PAYDAY 3: Blog Update #45 – New Skill System Preview

Hello Heisters,

We’ve come out of a warm summer into the cold clutches of autumn and are already hard at work making PAYDAY bigger, better, and more badass. To begin with; happy anniversary PAYDAY 3! We have some events planned for the next few days, so please join us for that!

And we just have to highlight the reception of Delivery Charge; we’re overwhelmed by the positive reception of the heist, thank you! We’ve been talking a lot about improvements, and we’re overjoyed by finally getting the chance to put one of those improvements in front of you. This is the first of many amazing changes coming to the world of heisting, such as…

Skills! We figure it’s high time to start showing off the new skill system, seeing as how it’s currently in testing. Woah, we know — exciting! And we do think it’s exciting, the current system has received a lot of… mixed(?) feedback, making it clear we need to change something.

The new skill system, as you’ll be able to tell, will bring a lot more potential power to the player. Which will require us to rebalance or adjust many other aspects of the game. We’re not quite ready to go into that yet though, so let’s focus on the skills for now.

To begin with, we’re doing away with the Edge/Grit/Rush buff system, it was confusing players early on, and didn’t provide the dynamic gameplay we’d originally hoped for. So gone, poof, dead.

We’re showing you things fairly early in this case, as the big disclaimer said. The release version of this won’t have time to be adjusted all that much. We will build on this feature in the future however, so please give us feedback.

Instead we bring back the classic skill tree, six skill categories with 3 skill trees in each. There will be a lot of skills, 126 (+aced versions) to be exact. Since they are grouped in categories and playstyle, we hope they’ll be easier to get into compared to the old system, despite how many there are.

The trees will be… tree shaped… and have an evolving skill at their start. That base skill will level up based on how many points total you put in the tree total, making it so that investing in one particular tree pays off. Every skill is ace:able, meaning you can select the skill one for the base version, or twice for an additional skill point but with a stronger effect.

We’re showing this off mid-testing, so exact skill point costs, and whether or not there will be any cost scaling, is still under heated debate.

Chances are you’ve played a game using a skill tree at some point in your gaming life. What you probably haven’t done a lot though, is going sideways within the skill group — “huh” I hear you ask. Slow your roll, we’ll explain it.

Using the soldier category as an example, it has the Juggernaut, Commando and Grenadier trees covering armor, LMG/assault rifles and frag grenades respectively. If you invest all the way up the Juggernaut tree, you’ll be able to pick any of the Commando or Grenadier skills. The goal of this system is to offer you flexibility, while not trivializing points investments across skill categories too much.

We believe this new system will make it much easier to keep track of what benefits come from what skill points, and you’ll feel a much more noticeable difference when you re-spec. Each build should feel more specialized and capable, giving you a stronger feeling of being good at what you built into.

We believe the new skill system will be much better at allowing you the freedom of creating varied and exciting builds. We know this feature will require adjustments in the future, so don’t be shy with feedback now or when you get your hands on it.

We’ll host a stream on October 2nd where we introduce Jonas, the new PAYDAY General Manager and speak about PAYDAY and the future. Join us to stay current on all things PAYDAY!

We’re assuming most people stopped reading at the skill table, so let’s just half-ass the outro. Love you, thanks for all the support for Delivery Charge, hope you’re excited for the new skill system and that it scratches that “skill build itch”, if not; let us know.

View a preview of the Skills on the official PAYDAY Website