Starbreeze Studios has explained why Payday 3 hasn't had any updates, saying a "critical error in our backend" was causing the issues.
Lead producer Andreas Häll-Penninger opened the first-ever Payday 3 'Dev Update' video by "addressing the elephant in the room", acknowledging the game's rocky launch and lack of updates since it launched in September (via PC Gamer).
"A lot of you want to know what this happened," Häll-Penninger began, "and what we've done to make sure we don't end up in this situation again. To make a long, complicated and technical story short, we found a critical error in our backend update pipeline just after the game went live.
"As a result of this, there was a significant risk that any update we made could affect the player's saves and progression."
"We had to ensure that the test environment functioned as intended before we could proceed with publishing the update," he continued. "We have no reason to want to delay updates for this long. It was frustrating for both of us and you, the players, that the launch went the way it did."
The developer ended by saying it has taken the necessary steps to ensure that any future updates aren't affected and cause more problems than they fix.
In terms of the future, the Dev Update video confirmed that Payday 3's first free content update will arrive soon. The update will feature two legacy heists from Payday 2 - Cook-off and Murky Station.
Due to Payday 3 having different mechanics from the previous game, some changes to the original heists had to be made. However, Starbreeze says that the heists will feel true to the originals, while also featuring some brand-new music.
The game will also see the return of Locke as a mission coordinator as well as changes to the challenge system including an "Infamy point reward" for each completed heist.
Update 1.01 was finally released earlier this month after a few delays and addressed a ton of problems from which the game was suffering. The update included a large number of fixes, along with changes to Heists specifically, which made cooperative play a less disruptive experience.
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