On Sept. 24, Starbreeze CEO Tobias Sjögren said an offline mode for Payday 3 is potentially being added to the game.
Since its release last week, Payday 3 has encountered an absolute flood of server errors, and fans have not held back on expressing their frustration. While this news does bring a ray of hope, our prayers haven’t been answered just yet.
Sjögren’s statement was written in response to a streamer who said the game went “from a buy to a hard pass” when it was announced Payday 3 would be online only. In his response, Sjögren jokingly suggested Game Pass over hard pass before writing. “Jokes aside, been communicated by Andreas for example that team is looking at possibility to add some sort of offline mode,” he said on X (formerly Twitter.)
The person Sjögren was referencing in the tweet is Andreas Häll Penninger—the lead producer for Payday 3. We couldn’t find where Penninger apparently communicated a team is looking into a solo mode for the game, so perhaps it’s not online. Regardless, we’re willing to take the CEO’s word for it.
To be totally candid, Payday 3’s servers have been an absolute dumpster fire since release. The game itself is great fun, but so far, you’re rolling dice that are loaded against you every time you try to jump into a heist. Of course, offline play would solve that problem. Not only would it allow people to play the game even when the servers are down, but it would also significantly decrease the stress placed on servers as many people actually want to play alone regardless of server status.
Payday 3 doesn’t allow players to set any sort of preference for what sort of play style they want to use in a heist when searching for a match. Naturally, many (myself included), would rather play a heist alone than hope that the three strangers they’re paired with also want to keep things quiet and stealthy.
Fixing the servers would be a great start (and an absolutely necessary one), but even if the servers were totally infallible, the demand for solo play would not dwindle. If Starbreeze wants that to happen, it would also need to make a change to public matchmaking that allowed players to select heist preferences and be placed accordingly. Even then, it’s easy to envision a scenario in which one or more players disconnect from a heist after stealth is accidentally broken.
Truly, there isn’t a single world in which nobody wants a solo play option in Payday 3, and it isn’t like it would be difficult to add one. Hopefully, Sjögren, Penninger, and the rest of the team are prepared to back up their words with actions and we get at least another update soon. Sjögren did write later in the same thread that Payday 3 will continue to be worked on for years to come, which is certainly promising (assuming that work for years to come involves listening and responding to the community of the game).
