Interview: Payday 3 Features Ice-T in a Bigger Role Than You Might Expect | gamescom 2023

ign.com:

Earlier this week, we learned that Ice-T himself will be making an appearance in Payday 3, courtesy of a reveal during gamescom Opening Night Live 2023. But the extent of his involvement in the game was still a little murky…until we sat down with the Payday 3 team at gamescom to clear things up.

Below is our full, detailed Q&A with Payday 3 lead producer Andreas Häll-Penninger and global brand director Almir Listo about everything Payday 3: it’s planned Unreal 5 update, the new Ice-T heist, its $40 price, and more:

IGN: Why did you decide to launch the Unreal 5 version of Payday 3 after the launch of the game?

Andreas Häll-Penninger: I can take that. So when we started the development of Payday 3, we just had Unreal 4. Unreal 5 wasn't available, and as Unreal 5 became available, we did look into it and evaluated it. But we just saw that moving and transitioning during development would put some risk to the core experience of the project, and the most important thing for us right now is to make sure that the game is fun and it plays well. So the transition post-launch just makes sense for us from a development point of view.

We saw new footage of the new heist that is available later. Can you tell us a little bit more about this particular one?

AH-P: Yeah. So like you said, in the beta we had a bank, which…has a very classic bank robbery feel to it. It's very close to the core fantasy. This one is a little bit different, most noticeable. It has a very different setting. It's also a little bit more stealth-oriented, and it has a very interesting feature where when you steal the loot that you're after, it degrades over time. So you need to be very quick and very coordinated with your team to get it back to its container