It took much longer than anyone expected (or reasonably thought possible), but the first "Payday 3" patch is finally here. According to developer Starbreeze, the update "adds a large number of fixes to make the heist experience smoother," and finally fixes the instability issues players have had since the game's launch in September.

The road to this point has been long and arduous: the launch of "Payday 3" was a disaster: players strongly disliked the game's progression system and, even worse, it required an online connection even for solo play, which made matchmaking a mess and a A comprehensive update scheduled for early October was postponed several times, and Starbreeze struggled to find and fix many of the problems.

The results were visible on Steam, where user ratings dropped almost immediately to "almost negative" and the number of simultaneous players was a fraction of that of "Payday 2". That situation is slowly turning around: user ratings have managed to rise to "mixed," but with only 40% of positive user reviews, it is at the absolute bottom. Still, it is progress in the right direction, and we hope that this patch will lead to a further rise.

The first patch brought a wide range of fixes and balance changes, including a number of connection-related issues: problems with social lists not filling up, problems preventing matchmaking when a former party leader leaves, and an unspecified "crash related to IP addresses." reportedly addressed by the patch. Several other crashing issues have also been fixed.

"It's been unstable for a while, but it's finally back to where it should be," wrote Starbreeze. Starbreeze writes." Hysters are robbing, citizens are screaming, and cops are flailing. If you find bugs, please keep me informed and send me suggestions."

Not surprisingly, Starbreeze writes: "...we've been getting a lot of complaints...

Naturally, some players are not happy that it took so long for the first Payday 3 patch to arrive, and there have been numerous complaints on Steam and Reddit about the unsupported issues. weapons offered in the cross promotion with Payday 2. Charms and Death Wish rewards have not yet been granted (Starbreeze says it hopes to resolve this before the next patch), and there is no word on the studio's previous thoughts about a possible offline mode: the Payday 3 FAQ says "Payday 3 is always playable We have not ruled out the possibility as a safety measure to ensure that it will always be playable," but so far no work has been started in that direction. It also appears that there are no promised changes to Payday 3's progression system.

Still, it is a step in the right direction, and within hours of the patch's release, Payday 3's concurrent player count increased. However, at least some players seem to want to know how much this patch will improve the situation. If the patch works as promised, Starbreeze will finally be taking a meaningful step toward turning its fortunes around.

The full patch notes are as follows.

In this patch, we mainly want to tackle minor fixes.

We recognize that Last Man Standing and Armor Up perform a little too well. This will be done in the next major patch. Outside of these two skills, we do not anticipate any major nerfs to skills in the next patch, but given that players are still new to the game, we will keep a close eye on the meta.

We also recognize that armor is considered the most desirable resource compared to ammo and health. While we are happy with the functionality of armor itself, we would like to add a few more ways for players to recover armor in-game. We also believe that health is under-performing right now, but that this will be gradually changed in the first year of updates, rather than in one major update.

The main focus of this update, technical. There are various fixes and changes on this list. If you find any bugs, please keep me posted.