It ain’t easy…
Recently, there was a minor difficulty tweak for Payday 2 which has many players a bit perplexed….
Overkill recently changed Normal difficulty to be even more… “normal-er”… one question is raised from this oddity, why not just rename it to “easy” mode?
“Normal” mode isn’t exactly normal. In fact, one could barely even call it “easy.” In addition… no one really plays it. Can you blame them?
To understand what’s going on here, we have to make a bit of a harsh assessment: the “new” developers of Overkill don’t exactly know what they are building off of. They do not know Payday’s history and what it started as. You see, Payday 2 was initially marketed as a considerably challenging game…
During these days, there were no silly one-man-armies. It was a team effort. Unfortunately, time passed, developers left, and new visions were made. They tried mass appealing to – Allah forgive me for uttering this word – the “normies”, and things had to be dumbed down consequently. This trend has become the norm in the modern gaming theatre for some time now, but let’s save that subject for another post.
Point is: Overkill doesn’t really know what they are doing with Payday 2 at this stage. I want to zero-in on difficulty in particular, because it’s the most demonstrable testament to how... clusterfucked the gameplay has become.
More Weapons, More Problems
Many games typically have around four difficulty levels, because that's typically all they need. There is easy, for beginners. Medium, for casual play. Hard, for those who want some challenge. Very hard, for experts.
Payday is a special case. It started with the "normal" because "normal" was something that newcomers would have to deal with, whether they liked it or not. From the beginning, it wasn't as easy as the developers intended. Has this affected Payday's popularity? Of course not.
But as time passed, Overkill couldn’t contain themselves. More normies meant more meaner weapons; bigger, tougher, downright ludicrous. Then they realized the game got a hell of a lot more easier when you could just mow down squads with RPGs and miniguns. What was the antidote? More difficulties.
More always means better, right⸮ It applied with enemies, it applied with weapons, it applied with characters, surely it applies with difficulty as well. Make them do more damage. Give them more health. More, more, more. What could possibly go wrong⸮
Yeah...
One reddit comment put it best…
They don't know what balancing is. That's not even up for debate. The main reason we've had so many rebalances is because they've fucked up every time. New DLCs added overpowered weapons which lead to more weapon buffs, which lead to new difficulties being introduced, then skills/perk decks rebalance, an then even more weapon buffs. It's an endless cycle.
The Narrowing Meta
(A Fate Worse Than Death… Sentence)
In addition to “normal” being… not the norm, we also have the Death Sentence schtick. At a time when new difficulties were still being carefully considered, they usually shipped with pleasant surprises. Higher difficulties meant more obstacles to overcome. Shortcuts would be closed off, safes were tougher to crack open, and there’d be more ways for the alarm to go off on unwary players.
Then Death Sentence showed up. The one difficulty to supposedly rule them all… at least, for the so-called “experts”.
I put “expert” in quotes since it’s really an exaggeration. You aren’t “expert” at a game if all you’ve mastered is one tactic, but the highest difficulty tries to mold players into believing the opposite. They are taught that a very one-dimensional meta is the way to go. Its bogus.
My own mod, “Snap's Mod”, is a testament to this flaw. It utilized much more than just changing damage around, and the so-called “experts” hate it because of this. Watch as famous YouTuber, Cloud Dasher reveals a pathetic display as he ragequits my game over a Minigun Dozer! But it isn’t just him that has this tantrum. I experience it every day, numerous times in my hosted games. High level players just can’t take the heat, because they aren’t high level players. They can't adapt. The supposed "highest difficulties" don't prepare them for such. They use a build that's only been designed for one thing, not EVERY thing.
If the system were anywhere close to intelligent, they'd still be in the lowest ranks.
In Conclusion…
The difficulties are fundamentally flawed in the sense that they don’t truly test the skill of the players. They instead seek to test the skill of the designers and programmers, and it’s becoming apparent to us that they are the ones losing the game.
Here’s hoping the management of Payday’s current husk, if there even is one, is putting their focus on Payday 3. Equally, here’s hoping Payday 3, assuming it revitalizes the zeitgeist of the series and doesn’t keep on with its conspirital tomfoolery, sustains its earnestness. Last but certainly not least, here’s hoping “normal” gets renamed to “easy”, and they cast some acuity into these currently senseless difficulties.
