Payday 3 Will Let You Take Hostages To Negotiate With Cops

thegamer.com:

In Payday and Payday 2, heists can go one of two ways - you sneak in, get what you came for, and sneak back out, or you charge in and fight off hordes of cops as you scramble to escape with the loot. It's usually better to play it stealthily, but Payday 3 is offering a third option - hostages.

"In Payday 3 you have stealth and then you have something that we call search," producer Andreas Häll-Penninger said (thanks, VGC). "And then you have something really interesting, which is called negotiation, so first responders arrive on the scene, and if you have hostages, you can start trading them to buy time before the cops get in, or you can save the hostages for later because you can trade them for resources."

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The phrasing that hostages will 'buy you time' seems to indicate that this isn't a get-out-of-jail-free card, only giving you a slightly longer window before things turn violent. I doubt you can pull off every heist by putting a gun to a stranger's head and telling the cops to piss off while you empty the vault. But if things start to go loud, it's an option to keep bullets from firing at least for a little while longer.

There's another way you can use hostages, which is to turn them into human shields while gunning at the cops. That's a bit grim, but if you're feeling like an inhumane monster, have at it. Odds are, hostages will die in the process, which means you lose your leverage, but at least it's better than dying yourself.

It's worth noting that if civilians die in the first two Payday games, you get a collateral damage punishment which deducts funds from your spending cash, even if you fail the heist. You can