The new installment of the franchise will continue to require an internet connection.
Payday 3 turned out to be tied to online play, and the servers crashed at launch. As a result, for a long time, users simply couldn't play the game they had purchased.
Then there were calls to make an offline mode for Payday 3, and Starbreeze announced it, but the promised launch "by the end of 2024" never happened.
They don't directly say that the offline mode is canceled, but during a recent stream, they made it clear that it definitely won't be available in the near future:
"I know that the team had good intentions when it came to [offline mode] and they were trying to bring it to life, but I think we'll have to admit that it's unfeasible for what we're aiming for with this game."
There are several reasons for "canceling" the Payday 3 offline mode:
"First of all, we have a limited number of people. We want them to work on the most valuable things for the game [...] progression, core gameplay loops, and so on. But more importantly, today we have an update model where it takes weeks to release a client update. It's a bit technically complex; it means that if we find out today that "this value is incorrect", it will take us a very long time to fix it. It's not because we're slow, but simply because updating the core part, etc., takes weeks."
The authors of Payday 3 want to move to a model that will guarantee fast updates, and for this, "...we need the ability to make changes on the backend [server side] to release new versions faster. If we can implement changes earlier and be confident in their ability, it will significantly speed up our work."
Judging by reviews, for some who still believed in Payday 3, this became the "final straw."
