Payday 3 has a rival heist game, and it’s an inside job

pcgamesn.com:

Payday 3 is shaping up to be another fantastic heist game in the mold set by the series, but there’s a new challenger in the wings – and it’s somewhat of an inside job. At Gamescom 2023, PCGamesN spoke to former Payday and Payday 2 leads Ulf Andersson and Simon Viklund about the upcoming co-op game they’re working on with their new studio, GTFO developer 10 Chambers Collective.

Both Andersson and Viklund worked on Payday: The Heist and Payday 2 – Andersson as its lead designer, Viklund as its composer. They’re now acting as game director and narrative director respectively on a new project that looks to learn from what the pair achieved with the Payday series, but aims to expand on areas where that game is naturally limited.

“I don’t want to s**t on them – I thoroughly want them to succeed. For us, it’s more like a step to doing the next game.” With ten years having passed since the launch of Payday 2, Andersson notes that his sensibilities and priorities have changed. Part of that is creating a more interesting pacing. “Payday builds up and just stays on that high note,” he remarks, explaining that it was tough to ramp down once things had kicked off.

Viklund expands on this idea further: “If you’re starting in stealth [in Payday] and you get found out, it just stays full-on combat, basically, all the way through until you either fail the heist, or you succeed.” 10 Chambers’ GTFO, by comparison, has a much more stop-start structure, where spikes of action punctuate the more quiet, suspenseful stealth sections.

“It’s an exhausting game to play in that way – but we learned a lot from doing what we set out to do. So the new game is sort of doing a similar thing, but in a different way, you could say, for a slightly