Earlier today, Starbreeze Entertainment shared that it cancelled Project Baxter, its Dungeons & Dragons-based project that was first announced back in 2023, so it could focus more on its flagship franchise, Payday. The cancellation resulted in the studio laying off 44 developers. Also today, Starbreeze hosted an anniversary stream to celebrate the second anniversary of the launch of Payday 3, where general manager Jonas Skantz and community manager Elisabeth Elvestad kicked off the stream by confirming that the highly anticipated offline mode for Payday 3 is no longer on its way.
The live stream, which was hosted on the official Payday Twitch channel, was intended to talk about the future of Payday 3 and what’s in store for the game, which is why Elvestad started by asking Skantz the question that was on the minds of Payday fans all tuning in live, “What’s going on with offline mode for Payday 3?”
“I thought we were friends,” Skantz joked to Elvestad, before he began to give what was ultimately a very disappointing answer in the eyes of many players.
“So offline mode. Let’s talk about that. I know that the team had good intentions with that, definitely. And they have been trying to make it happen, but I think we have to face the reality that it is not feasible for where we are going with the game. I’ll explain what I mean. First of all, we have a finite amount of people. We want to ensure that they work on the most valuable things for the game; these are the things that we will 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. This is a bit technical; it means that if we discover today that, ‘hey, this value is wrong,’ it takes us a very long time to fix that. That’s not because we are slow, it’s just because updating the first-party and so on, it takes weeks.”
“So we want to move to a model where we can work with the community and make sure that we can update things fast, and to do that, we need to update things from the backend. So we need to be able to tweak the game from the backend to make sure we can get things out faster. If we can get at things more early, and have the confidence that we can change it, then that would give us much more speed. It would also bring more meaning to player feedback. That doesn’t mean that we are not doing things to improve online, but that’s what makes it not feasible to do.”
It’s a confusing message to see 44 developers cut from the studio, to turn around and say the studio doesn’t have the bandwidth to develop a previously promised offline mode. It gets even muddier shortly after Skantz and Elvestad move on to what’s coming in Payday 3, and Skatnz claims the studio is “more than doubling the team to give us the bandwidth to actually do a lot of things we’re going to talk about today.”
If you’re a player who was waiting for offline mode, you can’t really be blamed for feeling confused by all of this. Sure, the team members who were working on Project Baxter could have had completely different development skillsets, but it’s difficult to believe that the studio’s hands are tied in this case and not in others.
In fairness, Payday 3’s biggest issue isn’t the lack of an offline mode. Since its abysmal launch, it’s biggest problem has been a lacking amount of content, especially when compared to Payday 2. Starbreeze needs to give players more reasons to jump to Payday 3 instead of just playing the same heists they already know and love in Payday 2.
Perhaps one day, when Payday 3 is sunset, an offline mode will be part of that process. But that’s just speculative hope, and based on how the community has reacted to today’s stream, it’s worth wondering if anyone will be around to care about Payday 3 getting an offline mode, even if it happens.