Payday 2

[Nonentity]

Didn't see a thread for this. The beta came out for people who purchased the 50 dollar version of the game.

Sequel to Payday: The Heist (quick primer if you haven't played it - it's Left 4 Dead, but you're criminals fighting against police forces to rob banks and steal drugs and all sorts of fun crime movie scenarios) - this game is better in lots of ways. Shooting feels significantly better, the progression mechanics are more interesting (discreet skill trees to spend points in), mask crafting, and all sorts of fun stuff. The mission diversity and randomness is great this time, they have some good rare events that just kind of happen sometimes to make the missions not feel completely static.

I spent many hours in it this weekend and I could not be more pleased.

Also, the webseries is DELIGHTFULLY corny.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwJ0tL8Fi-E

[Mrbloodworth]

The first mission in The original was simply the best. The others, not so much.

Are the missions more like the first heist/bank robbing in the original, and how consistent is the fun across missions?

[Fabricated]

I thought Heat Street was pretty great if not really hard. The Green Bridge was kinda cool too but also stupidly hard.

[Nonentity]

The first mission in The original was simply the best. The others, not so much.

Are the missions more like the first heist/bank robbing in the original, and how consistent is the fun across missions?

The difficulty has a much better curve this time - there is a more gentle slope to the difficulty over all the missions, and then you can choose to play them on hard, very hard or overkill mode. The missions feel a lot more fun this time around, especially with randomized locations and potential hidden problems - the bank vault may be in a completely different part of the building, or various doors may be locked or unlocked, so you have to stay on your toes and adapt on each mission. You have a few traditional heist scenarios (medium-sized bank robbery, jewelry store, robbing 4 different storefronts on one street), and then you have multi-phase stages.

One of those is called Watchdogs, where you start off in the back of a semi with a bunch of duffel bags full of cocaine. The door gets shot off by cops, and then you're immediately in a shootout You have to get the coke off of the truck, defend it until another pickup arrives, and then get to either an escape car (the driver can get killed really easily if you can't get to him immediately) or get a helicopter (but you get less money at the end of the mission). The next day then starts as a dockside mission, where the delivery truck has been stopped by feds, and you have to shoot them up to drag the bags of coke over to a warehouse, where you're waiting for a speedboat to pick up the bags.

Another one of these is called Rats, which starts with the crew assaulting a meth lab in some shitty suburb house. The cooks get shot, so you have to defend the house from cops while attempting to cook up bags of meth. The guy on the radio can sometimes give you a bum steer, though, which causes the meth to explode, and you're forced to escape, whether you have enough bags of meth or not. That leads to a second stage where you have to either trade the bags of meth for intel on who is ratting on the drug cartel, or if you didn't get the meth, you have to try and get it before they find and burn the evidence, while also avoiding cops. Stage 3 is assaulting a bus on the freeway full of the cartel rats who are being escorted to safety by the FBI, so you hop on the bus and shoot up the rats. If you didn't get the intel from the previous stage, you don't know that the suitcases full of money are rigged with C4, which cause the bus to explode shortly after you grab the money out of the briefcases, so you have to grab the money and get out fast.

This is all in the beta, too. There's all sorts of additional depth they've added as well with the skill trees, such as being able to answer pagers if a security guard doesn't check in after you knock him out, or being able to make security guards stand down and handcuff themselves - there are videos online of people running full stealth missions where the alarms never get sounded, because they controlled the heist well enough. This isn't even the full gamut of stages planned for the final release, but it's really exciting to see what they add in the full release in just a few weeks. Some people on reddit have dug up some additional maps, such as jumping a mob wedding to steal a diamond tiara.

[schild]

Didn't even know there was a Payday 1, let alone a 2.

[Tarami]

Would this work with two players?

[tar]

If it's like the first one (and it sounds like it is) then yeah, it should be good with two. Like L4D it's a 4 person game with the AI taking over any unassigned characters.

[Tarami]

Alright, thanks, I think I will pick it up then.

[Engels]

Two players is entirely possible, but on later maps, not very adviseable. Its best to leave the two remaining slots (4 man crew always) to the public since by and large someone that you can communicate to is going to be better than the AI 'stand ins'.

I've been playing this non stop since Friday and I have to say its way cool. Right now we're trying to do the first bank heist on over kill but without any fighting. A 'stealth' robbery, where you take down the security guards and cameras and then loot the bank. Only have been able to do it once out of 560 billion tries, but its a great challenge.

[Nonentity]

You guys, this game is really good.

[MrHat]

You guys, this game is really good.

Awesome.

When's it come out of beta?

[Nonentity]

Release is within August, not sure of the specific date - so within a couple weeks.

[schild]

Why is it really good?

[rk47]

It's a Co-Op FPS like Left 4 Dead, only it's a heist-themed one.
Gotta deal with limited ammo and medkits as you make it to the evac point.
And every mission has a unique set plays to accomplish.

