Payday 3 Offline Mode Officially Cancelled

In a recent live stream, Starbreeze General manager Jonas Skantz and community manager Elisabeth Elvestad revealed that Payday 3 will not be getting the highly requested offline mode. Skantz claims that the studio doesn’t have enough hands to work on the mode despite the studio recently laying off a significant amount of employees.  Payday 3 launched in September 2023 and is available now for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC via Steam and Epic Games Store.

Jonas Skantz’s full comment on being asked about the mode:

“So offline mode. Let’s talk about that. I know that the team had good intentions with that, definitely. And they have been trying to make it happen, but I think we have to face the reality that it is not feasible for where we are going with the game. I’ll explain what I mean. First of all, we have a finite amount of people. We want to ensure that they work on the most valuable things for the game; these are the things that we will talk about: progression, core loops and so on. But more importantly, we today have an update model where it takes us weeks to get a client update out. This is a bit technical; it means that if we discover today that, ‘hey, this value is wrong,’ it takes us a very long time to fix that. That’s not because we are slow, it’s just because updating the first-party and so on, it takes weeks.”

So we want to move to a model where we can work with the community and make sure that we can update things fast, and to do that, we need to update things from the backend. So we need to be able to tweak the game from the backend to make sure we can get things out faster. If we can get at things more early, and have the confidence that we can change it, then that would give us much more speed. It would also bring more meaning to player feedback. That doesn’t mean that we are not doing things to improve online, but that’s what makes it not feasible to do.”

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