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Pirate Jet posted:I mean, PD2 was supposed to “end” at the end of 2017, and then Overkill’s The Walking Dead imploded, and the company went insolvent, so they went back to making DLC for their captive audience two years later so they could buy time while they got a Payday 3 off the ground. Now it’s out after four years of development and it still feels underbaked. They are just not good developers, and they honestly never particularly have been. Absolutely. And yes there's absolutely been some absolute banger GAAS games - I played Warframe and Payday 2 often in parallel over the same period, and Warframe has some really remarkable achievements to its belt. Payday 2 is largely held together by nobody else really touching the concept its going for, which allows it to stumble quite badly with nobody eating their lunch. And in more 'modern' DRG is fantastic and very GAAS, though the GAAS model that I think is the most interesting is EU4, where they released a bajillion DLC and then after the fact made a (quite cheap) subscription, which TBH I think really cuts to the heart of GAAS economic models: they need a constant inflow of cash in order to pay developers for a constant outflow of content, and you can get that from a drip feed of DLCs but that is going to be intrinsically more volatile than "we get x dollars per user per month" like an old MMO.
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Nov 27, 2023 19:38
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padijun posted:Apparently people are immediately blowing up the lab on cook off. Nature is healing
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Dec 2, 2023 02:58
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Fil5000 posted:I have hazy recollections of doing Rats at low level requiring you to be careful with ammo but god, it's so long ago that I don't know if that's just my memory playing tricks on me. The ammo economy has changed in several ways over the game's history. There were points, particularly early, where running out of ammo was the primary fail state, and strategic letting people go into custody to trade them back to get some of their ammo back was a legitimate part of strategy. I remember particularly early on that it was trolling to take less than 6 ammo bags with your crew. Last I was up to date with the meta, the weapons that were considered good for endurance runs were ones that had unusually high pickups - specific LMGs and grenade launchers had unusually high pickups, and while dragonsbreath rounds were not especially economical their sheer staggering utility at clearing (and more importantly, stunning) large groups of cops justified their use. DMRs are a particular category where most of the time they had dogshit ammo economy that made them unviable outside of the exceptionally short heists (which people didnt bother optimizing for) and had a few time periods where their pickups were so reliable it was dubious to use any other conventional weapon.
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Dec 7, 2023 23:19
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My personal experience was that I started when the Armored Transport heists came out and kept playing probably until a little after One Down was added, and since then I've been very intermittent but not 100% absent. Honestly I feel like it was just generally uphill and hit a 'mature' point when they added the Overkill pack and it remained at a good level since then, being very uneven before then. I do think that, exempting Bomb Forest, from HLM onwards they pretty much made good heists which is the most important thing.Anime Store Adventure posted:I didn't play a lot of Payday 2 past its 'early' life and missed a lot of DLC, but I always super hated that the move was always to rush the best Reward-per-Time match which was Rats. Stealth was too finicky and Rats played into the gameplay of "Find the most optimal guns with the most optimal corners to most optimally reward yourself to better get more optimal guns to camp the most optimal corners." And I get it, the game dies without the grind and playing into that, but the base of Payday 3 has some threads of ideas that lead into more fun "Let's do our best to stealth and maybe it makes it easier even if we gently caress up" instead of being totally binary. I want that game - I want the heist game where no matter what my squad is prepared for whatever happens, but always tries their damndest to be smooth and clinical and is rewarded for progressing even slightly under those rules and can push the "Final Assault Hellwave" poo poo as far back as possible, but we can still attempt to deal with it. So I want to jump off from here because I think its interesting on a couple levels. I think the biggest thing to me is that in the horde shooter space, I predominantly play them with friends, and so the question of which one I'm going to play is rarely which one is best (probably L4D2 tbh) but which one my group of friends is in the mood for in a given month. If they want to play Deeprock we play Deeprock, if they want to play Warframe we play Warframe, and its not driven by any particular rational argument but by one or more people getting in the mood. So with Payday 2 I just don't feel like it super matters whether or not I think Alien Swarm is "better," its just what me n the buds are gonna play this week. The part about the treadmill I do want to highlight as kind of interesting because very early in the game's lifecycle that felt pretty realistic, but after several rounds of upping the XP rewards, revamping skill trees, and changes to unlocks, you get to an endgame state really fast (genuine power leveling could get somebody completely past the treadmill in like...an evening), and so even the more casual players I played with spent very little of their time playing the game gated by the grind. 99% of the time I've played payday 2, shooting cops wasn't an obstacle between me and getting XP or money, shooting cops was the reward for setting up a night of gaming with my friends. Which I guess gets to where I just kind of disagree with you a bit about what Payday is. Because of the way the mechanics worked in Payday 2 (no comment on Payday 3), the reward for good play is shooting tons of cops, and attempting to affect or delay the inevitable hell-assault isn't really so much a strategy as it is an abstract challenge mode, since the ratio of effort-to-reward for engaging with those systems is so thoroughly negative. A big part is that the way Payday 2 is actually balanced is such that the things you do that reduce the severity of hell-assaults are by and large more expensive and less reliable than just investing in being better at pushing through those hell assaults (compare stealth skills to just doing more damage or having more health or ammo pickups), and at a more profound level because the punishment for bad play in payday 2 is waiting around and the reward is shooting tons of cops, and so strategies where you reduce the severity of hell assaults are both penalties (cuz they're mostly just waiting around cuz the stealth sucks) and lower rewards. Anyway thats kind of a philosophical disagreement because, as mentioned, my perspective is that the reward system of payday 2 is the gameplay experience of playing the heists, the money and experience wound up just not being things that me and my friends optimized for other than to create context and structure for challenges we wanted to do for fun.