The iconic bank heist could've gone smoothly if the robbers can keep all the hostages under control and stuff.
One guy will drill the vault, the other will do crowd control etc.
It will escalate to SWAT teams eventually, leading to a bunch of tense firefight as you drill the vault, grab the cash and get the fuck out.

You'll need regular friends to play with however, randoms aren't much fun. I ditched it due to that.
Not gonna bother buying the 2nd one at full price.

[Kail]

Yeah, I really didn't dig the first one at all.

I didn't want to slow people down for my first playthrough, so I tried it in single player, which was frustrating as hell.  The AI is the same flavor of useless it is in L4D (they sit on your ass and occasionally spray fire ineffectually at the enemy).  Missions are something like 30 minutes long.  For SOME reason, there is no easy mode on any map past the first one.  Because I guess learning maps is for pussies, you should just start out knowing that shit.  So if you fuck up, you die, and then you get to start all the way back at the beginning of the half hour long map.  And you will die, because there are infinitely spawning waves of cops constantly chewing on your ass.  They have hitscan weapons and will blanket the area in fire so there's no meaningful way to avoid damage except to stand behind a wall or something staring at bricks waiting for the health bar you can't see to fill back up.

I like the idea of the game, but it was just such a chore to play.  You're just shooting at wave after wave of cops or gangsters or whatever with no variation.  I guess there was some mechanic with hostages or something, but the game teaches you nothing about it (there's no tutorial AFAIK), you only have a limited number of handcuffs, and I couldn't figure out how to get them to come with you, so you've got to leave them behind for the cops to untie anyway, so I didn't see much impact on the gameplay.

[Nonentity]

Yeah, I really didn't dig the first one at all.

I didn't want to slow people down for my first playthrough, so I tried it in single player, which was frustrating as hell.  The AI is the same flavor of useless it is in L4D (they sit on your ass and occasionally spray fire ineffectually at the enemy).  Missions are something like 30 minutes long.  For SOME reason, there is no easy mode on any map past the first one.  Because I guess learning maps is for pussies, you should just start out knowing that shit.  So if you fuck up, you die, and then you get to start all the way back at the beginning of the half hour long map.  And you will die, because there are infinitely spawning waves of cops constantly chewing on your ass.  They have hitscan weapons and will blanket the area in fire so there's no meaningful way to avoid damage except to stand behind a wall or something staring at bricks waiting for the health bar you can't see to fill back up.

I like the idea of the game, but it was just such a chore to play.  You're just shooting at wave after wave of cops or gangsters or whatever with no variation.  I guess there was some mechanic with hostages or something, but the game teaches you nothing about it (there's no tutorial AFAIK), you only have a limited number of handcuffs, and I couldn't figure out how to get them to come with you, so you've got to leave them behind for the cops to untie anyway, so I didn't see much impact on the gameplay.

The second game is considerably better and addresses a lot of those issues. The scaling difficulties they added have a much better curve, and if you get good enough, there is a way to 'full stealth' a lot of missions so alarms never get tripped and cops never show up. That's a new feature, and is AWESOME when you pull it off. It involves crowd control (making sure both civilians and random pedestrians on the street don't call the caps), silence (not using unsilenced weapons or sticking to melee attacks), strategic takedown of security guards (if you takedown a security guard, you have to answer his pager or an alarm goes off - alternatively, you can get a skill to intimidate the security guards into handcuffing themselves), avoiding security cameras (often there is an actual room with a person watching the cameras and if you can get to him, you can safely ignore security cameras), and so on.

But yes, it's basically the co-op element of Left 4 Dead, but every story beat that happens on a given heist leads to gameplay variations - like whoops, you didn't have the meth to trade to the drug dealers because you fucked up, now you have to try and find the evidence before they burn it. Oh shit, your evidence got burned, now you don't know the code to disarm the C4 planted in the money on the bus.

Civilians are the best and the worst. They're great assets when you can tie them up (one particular easy to grab low-tier skill gives you considerable more cable ties) and you have to watch out for them in firefights. Cops fight more cautiously when civilians are around. After they know that all the civilians have been rescued, they get a lot more aggressive. You can also trade a tied-up civilian to free one of your teammates that is in custody so they don't have to wait for the long respawn timer.

[Nonentity]

Why is it really good?

It's a challenging and well-made co-op versus AI first-person heist simulator where you get to play a bank robber, with light RPG elements. I happen to like the concept of that, and it nails it pretty good.

If you don't like shooters or Left 4 Dead this isn't going to change your mind or anything, but the setting is refreshing.

[Fabricated]

The first one was a more strict L4D with cops, and it had an unlock system that kinda took fuckin forever to get everything in. Also the cops were pretty unerringly accurate and came in gigantic swarms on some maps. Civvies also thought bullets were awesome so they liked running into your line of fire unless you yelled at them all the time.

