Payday 3 Hands-On Preview: Steal Quietly…if You Can

ign.com:

The gang is back and this time they’re in New York City pulling off the most daring heists. The setting change up from Washington DC from Payday 2 is supposed to be an “enormous living breathing world” that aims to add new layers to the gameplay experience. Dallas, Hoxton, Wolf, and Chains are on the returning cast roster and the story is picking up where it left off. Our favorite heisters are coming back from retirement.

Payday 3 sticks to the classic formula of being a four player co-op shooter. You create your ideal team loadout with your friends and you can bring various weapons and gadgets into the heist with you. You can play solo and with AI teammates if you’re really a solo player but I can’t speak to how that feels since the hour I played was in a full group.

You can approach each heist with various different paths. You can choose to go quietly and stealth around and try not to get caught through the entire mission, or you can go loud and just go guns blazing from the get-go. Starbreeze promises lots of different ways around accessing locked doors and stealthing through the various new tools added to Payday 3.

In fact, there are now new heist phases: Search to go looking for you, Negotiation phase to give yourself more time, and Assault. The gameplay loop has you equipping your preferred loadouts, selecting new skills that you want to use, then entering the heist, assessing the map layout, initiating the heist however you want (stealth or loud), the getaway, then payout.

But of course, before you load into a heist, you have to perfect your gun loadout, along with the specific items and skills you want equipped. There are new skill trees for you to unlock different perks and bonuses. You have to level up to unlock