Payday 3 developers promised an offline mode — now explain why it’s “impossible” to implement

The new entry in the franchise still requires a constant online connection.

Payday 3 launched as an online-only title, and its servers collapsed at release. As a result, many players were unable to play the game they had purchased for an extended period.

At the time there were calls for an offline mode, and Starbreeze announced one, promising it would arrive “by the end of 2024,” a deadline that ultimately passed without delivery.

The developers haven’t explicitly declared the offline mode canceled, but during a recent livestream they made it clear it won’t be available any time soon:

“I know the team had good intentions about [an offline mode] and they tried to make it happen, but I think we have to accept that it’s not feasible for what we’re aiming to achieve with this game.”

There are several reasons the offline mode appears to have been abandoned:

“First and foremost, we have a limited number of people. We want them working on the most valuable aspects of the game […] progression, core gameplay loops, and so on. More importantly, our current update model means client patches take weeks to ship. It’s technically complicated; if we find today that ‘this value is wrong,’ it will take a very long time to fix. Not because we’re slow, but because releasing a major update and such takes weeks.”

The Payday 3 team wants to move to a workflow that allows faster updates, and for that they need “the ability to make changes on the backend [server-side] so we can push updates more quickly. If we can implement changes earlier and be confident in them, it will speed everything up considerably.”

Judging by the responses, for some players who still had faith in Payday 3 this was the final straw.

Source: iXBT.games