"we are confident in being able to continue delivering amounts of value to our players with a significantly lower level of investment"

Yeah, right.
And to think the past month I thought Payday 3 was going places... what a shame.
Starbreeze finally changed the UI, added Crime.net, had some cool new heists, and had begun to build back the community they burned at launch. Now, they are removing most of Payday 3's team to work on a project nobody cares about.
As somebody who bought Payday 3 at launch, I've seen how far this game has come. Seeing the game grow and improve has been agonizingly slow to watch, but rewarding. Finally, we have a launch-day level product. A game worth playing.

But of course, corporate greed strikes again.
Screw you, Starbreeze. Even if you walk this back, you won't do it because you care. You'll do it to save your bacon.
Unfortunately for you, your name is mud in this community.

They spent a year fixing the game just to kill it

Even to my friends I kept saying that this game just needs time, it needs more care and it will be fun, that it would be enjoyable. Now with the announcements of decreased support for the game the last bit of my hope is gone. This is a a game for no one. A COOP game with no in lobby chat (after a year I might add). The updates were slow and simply too little little, too late to save this frankenstein of random ideas that simply carried the name Payday. But it's far from Payday: The Heist OR Payday 2. It tries to combine elements of both while adding pointless things on top. How did we go from the insane variety in Payday 2's skill system that made every new player scratch their heads because so many terms were made from the posibilities. To only having like 2 choices now. Not to mention how absolutely boring and grindy it is to level up now. The rewards are being spaced out, while understandable, atleast making the earlier levels quicker to level up FROM would be nice. Payday 2 did this well, earlier levels were pretty fast to get out of, and it slowed down as you progressed. Payday 3 however has you grind for each and every single level. And when you have 3 levels of no unlocks, that means you will waste 3 hours getting very little in return (money means nothing if all is locked).

To give credit where it's due. Stealth is a big improvement and alot of love was visibly put into it, being able to do objectives while still in casing mode is a gamechanger, allowing one friend to mask up and other 3 to potentially scout ahead without issue. The soundtracks in stealth now have stages, the closer you are to the end, the more instruments get added in, making you truly feel badass as you walk out of there, unnoticed.

My late teens were defined by playing Payday: The Heist and Payday 2 extensively with several friend groups. Despite Payday 2's bugs (my folder has a gigabyte of crash logs), it still provided insane amounts of fun. It had it's moments of frustration yes, but the devs added so much content that you could not possibly get bored. Plus, atleast it actually worked when you tried to join a game and did not take 10 minutes on a brand new SSD (I modded Payday 2 to hell and back and it still had better performance than base Payday 3). But let's put that aside, after 1 year in, all we got for this game was overpriced DLC that added power creep weapons (some with terrible animations I might add, who let the intern cook ) and tailor packs that look pretty disproportional and awkward on the heisters (looking at you hoxton breakout tailor pack).

Despite my incredible nostalgia for the series, I cannot recommend this game for anyone. Even with heavy sale which I took advantage of, it is simply a game that tries to appease everyone, and in doing so, appeases no one. Not the newcomers, not the content creators who were sponsored to play it, but most importantly, not it's loyal fans who stood by it since the beginning of the series.

Unfinished. Broken. Abandoned.

That's Payday 3 for you.