absolutely archetypal Content Game. transformed itself many times over its lifetime, and ever for a price -- paid in both dollars and manic complexity. understanding even the basics of this game requires understanding 9 years of patch notes. expertly demonstrated the flaws in live service games while fortnite was but a twinkle in the milkman's eye

this game is a familiar home that has taken 2 thousand and change of my hours on this planet. i know how it works down to the source code level. i've run these heists far too many times. the weird movement, gunplay and interaction mechanics are just a day at the spa to me. i can't give it an impartial rating -- frankly, i can't even give it a personal one

an orkish collection of mechanics and concepts that don't really work very well as either an fps, a stealth game or a co-op game, held together by a mind-boiling variety and the greatest (dynamic!) soundtrack ever seen in a cooperative video game

Payday 2 is a polarizing game, and much has been written about its robust customization options to its relatively weak gameplay mechanics. Yet it remains a compelling, and for many, an incredibly endearing game whose appeal still resonates over eight years after it was first launched. To understand why this is, it might be interesting to delve deeper into the universe of Payday; not necessarily the storyline itself, but rather the idea of crime fantasy in general.

Crime fantasy is a particular type of crime-based game where the player is imbued with incredible personal attributes, most often great physical strength, the supernatural ability to heal, or other standard video game protagonist tropes, and freed from the arbitrary legal and social inhibitions forced upon us by society. These concepts alone are not incredibly earth-shattering, as many people enjoy video games precisely because it allows us to do things that are either physically or socially impossible in a relatively consequence free environment. But what games like Payday offer, and what I believe are these games’ most interesting components, are that they don’t just offer some one-off party into the sunset, but they build an entire life that exists outside of the bounds of society, of the socio-economic system of capitalism. These people don’t just do crimes and have fun, they are free in a way that none of us have ever experienced. The material constraints that compel capitalism’s subjects to work, the social reproduction of collectively-held value that reinforces the dominance of the system, these protagonists are affected by none of these things. In this way, they are not humans to us, they are explicitly written as Übermensch, they are quite literally gods.

But is this really all these games do? Give you special powers and set you loose? That would be fun for a while, certainly, but likely not enough to generate such success. Payday and others do more than simply hand you a gun and let you go wild, and the answer lies not necessarily in the game, but in its context.

Three of the genre’s games (which also happen to be some of the most successful video games of all time) were released within weeks of each other. Payday 2, GTA V and Saints Row IV were all released in August and September of 2013. Development of these games and their predecessors of course varied, but all were absolutely colored by the financial collapse of 2008 and 09. To be incredibly brief, this crisis shook the faith of many in not just politics, but the very logic underpinning the social-economic engine of capitalism: permanent and unrestrained growth. The cultural artifacts produced during this time reflect that general distrust towards institutions, towards politicians whose words are powerless in the face of terminal decline and worsening exogenous shocks, towards society, towards anyone who lives in society, towards everything. The soaring rhetoric of Obama was bitter in the mouths of those who lost everything yet witnessed only finance capital see a cent in government money, and the religious devotion to decades old failed politics espoused by his opposition meant that most had nowhere to go. If you’re a game developer, what better way to express your frustration with the system, than to build your own system?

This is, in my view, what makes games like Payday 2 so compelling. In a Gramscian sense, they create their own counter-hegemony. A group, a collection of individuals who together form an entirely separate way of life that exists completely outside the strictures of capitalism. An alternative socio-economic system where one can not only be self-sufficient materially, but also make intimate social bonds strengthened by their position outside of capitalism and their collective persecution. That sense of freedom mentioned before is not derived from having super-powers or ignoring others in the pursuit of your own pleasure, but rather from truly living in a community-wide family whose membership is granted unconditionally and never questioned. For actively building towards something that is materially and spiritually meaningful in a way that is nearly impossible to achieve under capitalism, where even the most well-intentioned still need money to survive. You don’t need that system anymore, you have the Payday gang, you have the Saints, you have an entire support network and sidekicks and proverbial eyes in the sky and a connection to a deep underground network of support who would die for you just as you would for them.