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Dec 27, 2023 11:06
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explosivo posted:Overkill's really been put to shame by the Helldivers devs with regards to how they handled their lovely hosed up launches. I think it helps that HD2 is just more fun to play so people want to play in spite of the problems unlike PD3 which has passed launch issues and is now just a mid as hell game, but the update cadence and messaging has been great the whole time with HD2 and I think that's shown in the response from the community who is understandably upset but still choking the servers to get in and play more. Meanwhile PD3 is getting DX12 and an unready button this week, 5 months after launch. And according to their blog update, from now until April, "we’ll be strengthening our internal pipelines and making sure we can deliver updates more reliably and really hit those deadlines going forward." I'm sticking to my guns from early PD3: the question isn't "how can PD3 be fixed" it's "what will PD4 look like." I'm operating under the assumption that since no particular person or company is clinging to the IP like grim death, and the IP isn't really tainted given that PD2 still has decent player numbers, somebody somewhere in the economy will eventually make a PD4. No guarantee but seems more likely than not. The HD2 thing is very illustrative and is evidence for why "the servers are hosed that's the only problem" crowd was so unconvincing even at their best. Every decently anticipated game launch has server problems, its as routine as the sun rising and setting. And for that matter it isn't the balance that was the problem, that's a thing that only sweaty redditors really believe can kill a game. HD2 has a bunch of balance missions - there's a far more clear tier listing of weapons and stratagems than in almost any other game I've played, a major mechanic functionally doesn't exist, and one of the most common mission types is borked. But the core gameplay is REALLY fun and Arrowhead has over a decade of commitment to a very clear design principle of "friendly fire should be friendly" that they've really nailed. Actually playing HD2 does not feel boring or like a chore or, especially salient here, like the worse version of a readily available competitor. The core gameplay of PD3 was less fun than the core gameplay of PD2, and PD2 is very much still alive and competing with PD3.
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Feb 24, 2024 05:21
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Grimthwacker posted:Operation "Auuuuugggggghhhh, I'm dyyyiiinnnggg I neeeed a Medic Bag!" I'm still of the opinion that the fact that Payday 2 is still going pretty strong and that it has a very unique aesthetic and style means that the IP is going to get used someway, somehow in the future, and if anything HD2 makes that more likely since it demonstrates that Payday 3's core concepts (cooperative ultraviolent shooter with a kind of political comedy) are very marketable, the specific studio in question just hosed the execution. I really do think we're going to get a Payday 4 at some point, I just think that it involves the existing studio dying completely and the IP getting bought by somebody else. I don't think it'll happen super fast, since 2024 has been very much a year of game downsizing, but this stuff moves in cycles and somebody is going to be smart enough to go "I could make a co-op action game from scratch...or I could try and take advantage of this decade plus old game that consistently has 30kish players after they ended support." If I had to guess the CEO was fired so they could bring in a breaker: fire everybody, sell IP off, auction off the chairs and such.
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Mar 13, 2024 23:36
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Shooting Blanks posted:I wonder how many of these problems would have been mitigated had they just pushed the launch back 6 months (or more). I've said it elsewhere, but I'm firmly of the opinion that companies announcing launch dates far in advance only to release a broken product hurts them in the long run. This is always a complicated thing. Giving projects more time to work doesn't mean they spend that time getting better, sometimes its just more investing into a fundamentally doomed project. Sometimes it makes it worse as people do stupid, wasteful poo poo with a larger canvas than they would with a smaller canvas. I don't really know quite what to say about PD3. You need the juice, you need the there there to make a game that really grabs people. Payday 2 and Helldivers 2 and hell Warframe and Destiny (as much as I hate it) and obviously Left 4 Dead all have something really deep there under the hood. Nobody's been able to tell me with a straight face that PD3 "utterly loving rocks" like they do with all those others. And of course its not the same thing underneath all of those, PD2 is the just sheer energy of shooting cops to dubstep, helldivers its the incredibly balanced comedy of Friendly Fire, Warframe its the moment to moment feel of being a flippy ninja, Destiny...I don't know somebody who likes Destiny can fill in, L4D its the excellent sense of changing dynamic tension from its (still to my mind) really good AI director. Without whatever you have that really just jolts your intended audience into going "now THIS I like," there's just no amount of polish that can really get you there (maybe this is Destiny's thing? Though maybe don't be an indie studio trying to compete with AAA gaming on their home turf).
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May 1, 2024 01:13
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The sad, horrible truth is that the thing PD3 needed most of all was for PD2 to be offline for 2-3 years before it was released.
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May 1, 2024 02:42
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