Starbreeze Studios CEO Tobias Sjogren had to issue an apology on Friday over the launch of “Payday 3” this week following the nearly disastrous launch of the new entry in the long-running co-op bank robbery series.
Unlike its predecessor, the new title requires players to always be online – something that likely impacted the game’s first-week launch woes which saw server crashes and slow matchmaking. In a statement released on Twitter just after launch day, he says:
“We are so sorry that the infrastructure didn’t hold up as expected, and although it’s impossible to prepare for every scenario – we should be able to do better. We work tirelessly until we have restored all services and our players can get back to heisting again without issues!”
The game underwent its ‘early access’ period on Monday, September 18th but didn’t begin until its full release until Thursday, September 21st on PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox. In the latter case, the multiplayer heist sim also hit Game Pass.
Xbox players reportedly faced unstable servers and crashes, PC players complained the game was stuck in ‘searching’ move trying to find a match, and PS5 players reportedly began the week with an apparent wrong build of the game.
The outages have increased the push for companies to move away from always-online requirements, and an offline mod for the game is apparently already in the works.
Though the problems are already mostly resolved, reaction has been swift with the game clocking up nearly 19,000 negative reviews on Steam (compared to nearly 10,000 positive) and a mere 1.9/10 user reviews on Metacritic.
Source: Kotaku
