Payday 3's First Big Patch Delayed to "Ensure Its Stability"

Since launching in September, Payday 3 has flown up the sales charts, while also leaving many fans upset at several of its shortcomings. In fact, Payday 3 recently got the dreaded "Mostly Negative" tag on Steam after users bombarded the platform angry at matchmaking and progression issues. Thankfully, the team at Starbreeze recently released a fix for matchmaking that seems to have alleviated that issue quite a bit. Today, Starbreeze was also supposed to drop a new update with more than 200 quality-of-life improvements. Unfortunately, that patch has now been delayed until mid-October so that Starbreeze can ensure Payday 3 stays stable.

In the tweet announcing the delay, Starbreeze said, "Heisters. We're extremely sorry for this, but we've chosen to delay today's planned patch to ensure its stability." It continued, "The patch needs some changes that would require us to go through console certification again. We hope to be ready to deliver this one for mid-October." 

Essentially, the team knows the patch wouldn't be able to pass cert on consoles, so to skip that process, they're dealing with it for everyone to get everything in order. The Payday 3 team also noted that this means the bonus content on PS5 "will remain unredeemable until this patch is ready." Luckily, the delay is going to be relatively short, but it is still frustrating for many fans who have been annoyed by the state in which Payday 3 launched. Hopefully, this patch gets the game into shape, making its many fans happy.

What's Coming in Payday 3's First Major Patch?

Heisters. We're extremely sorry for this, but we've chosen to delay today's planned patch to ensure its stability. The patch needs some changes that would require us to go through console certification again. We hope to be ready to deliver this one for mid-October.

— PAYDAY 3 (@PAYDAYGame) October 5, 2023

As mentioned, the first patch will include more than 200 quality-of-life improvements. Starbreeze has to confirm all of the specifics, but we do know that one of the main areas the team is targeting is the progression system. It may not be included in this update, but in a recent developer Twitch stream, lead producer Andreas Penninger said, "We have heard you, and we are working on a bunch of changes to the progression system. I can't say exactly what yet. We're working on it, then we're going to test it and verify it to make sure it's in line with how we want it to work and also based on your guys' feedback."

Past the first big update, we also know that the team is targeting a second update for late October or early November that will add "new content and new functionality" to Payday 3. It's not clear if this delay will push that update back, but we do know that a similar patch is also on the schedule for later in November, and then the "Syntax Error" DLC will ship sometime this winter. Again, that could all move around based on this latest delay, but the order will at least stay the same.

Payday 3 is out now on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC.