Been missing Police Clicker 2014 lately (aka PayDay 2) and that has me looking at its sequel and some of the shit I am learning is just baffling, in the "how did you make this and the previous games in the series" sort of way.

Like, okay. Let's use Payday 2 for an example. Which is maybe a little unfair because one of these has had years of development and the other is still a relatively new game when you consider that for a solid third of its life the company who owned it was on life support.

But your early jobs in PD2 are things like Jewelry Store, Bank Heist, GO Bank, Diamond Store. Designed for you to try to go loud or stay in stealth, but straightforward; get in, control the crowd, grab the goods, make a run for it.

And the game slowly ramps up to more and complex jobs. You can jump in the deep in with some of the really complex multi-day jobs like Golden Grin or Breaking Feds or Framing Frames but it's not designed for you to do that. Furthermore there are jobs between the two groups I mentioned that introduce mechanics to you gradually.

If you want to do Breaking Feds you probably did things like Shadow Raid and Car Job to get used to stealth-only heists.

MEANWHILE.

Payday 3 took several years, fifteen major we-got-patch-notes updates, and an A Realm Reborn styled management sea-change to introduce Smash & Grab Mode, which modifies two of the current heists to just be the basics - go in, control hostages, break into vaults, grab money, get to the escape van.

oh. oh no.

No Rest For The Wicked, the first heist of Payday 3, is roughly comparable to, say, World Bank Revisited, the heist Payday 2 considers to be the first hard heist and the one that Career Mode uses as the "you are 50% done with this" milestone.

No Rest For The Wicked in Stealth requires you to find keycards to open up and disable the security system and depower the security gate, then find an executive, take them hostage, make them work the retinal scanner, go back to the offices, find the manager's computer, hack it for passwords, loot the vault, disarm dye packets, and get it all back to the van.

If the heist is done loud the bank vault secures itself so you have to manage hostages and send someone out to the parking lot through waves of cops to grab thermite packets your handler is dropping via drone to burn through the floor above the gate, then do the vault including dye packets while under assault, deal with an FBI assault on the bank, and then

spread out to find switches to lower bollards so the escape van can get in.

Payday 3 basically assumed you had played through Payday 2's Career Mode, if not have been active through most of its lifespan.

It again took them like 2 years of actual updates to add a "make this newbie friendly" mode.

considering how i heard it took them months to implement an "unready" button to pre game lobbies

it seems like payday 3 was raw coming out of the oven

Yeah, the development team did an atrocious job at launch.

To the point that they basically had to do QoL updates for awhile while making more Payday 2 content to keep the studio afloat.

Coming back to this because I had a thought last night: how the fuck has Payday 3 not crossed over with Ready or Not?

Like half the PD gang's thing is knocking over people worse than them.

Have the hero cop SWAT shit going on while you have a forced stealth heist in the background.