Payday 3 promised players an offline mode months ago, now it's "not feasible"

Oh, Payday 3 - for every positive step forward and well-received change, there always seems to be something pegging it back. The co-op game has delivered some great content since it launched all the way back in 2023, but Starbreeze has struggled to get the bones of the game in a satisfactory, stable state. The developer, fresh off the back of canceling its upcoming Dungeons and Dragons game, now wants to push more resources into the Payday franchise, and that hopefully means faster and better improvements for Payday 3. However, general manager Jonas Skantz has delivered some disappointing news for those that have been waiting for Payday 3's promised offline mode.

While I can't speak to how it's doing on consoles, one look at the Steam player stats for Payday 2 and Payday 3 shows a pretty alarming trend - one that's been consistent for almost all of the newer game's life. Payday 2 commands daily player count peaks of more than 30,000, while Payday 3's is roughly ten times less than that. It's brutal, but Starbreeze continues to try and turn things around for its latest entry in the series.

In February 2024, Operation Medic Bag was revealed - a roadmap of changes that would be gradually rolled out to improve the overall health of the game. An offline mode was one of the features pledged as part of Operation Medic Bag, but roughly 20 months later, it hasn't materialized. Now, Starbreeze is shelving its plans for an offline mode.

"I know that the team had good intentions with that [offline mode], definitely," Skantz says during a recent livestream. "And they have been trying to kind of make it happen, but I think we have to face reality that it is not feasible for where we are going with the game.

"So, first of all, we have a finite amount of people. We want to make sure that they work on the most valuable things for the game. And these are the things that we talk about - progression, core loops, and so on. But more importantly, we today have an update model where it takes us weeks to get a client update out." He goes on to say that an offline mode doesn't marry up with the goal of trying to get updates out more speedily, which can only be achieved if players are hooked up to online services.

While Skantz doesn't explicitly say that offline mode has been totally canceled, it seems that it's at least been put on the shelf to revisit much later down the line.

The vibe from players is a general sense of 'disappointed, but not surprised.' The lack of progress on offline mode always suggested that it was a very low priority, but now it seems extremely unlikely to materialize. It's frustrating given that Payday 2 has support for offline play, but that's also a far more established game where the core experience is in a much healthier state. While work continues on actually improving what's under Payday 3's hood - including an engine upgrade, according to Skantz - an offline mode sadly presents a major distraction.

Hopefully, as the improvements keep on coming for Payday 3, we'll see it one day get to a similar level as its predecessor and some of the other top co-op multiplayer games around. When that day comes, maybe then Starbreeze will put an offline mode back on the menu. Until then, here are some other great crime games to try out.

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