go over well.

Crimefest 2015 Day 9
Surprise, it's another oddly buggy Payday the Heist remake! Slaughterhouse is added to the game and while it's not got as many crash issues as First World Bank, it's still got severe issues. Additional Groucho Marx glasses and a pair referencing Vlad's homeless person disguise are added as "community unlocks".

Crimefest 2015 Day 10
The grand finale of Crimefest 2015, now a total omnishambles...is third person jumping animations. This also closes out the event with another event safe in Slaughterhouse and four masks referencing internet memes.

Overkill would eventually make safes open without drills, and would let the community get additional drops from event safes, tanking the market and removing most of its appeal for the sort of people who gamble with ingame purchases (or use them to launder money). The studio would mostly back away from extended multiday events, and would proceed to continue to eat crow for other poor decisions relating to this time period for years to come. I'll get into how Overkill was nowhere near as bad as people thought, and in other ways, much worse, in my next post.

Behind the scenes at Overkill
A lot of the below information is inferred from data leaks or statements from former devteam members. I think most of it is true, but some specific details may be incorrect.

The Original Plan
Payday 2 was designed as a Games As A Service (GaaS) product, meaning that it was intended to run for as long as possible, making money by providing expansions and additional content. To accommodate this process, the overarching plot and progression of the game needed to be set up in advance to be flexible, and this was the case. Based on leftover code from early launch versions, launch era plot material and other sources, the original idea behind the plot of Payday 2 was that eventually, the gang's safehouse would be attacked and burned down and Bain would be kidnapped or killed by Murkywater. The gang would lick their wounds outside DC and ultimately return to perform the White House heist with the help of Vlad, who was keyed into the whole Secret thing. In this telling, the Elephant played the same role ultimately played by the Dentist, who did not originally exist.

As time went on and the game succeeded beyond anyone's expectations, the plot expanded like an accordion and new characters and game elements were added to fill this space with content and, well, profitability for Overkill. Many of these deals came from tie-ins, cameos, new characters and crossover events agreed to by CEO Bo Andersson. In practice, it seems as if Bo accepted virtually any offer that crossed his desk. To be clear, many of these agreements turned out very well- for example, the Hotline Miami 2 DLC apparently was an indefinite license and involved no payments to Devolver Digital, meaning from OVK's perspective it was a free, massively popular crossover event that greatly boosted sales for both parties with no pushback. Other deals were less clearly related or successful, and engendered massive controversy within the studio because they made actual development hard to predict. Crimefest 2015 appears to have been a casualty of this process.

The Hollywood Event
Heading into late 2014, it appears that Overkill were planning to make Crimefest 1015 the end of act 1 and a turning point for the game - the gang would leave DC (possibly with or without Bain) and go to LA, where Vlad was likely to play a much larger role in future activities. The event was not going to be themed around an ancient vault, but was instead based on Hollywood, with a large number of film tie-ins planned over the following years, maximizing GaaS opportunities, promotions and benefits. Even before Crimefest was teased, the schedule and plan for associated content was in a constant state of flux, producing acrimony within the studio. Numerous projects associated with this "LA turn" were subject to large amounts of development time before being scrapped or delayed for years; it appears likely that by this point, internal development had already begun on the Scarface Mansion and Reservoir Dogs heists, for instance, and the Car Shop heist was the reused leftovers from some sort of cut down heist project that included a live film trailer. The Payday the Heist remake heists were going to be film-themed (as the original game had been, to a degree), and part of this movieland promotional activity was an animated film by Harry Partridge that was ultimately delayed by production issues for several years (this was the source of the cartoon Dallas used atop the Dallas Pack). The "Dallas Pack" was labeled as such because it was apparently once intended as separate, standalone DLC.