Of course, like any crime game or show or movie, this is a fantasy. Not just because the gratuitous amount of merciless violence would obviously rip out any vestige of humanity within a person (these games often portray even civilians as an other who at best are passively supporting the evil system, and therefore may be killed, though often with minor penalties. This could be the topic of a different analysis connecting this with conceptualizations of the other and fascism) but on a more abstract level, this counter-hegemony is nothing more than a façade. It abrogates capitalism’s legal, financial and social code only to replace it with a system whose only difference is its methodology. The extraction, the alienation, the exploitation, the human blood and misery that contributes to the creation of such wealth to be stolen, still exists. The levers of capital are all still fully functioning and remain unchallenged in strength, the only difference is now there is a small portion of it syphoned off into this dream of self-sufficiency. Self-sufficiency that is just as predicated on the backbreaking labor of those deemed as lesser by the same determiners as under capitalism: place of birth, relative familial wealth, random acts of genetic and life event distribution, etc. It is in this way dreams of a de-coupled self-sufficient society separate from capitalism, indeed even those whose origins arise on the left, break down. For as long as capitalism exists and remains hegemonic, it cannot be ignored and it will never provide relief. Even games that may, on the surface, seem revolutionary in their rhetoric and action such as Payday 2, are ultimately nothing more than understandable, but futile, attempt at fixing capitalism.

Payday 2 is a fun game. It doesn’t have the best graphics or the tightest gunplay, which is obviously a significant part of the game, but it’s a blast to play with friends and it does its job very well. For that, it deserves no less than four stars.

Ten years ago, first-person heisting perfection on a crappy racing game engine was achieved. Payday 2 is one of those games you either play once and never really give a go again, or you have hundreds upon thousands of hours in it. I'm the latter. I first played this game in August 2013 when I saw the beta go up, and I gave it a try and absolutely loved it while I was waiting for GTA 5 to drop, I played the crap out of it but sadly after that didn't really manage to find a copy of it, so I stopped until in October they dropped a demo for it, and I downloaded that and ATE. IT. UP.

I must have at least 100 hours in that demo alone. It only featured two out of the tens of heists, less weapons and customization but I did not care, I played that demo and grinded the game so damn much. I finally bought the game early in 2014 and played along watching it grow into something bigger and bigger with each year that passes. I played up until 2015 then stopped, then started again in 2018 on PS4, then stopped then started again in 2022 on PC, I must have 1000+ hours on it by now.

Payday 2 grew from a simple first shooter where you rob banks and jewelry stores into a batshit insane narrative about ancient aliens species, demigods controlling the world, overthrowing governments and reincarnating your dead friend as the president of the United States, and it was a once in a lifetime experience seeing it develop before our own eyes.

The mechanics of the game started off rough but got better and more polished with time, the sheer amount of different ways to enjoy the game is amazing, from dual-wielding leech builds, to dodge builds and so much more, what I love about the weapons as well is that they are all entirely customizable meaning you can make any gun you like cater to your level and build, new guns that come out don't make the old ones obsolete, they just give you more ways to play. That, along with the heists themselves and all the enemy types and difficulties, and the heists becoming more and more huge in spectacle to the point that you go from robbing small banks and jewelry stores to robbing Scarface's Mansion, a military jet, a Russian human experiment lab, a Lovecraftian mansion, and the damn White House itself was just amazing to witness in real time.

The game has had its rocky moments, from the Crimefest 2015 fiasco to the June 2023 Epic Games Store release disaster, but through it all, the team we all love did their best, I mean c'mon how can ya not like the game when you're robbing the damn WHITE HOUSE while the leader of your crew who's dying but pulling himself together to make sure he sees you through to the end of the heist, also sings you THIS masterpiece. It's a love story really. and now with Payday 3 out, I can't help but feel a little sentimental about the past and sad that Payday 2 is no longer getting any updates, of course I'll still be playing it for years to come alongside the sequel but y'know how it is. On behalf the entire Payday community, thank you to everyone who worked on this game so hard.

Firstly to the entire team of Overkill who developed the game on a terrible engine with a low budget in 2013 and transformed it into a legendary generation defining franchise, Almir Listo, our lord and savior who is the reason so many of us are still here, Ulf Andersson who played one of my favorite characters in Wolf and worked on the game for a long time,

Simon Viklund, our watcher, Bain, and the creator of one of my favorite soundtracks in any media ever. Your talent is beyond what words can describe, and I wish you only the best and wherever you go next. Gustavo Coutinho, who took the helm and made even more absolutely amazing music and continues to do so,

Eric Etebari and Simon Kerr, who gave us our beloved medic bag loving protagonist in Dallas, and all the amazing actors who gave us so many more iconic characters, Damion Poitier, Josh Lenn and Pete Gold, Derek Ray, Giancarlo Esposito, Dash Mihok, Sharlto Copley, Mira Furlan, Ilia Volok, Ian Russell and many, many more. This isn't nearly enough to describe how much I love this game and hold it near and dear to my heart but It'll do. Thank you all for making Payday 2 and giving me the time of my life with it. To the Greatest Heist of All!

