Payday 3 will be more update friendly on the new generation of consoles. The sequel to the acclaimed co-op title will be developed on another game engine, allowing the developers to cover all platforms without working around issues on their engine.
Payday 3 was announced back in 2021, and since then, a large portion of the player base that still plays Payday 2 is excited about the new sequel announcement. At one time, Payday 2 was one of the most played co-op games on Steam, and that level of interest was one of the factors that gave birth to its console port. Payday 2 Console Edition was released in August 2013, and later, Overkill Software released Payday 2 Crimewave Edition. The Crimewave Edition of the game came with lots of previously PC-exclusive features, graphical improvements, frame rate, and content, offering console players a more up-to-date version of the game.
A while ago, an AMA was held on the official Payday The Heist subreddit. On said post, players got to ask some interesting questions about the upcoming title, and a couple of them asked the developers about how they will handle the console port of the game. According to a user that commented on the post, the reason why the console version of the game is not as updated as the PC one is the fact that the Diesel Engine content can not be ported to consoles, so the developers have to do everything from scratch.
If this is true, then Payday 2’s developers had their hands full with porting. Making all the assets twice just to bring them to the console version of the game had to be an exhausting and difficult task to do when developing new updates and DLCs.
Luckily, Payday 3 will be developed on Unreal Engine, so in theory, porting content from the PC version of the game to the console should be a lot easier. Some players are skeptical about this, but there is still a lot of time until the game releases.
Currently, Payday 2 has around 30 thousand players on its servers, more than what many AAA titles have a month or two after their releases, so we can at least assume that there are a large number of players still interested in this franchise.
Payday 3 is set to be released in 2023.