References in Overkill sites and the codebase indicated that a "hollywood" heist was planned, possibly for the event or as standalone DLC involving an assault on a producer's mansion and the theft of film memorabilia. This got so far into development that an associated set of masks were created (used for the crimefest 2015 event) along with a set of never-released melee weapons, including a filmreel, film scissors, Oscar, and director's folding chair. By what little info I've been able to pull out, it was rumored that the hollywood heist was cut was because it was disastrously unfun to play. At least one day of this heist involved some sort of forced stealth process, robbing a location at the same time as another group of criminals and dealing with the issues they created. One feature of this lost DLC that's particularly mourned by modders and filedivers was "xeno", an accurate and player-useable pulse rifle (as in the one from Aliens) that was fully modeled and never implemented ingame.

A disastrous reordering
With the above cuts and shifts, there was never enough material to go into Crimefest 2015, and presenting it as a series of "community unlocks" tied to the ARG was always going to go poorly. Overkill appear likely to have done everything possible to fill in the gaps with what they could. Live action footage of Chains talking with Vlad, remade heists, LA-themed material and part of an unfinished LA heist were all crammed together and loosely tied to the new "ancient temple" setting, but its ultimate reception was made much worse by reversing the planned order of release, seemingly days before the event started.

The live action trailer, the Aftershock heist, even the last-minute animated trailers, all made more sense if they were teasers, and the entire microtransaction update- crates, keys, and free keys- was going to be the final day of the ten day event. The microtransaction system would have been revealed all at once, after the community received nine days of free, much-demanded game improvements. Vlad's slimy microtransactions deal was going to be presented with the immediate revelation that "don't worry, gently caress Vlad, Wolf is going to make sure you get skins for free."

Instead, for some reason, Overkill decided to announce the microtransactions without a free version on day one of the event and delay the announcement of the free key dynamic for an additional five days. The effect was to make a maximally predatory version of the microtransaction system the headline of the grand community event, and made the free skins seem like a face-saving afterthought. In this way, Overkill took a losing hand and made it much, much, much worse for themselves.

Long term pain
The initial change in plans that pushed back or removed so much planned content, and forced a months-long crunch to make up for it, appears to have been at least as much reason for an exodus of former Overkill leadership in early 2015 as the use of microtransactions. At a minimum, the crates and keys system was already planned and under implementation by the Hype Train event. This sudden scrambling of the planned order of release, however, put Overkill team members under an incredible burden to produce a Crimefest worth of material, with a different theme, and different content, in an impossibly short amount of time. That exodus, coupled with other business decisions unrelated to Payday which may have also caused the exodus, caused the near-dissolution of the studio. Those decisions, which were imo even worse than all this microtransactions stuff, are better left to another post.

I�m happy for you
or sorry that happened

# ? Nov 26, 2023 19:02

Tempest_56: Mar 14, 2009

Discendo Vox posted:

The Payday Drill Debacle

One thing Vox passed over that's worth mentioning was the pricing structure.

Each drill cost $2.50. This price point mostly works for CS:GO since it's a $15 game that you pay once and are done. At the time, Payday 2 was $30, with (I think) a dozen DLCs that were $5-10 each. They were also frequently 50-75% off. So from the perspective of a consumer, for the same price you could either buy an entire DLC or a skin that looked like poo poo 75% of the time.

Oh, and IIRC you could get skins not only for guns you didn't use, but ones from DLCs you didn't even own.

# ? Nov 26, 2023 22:02

UnknownMercenary: Nov 1, 2011; I LIKE IT
WAY WAY TOO LOUD

Tempest_56 posted:

Oh, and IIRC you could get skins not only for guns you didn't use, but ones from DLCs you didn't even own.

This reminds me that they had to give out free DLCs to people who also bought the Completely Overkill pack because of this.

# ? Nov 27, 2023 00:14

Nehru the Damaja: May 20, 2005

so uh

is 3 good now

# ? Nov 27, 2023 01:01

EorayMel: May 30, 2015; WE GET IT. YOU LOVE GUN JESUS. Toujours des fusils Bullpup Fran�ais.

Nehru the Damaja posted:

so uh

is 3 good now

It is not good.
:pubstove:

Online only+servers are still unreliable, and the notorious day 1 server failure that lasted several days later chased off the majority of players in a week. There is also no offline mode except maybe doing the rudimentary training stage again and again. Even doing a solo queue with bots or a private game still requires queuing, and people can join your private games via your steam profile "Join Game" button.

Progressing is tied strictly to completing challenges, most of which boil down to sitting in a bathtub and farming 500 headshots with an Uzi. Next update is adding "a small amount of Infamy Points" from Almir Listro(coming next patch) to try to make people shut up about it, and the devs still clearly love the challenge/leveling system. Most people who hung around after the server incidents realized the leveling sucks rear end and also left a month after launch.

Only 8 heists and about 16 weapons total gets stale pretty fast(next update has two *new* heists...which are ports of Cook Off and Murky Station from PD2), and the concept of multi-day heists is almost certainly not going to be touched again. Anything that isn't the double barrel shotgun, m308, or a revolver is pretty worthless. Stats are ambiguous bars that grow or shrink 3 pixels per confusingly worded modifications. The most important weapon stat, armor piercing, also isn't shown to the player whatsoever, as while enemy health doesn't scale with difficulty...enemy armor does.

UI and menus are terrible and blatantly ripped off of COD, down to everything being clunky grids hiding stuff at the bottoms of pages.

The absolute fastest that updates can come out is once every 14 days due to console parity and certification. Very first update was also delayed almost a full month and addressed very little of value; hard to assume they got it ironed out now.

No voice chat whatsoever. No lobby communication to tell people you wanna stealth. Console players cannot see anything you type. No loud/stealth matchmaking filter unless you queue up the only unambiguously loud only heist. No crimenet lobby browser. Everybody is forced to split up after a heist and make a new queue, so even if you found 3 pubs who are competent you will never see them again once you are done.

People leaked the planned microtransaction items and prices that include a whopping $10.00 USD for masks you can only see in the main menu and only for other people to see in game. Said microtransactions are assumed to be put in later, but hackers already figured out how to access and wear them for free since all of it is in the files and normally inaccessible for normal users. And they look like poo poo, naturally.
:pubstove:

It is going to take a very long time for payday 3 to :gitgud:

. Meanwhile payday 2 is only $2.50 USD for the thanksgiving sale right now and at least has basic poo poo like communication features and an offline mode in case you're playing during a hurricane.

EorayMel fucked around with this message at 01:26 on Nov 27, 2023

# ? Nov 27, 2023 01:24

ZeusCannon: Nov 5, 2009; BLAAAAAARGH PLEASE KILL ME BLAAAAAAAARGH; Grimey Drawer

Absolutely not the same thing btw but if any one is looking for a coop shooter, darktide is in a good place these days

# ? Nov 27, 2023 03:01

swims: May 5, 2014; Waiter, this band keeps shooting pearls at me.

Dark tide is either the funnest boring game or the boringest fun game. The graphics are cool for sure though.

# ? Nov 27, 2023 07:38

Kikas: Oct 30, 2012

EorayMel posted:

It is going to take a very long time for payday 3 to . Meanwhile payday 2 is only $2.50 USD for the thanksgiving sale right now and at least has basic poo poo like communication features and an offline mode in case you're playing during a hurricane.

Payday 3 is missing a lot of things that made Payday 2 great. Funny enough, streamlining most of the cosmetics is one of these things :v:

I kinda miss the dumb payday mechanic, you could have added buying with cash/c-stacks to it, not rip it out entirely. I do miss lobbies with visible other players, the fashion show before we enter a heist was one of the greatest parts of PD2. I miss multi-day heists with stuff like bags carrying between heists, I miss maps with variable spawns like Watchdogs or Transport heists, I miss escapes. I miss contractors having more than 1 heist each, with appropriate themes. Dealing with gangs and enemies other that just "the cops" was also fun. Let me steal some guns, make bags have variable movespeed. All those things that after 300 hours seem like annoyances, build a LOT of character of the game in the first 3 hours.