It's PAYDAY fellas

It's easy to forget what Steam was like ten years ago, even if you were there. Steam was still using the Greenlight program at this point, requiring that indie developers beg the Steam community for votes to improve their chances of being manually approved by Valve for sale on the platform. While the selection would start improving rapidly in the next couple years, I bring this up because I think Payday 1 benefited tremendously from the platform's limited catalog. If you were shopping for something like Payday, there wasn't anything else on Steam that would scratch that itch. It's easy to feel like Payday: The Heist got much more attention in 2011 than it would today, given that it's essentially a bunch of heist movie references stapled onto Left 4 Dead. Hell, one of the most popular levels from the original game is a Left 4 Dead level.

The sequel attempts to become more than that, to be its own game and improve upon the parts of Payday 1 that resonated the most with players. I started a job at a local grocery store the day before Payday 2 released, and I bought it immediately after they handed me a paycheck - and I was happy! The small selection of launch heists felt a little too "safe", but everything else was a massive improvement when it came to creating a personal connection with the game. Customize your own masks, your guns, the skills you want to take (separate from the heister you picked!) and play some heists in actual, real stealth.

This is not the game Payday 2 is today.

Ten years of updates has rendered the game horrifically bloated, each update adding new heists, heisters, masks, gameplay systems, cosmetic systems, progession systems, currencies, balance changes, enemy types, ammo types, melee weapons, weapon mods, grenades, and an arsenal of guns so large that I can't really think of anything outside of H3VR that beats it. The only way you can keep up is by being an early adopter, because the onboarding process for Payday 2 nowadays mostly relies on having a friend that will drag you through 2-5 hours of heisting before you start to understand how all the moving pieces fit together.

Many of the community's running jokes about the game's more unwieldy elements have a basis in reality as well. Yes, it "runs on a racing game engine" in the same way that DotA 2 can trace its lineage to Quake's engine. Yes, it's a "bag-throwing/drill-repair simulator". Overkill Software realized that the most popular heists in Payday 1 asked players to manage some other resource and introduced bags of loot that the cops can reclaim from inattentive players. This loop has been repeated in basically every mission since Payday 2's release, and while I think you could criticize this for being a lazy way to add gameplay to missions that should be radically different, in my experience the players of Payday 2 tend to feel like they haven't really done a mission if they're not managing some kind of tangible loot.

If you can sift through all the nonsense, though, the game has its allure. Payday 2's gameplay - in its current form - is about putting together a "build" with skills, weapons, and perk decks that synergize so you can clear some of the more sadistic content in the game. However, if you're playing on difficulties for people that leave the house, the possibilities open up a lot more and the game's variety really shines. Run a melee build, run a "summoner" build that uses turrets and converted cops to fight for you, sprint around the level at light speed using a shotgun to light everyone on fire. It's all fine, but it really takes off when you're playing this with a friend or three and all of you are engaging with these systems at the same time. Sprinting over to a teammate to revive them with a shout, keeping a lookout while they answer a guard's pager to maintain stealth - while some games are better at actively encouraging teamwork, each mission completed in Payday 2 feels like a bonding exercise through the little ways you're constantly looking out for each other.

So sure, you could play Payday 2 with bots, but even if they improved the lackluster AI you'd find that the game loses a lot of its magic. The game is at its worst when it's not doing anything to encourage collaboration (this is where that "drill repair simulator" joke comes from), but the reason it's still in Steam's Top 25 by concurrent players is because the rest of the game gets it right. Despite all the updates and the bloat, the allure of Payday 2 remains the same since its release: It retains the best parts of Left 4 Dead as a game bundled with a social space, letting you shoot the shit with friends or strangers in a purely cooperative environment, wordlessly providing assistance in the form of a trigger pull as you remove the helmets from an army of cops.

It's raining. Storming. I hear the murmur of the rich elite. I can smell their perfume.

I’ve got my earpiece in. Auction house in sight.

I'm the case-man. My crew is backup.

Circling to the left of the house, unnoticed. There is a metal detector in front, after all.

An inside man has placed a ladder here. I can get onto the second floor without being spotted.

Mask up.

Inside the auction, I need to disable the alarms.

There are two boxes. I turn the corner and wait for the patrolling security to pass.

