As of Sept. 25, Payday 3‘s Steam rating continues to plummet while the game’s servers remain basically unplayable a week after its early access launch on Sept. 18. On the couple of days after release, the server debacle was generally viewed as a launch issue in an otherwise well-made game. Now, however, it’s reaching the point of just becoming an issue.
Payday 3 currently has over 20,000 reviews from players on Steam, and 70 percent of those reviews are negative. Here’s the thing, though: Nobody seems to be saying that Payday 3 isn’t a fun game. The chief complaint (and the one that’s impossible to ignore) is the fact that the server issues are quite literally making the game only playable for a handful of hours each day, and that’s if you’re lucky.
Steam user Randomdude took the words right out of our mouths in his review on the Steam Community page for Payday 3 when they wrote, “Starbreeze has created an incredible successor to their beloved PAYDAY 2. Too bad you cant play it.” This review was written on Sept. 24 and was voted by others as the most helpful review for the game. Payday 3 has been out for a week, and a comment saying you can’t play the game is considered the most helpful review. Yikes.
When we reviewed Payday 3 on Sept. 22, we focused on the design of the game itself, highlighting the charm but acknowledging how the matchmaking system needed a revamp. We intentionally didn’t focus on the state of the servers, as we wanted to create a review that would still be helpful to people in a week or two, and it seemed outlandish to think the servers would still be in such an awful state come October.
With every day that passes, that chance seems more and more likely. That said, it’s getting harder to defend or give the benefit of the doubt to the developers. A day or two of server issues can be expected with anticipated releases in 2023. What can also be expected is that it will all be resolved within a day or two.
The most frustrating part of the server nightmare for players is the fact that an offline solo play mode would alleviate a huge amount of the discontentment from fans. If the servers are down and we can heist alone to learn maps and practice stealth routes, fine. We’ll make do. If the servers being down means we can’t even run a heist with bots on our team, that’s a huge problem.