After all this time it occurs to me that, gently caress, we did need those cooks.

# ? Nov 27, 2023 08:51

Pirate Jet: May 2, 2010

Payday 2 also sucked rear end for about its first year and a half so I guess we�re just continuing the Overkill tradition.

# ? Nov 27, 2023 10:44

Tulip: Jun 3, 2008; yeah thats pretty good

Pirate Jet posted:

Payday 2 also sucked rear end for about its first year and a half so I guess we�re just continuing the Overkill tradition.

the most surprising thing to me about the last page or so of posts is the number of people who dropped off of PD2 by or around Crimefest 15, at which point I'd basically consider it like 20% of what it was in 2017 onward

# ? Nov 27, 2023 11:31

Kikas: Oct 30, 2012

Tulip posted:

the most surprising thing to me about the last page or so of posts is the number of people who dropped off of PD2 by or around Crimefest 15, at which point I'd basically consider it like 20% of what it was in 2017 onward

I got in with Transport (at that point grenades were still paid DLC exclusive) and stuck with it right up to the White House, that was a wild and fun ride to be on, despite it's ups and downs. I enjoyed the unique experience of getting daily updates during crimefest and the two-week update cycle of heist - masks - guns - masks - heist etc.

Pirate Jet posted:

Payday 2 also sucked rear end for about its first year and a half so I guess we�re just continuing the Overkill tradition.

However, as I wrote upthread, Payday 3 sucks not just compared to end-life Payday 2 - which it just had to, there was no way it would beat it. Payday 3 sucks compared to mid-life Payday 2 and in some places it's worse than launch Payday 2. And that's what killed all the hype for it for me.
Payday 3 feels like a sequel to Payday 1, not Payday 2.

# ? Nov 27, 2023 12:36

Tulip: Jun 3, 2008; yeah thats pretty good

I do kinda feel for the devs, not just of payday but of any sort of games-as-a-service game. Like its just not possible that payday 3 on release could ever have had the level of content support that payday 2 had at the end of its lifespan, and like for myself as a consumer it feels like an incredibly stupid choice: even if I didn't already own payday 2, I have the choice between a game that costs 100% of a new game and has x amount of content, or i could buy the older game that costs 10% of a new game and has 20x the amount of content. And because of like, just how game development works in the GAAS paradigm, the older game is going to be more, not less, polished. Unless you have some sort of truly rare psychologically devastating reaction to the older graphics, the newer game is just kind of a worse deal.

IDK that's me being more philosophical. I don't know that its an impossible ask - I was worried that CK3 would fall into this same problem where its the green shoots trying to survive in the oppressive shade of the hulking tree of CK2, but CK3 seems to have been well executed (though I am worried that the still hypothetical EU5 will suck poo poo because its going to have to compete with a game that has 10+ years of continuous polishing). And while the green shoots problem for PD3 pretty much killed my interest in it, all the reports I've gotten from this thread and others is that PD3 has plenty of problems above and beyond that.

All this talk just kind of makes me want to clear up some hard drive space so I can shoot some cops in PD2 though.

# ? Nov 27, 2023 13:04

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ? May 15, 2024 05:37

UnknownMercenary: Nov 1, 2011; I LIKE IT
WAY WAY TOO LOUD

Tulip posted:

the most surprising thing to me about the last page or so of posts is the number of people who dropped off of PD2 by or around Crimefest 15, at which point I'd basically consider it like 20% of what it was in 2017 onward

I would argue that peak Payday 2 was up until that point. That whole run of DLC from 2014-2015 was good, especially the Dentist heists though Golden Grin was the worst of the lot. After that we got an increasingly bizarre and silly amount of crossovers and the power creep had genuinely gotten so out of control that the game warped into something entirely different after.

# ? Nov 27, 2023 13:24

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Payday 3: We've Been Robbed

«‹›515 »