‘Payday 3’ community head Almir Listo has admitted the game “was a bad experience” for players because it was “unfinished”.
Payday 3 community head Almir Listo has admitted the game 'was a bad experience' for players because it was 'unfinished'
The first-person-shooter - which was helmed by Starbreeze Studios and followed on from the highly-successful ‘Payday 2’ from 2013 - was met by fierce criticism upon its launch last year due to significant sever issues and its unpopular online-only model, and now the community head has conceded the game needed more time in development before releasing.
During an interview with PCGN, Listo said: “The game just felt unfinished. It was a bad experience for our players.
“It's hard to make video games, and it's particularly difficult to follow up on the kind of success that ‘Payday 2’ was, not only at its launch, but also in the 10 years succeeding that.”
Lead producer Andreas Penniger added lots of the game’s issues stemmed from a lack of “due diligence” from the studio, and admitted the team “ended up making decisions too quickly”, which resulted in the title's disappointing performance.
He said: “A lot of the problems were due to the fact that we didn't do our due diligence well enough.
“We built ‘Payday 3’ while trying to understand what we wanted, in parallel. It ended up being a product that people didn't resonate with. I think we were a bit confident from the success of ‘Payday 2’ that we ended up making decisions too quickly.
“Our energy was like, ‘We're a rock band, and we're coming onto the stage, and we've got a new album.’ And the whole stage just collapsed and everyone left.”
Despite its rocky release, Starbreeze has continued updating and improving the title, and Listo said that ‘Payday 3’ “would be dead at this point” if the developers didn’t address player concerns quickly.
He said: “If we just put our heads in the sand and continued on, the game would be dead at this point. But even the angriest ‘Payday’ fans still come from a good place. They want the game to succeed, and their anger is only a reflection of that.
“They’re not hating on the game just to be haters - they're telling us what they want the game to have, in order for it to improve.”