It had some cool stuff; the scenarios were pretty fun but were pretty much all "keep some thing working while holding off cops" in between moving from place to place, repeat. Most were takeoffs on movie heists.

The only one that really allowed for variance was the Diamond Heist which had a stealth element, and I think if you were lucky you could do that one largely stealthy.

I think you could do the bonus L4D crossover heist in Mercy Hospital stealthy?

[Mrbloodworth]

Late to the party, but if you own #1 apparently you can play the beta on steam, look in your list.. I just found this out, a day and a half before launch.  

[schpain]

Its been kinda said but payday2 really breaks away from the l4d with banks theme compared to its predecessor.

sure on some level its always going to have parts where you're holding off cops till a drill finishes, or someone blows a vault, but after spending the weekend playing with a couple of mates, it actually had a vibe closer to dues ex HR multiplayer (obviously without the augs).

the classes are more varied now and each will give you a different option (ghost can lockpick/crack safes/doors, enforcer has a buzz saw for getting past obstacles, technician uses c4, mastermind can has the power of schmooze and extra cable ties), its best to bring a variety of dudes and in this version people can mask up independantly, so one guy can get to work knocking out pesky guards and setting up the heist in the background while another dude stands in the public area monitoring and waiting to start the crowd control until the last moment.

also in payday1 they give you a silenced pistol from the off, not so much in the sequel, which means you have to work around silenced weapons for the first couple of missions which is a nice change.

[Mrbloodworth]

You can tell they have gone out of the way to round off some rough edges from the first one, and make progression more clear and add way more variety of content. My only wish now is that you could choose your next mission from within the safe house, hitting the laptop brings you out to a screen, kinda jarring.

[Mrbloodworth]

My first mask makes me happy.

[Reborne]

Does anyone know if there is a maximum level or are you about to just keep working until you've got access to every skill?

[Nonentity]

Does anyone know if there is a maximum level or are you about to just keep working until you've got access to every skill?

Level 100.

Also, on the silenced pistol comment, your starter pistol has a silencer you can buy from the start.

[Reborne]

Thank you :)

Now I need to find a character builder to see what I can do with 100 points.

[Fabricated]

This is really fun and a major improvement over the first one.

That being said it is buggy as fuck and still kinda too mean. Even normal difficulty is ridiculous sometimes with how fast you go down in a suit or base bodyarmor.

I got a nightclub run, everyone else just hung out while I went in the back by myself; I bumped into one lone guard and he noticed me. I somehow meleed him instantly after it made me mask up and it silently killed him, so stealth wasn't broken! The back room is barren, I manage to drill the manager's door open with NO ONE coming back or noticing anything, I go upstairs and silently cap the one guard and tie up the owner and his GF. I start drilling the safe and head downstairs to open the back door to get ready to scoot.

NO ONE IS IN LOS OF ME. I am behind 3 walls in a back room with no one within 100 feet of me. I accidentally hit C and swap my silenced glock for my stupid AK and my screen literally lights up with a wall of exclamation points. Everyone saw me through a wall, the cops get called, and I had to do the standard shootout. Lame. Got it done, but lame.

[Engels]

Ya, nightclub was buggy too. Still unclear how that happens. Perhaps seeing the tied up people on the floor from the other side of the 2nd floor, but I've seen stealth be broken there when it really didn't have any right to be.

[Mrbloodworth]

Every item has a Visibility rating, quite sure that has something to do with it.

[Fabricated]

Yeah, but last time I checked AKs don't have a radiant, radioactive glow that can be seen through several feet of concrete in the dark.

[Mrbloodworth]

Was there a Camera? I'm not saying something isn't possibly broken, but I'm not 100% sure myself what all the risks are. I Do know that anyone seeing someone on the ground or tied up can also trigger it, especially if an NPC is already on a phone. For instance, did you dispose of that guard body you spoke of? They can be disposed of in dumpsters.

[Fabricated]

No cameras, guard was dropped in the back corner of a back room where no one else came until I got spotted through a wall.

[Nonentity]

The internal logic of their visibility systems isn't 100%, but USUALLY there is something that breaks the stealth - it'll say once an alarm is tripped what caused it to happen.

[Mrbloodworth]

Unrelated: #3 highest game on steam, 60,000 concurrent players ( Steam/PC only. No PS3 or Xbox in that ). The Game was paid for 6 days before launch. Years worth of DLC planned, also a female character.

[Reborne]

Playing over the past couple of days has shown that only criminals care about walls.
We've seen people phase straight through them, which is really annoying when it is the bank manager than you're trying to keep track of.

Even with all the bugs though it is a lot of fun.

[Engels]

Anyone watched the web series on Steam? It is hilariously awful. Like, not on purpose awful, just awful, but in such an innocent way you can't help but still like it. The blonde FBI agent with a dress shirt so tight you could trampoline hamsters off her boob-tent is so wooden you have to wonder if they didn't just grab someone off the street for the role.