Snuck into the first room. Immediate bingo, I get to hacking. Everything is going smoothly.

Second box, I get greedy and try to get this over with. A guard is alerted to my presence.

My gun is silenced.

I answer his radio. "Nothing wrong here, control."

The vault is at the bottom floor. Not wanting to risk it, one of my gang will have to sneak in.

The loud sirens of panic fill the air as I forgot to tell my crew about the metal detector.

The loud sirens of… sirens fill the air as the metal detector go off.

Within 30 seconds, 1000 fully armed swats siege the building like zombies.

It's ok, I throw a molotov at my own feet and nearly burn to death. My speed increased.

With my speed my reflexes increase, I am capable of dodging every bullet shot my way whilst running through the halls.

I pull out my heavy duty LMG. It’s silenced. Has no recoil, perfect accuracy. One shot, one kill. Just as the weapon class suggests.

My friend has been drinking alcohol and is shooting up the office with a quad rocket launcher to defend the drill. Its done. He hacks the laptop.

A third crew member is holding out near the vault to keep it secure. Of course, he convinced 2 police officers to back him up in the middle of the firefight. Invaluable allies.

A bomb squad member comes into the room. He is carrying a minigun and tears my teammate to shreds. He is bleeding out.

Luckily I’m on the floor above him. I shout through the floor that he needs to get the fuck up. He does.

A second chance, he takes out the bomb squad member.

The vault is almost open. My friend in the office comes down to help us secure the loot.

A Ninja had been hiding in the shadows, drop-kicking my friend to the floor and beating him unconscious. In a blindfire he had shot 3 innocent partygoers. It would take us at least 1 minute to get him out of custody.

Me and my crewmate hold down the vault until the police decide to regroup. This is where our invaluable police-allies come in. We trade one of them to make up for the 500 we have killed. They release our friend, he is back in the fray with all his weapons reloaded.

We bag the loot. A black tablet holding the secrets to Mayan immortality.

Signal the chopper and fight our way through 200 more swat soldiers.

We made our escape.

This game has some pretty cool highs and some LOW lows. i just want to preface this by saying that i played mostly the career mode, offline (due to my internet connection being shit), so the experience you might have online could be completely different, and probably will be.

The first thing i thought when i booted this game was "wow, this looks like shit". i thought i had the graphics on low but to my surprise the game was actually maxed out, i changed a few settings but the feeling of the game looking ugly didn't go away until about 3 missions in, i DID get used to it and honestly now i even think the game looks good, it has some really nice and shiny textures specially, but there's something like, oddly artificial about the art direction, most of that i think can be attributed by the weird "3D" filter on screen at all times, it's subtle but it's not good either, i couldn't figure out how to disable it so i just let it on and got used to it.

Starting out, this game really blows. i didn't even notice the career mode at first and just went on a random heist, only to realize that i didn't have the right equipment and that i needed to play OTHER missions to maybe unlock it, unsure if i'd even be able to complete those other missions.

At the start the difficulty also feels like it makes no sense, Normal is pitifully easy, Hard feels normal but then Very hard feels impossible, turns out you just gotta wear armor and it's all good. Sorta wish i figured that out earlier though.

i mostly didn't use the other deployables that weren't health kits, even in stealth missions (i'll get to those in a moment) i didn't find the ECM jammer very useful, although i saw people using it on gameplay, and i ended up just doing it all with a silenced pistol, even though i knew that you'd want a shotgun for better knockback, allowing you to kill silently better, the reason i couldn't get one is i couldn't figure out which one the right one was, and i didn't have enough points to spec into both knockback for my stealth and health for my loud.

moving on to stealth, it sucks, like REALLL bad, there's really not much interaction between you and the world, it feels like an obstacle course where you are restricted to very specific rules so only one main strategy that is optimal becomes realistically viable, with the whole "you can only kill like 4 guards lol" thing, and their pathetic sight. they're quite boring and when not boring they just feel unbalanced, like the one with the garett guy, where i almost completed the mission, was INSIDE the escape elevator, and he saw me from the other side of the map and ended my mission (this happened twice).

overall i can see why some people like this game, specially the speedrunners, but i can't see myself coming back to replay this ever again.

eu tenho 300 e poucas horas de jogo disso (oque ainda é pouco)

o unico problema dele sinceramente é a quantidade absurda de DLC a venda que tem, ele é um jogo muito muito bom e muito divertido

Vem logo PD3 pelo amor de deus