Payday 3 has not had a great launch. When it officially released last Thursday, the servers were unable to handle the suddenly influx of players. This rendered the game unplayable for a lot of people. But some PC-owning fans are using a mod to play Payday 3 offline.
Tobias Sjögren, CEO of developer Starbreeze Studios apologised for the game’s problems via Twitter. He stated, “We are so sorry that the infrastructure didn’t hold up as expected, and although it’s impossible to prepare for every scenario – we should be able to do better.” He went on to say that the company was working on fixing the issues. And, at the time of writing, the game is slowly getting back to its feet.
One complaint, even before the servers fell over, has been the absence of an offline mode. Such a mode was present in the previous two games and while you can play solo with bots, you need to create an online lobby first. It’s not a great look that the most upvoted Steam review simply reads “Online only was a huge mistake.”
However, there’s a mod that, via the game’s debug mode, does let you play offline with bots. There’s no matchmaking needed, just fire it up and away you go. Installing it requires a little work, but there’s a helpful video which talks you through the process. The mods you need are here and here, but we’d still recommend you watch the video first.
The catch is it won’t track your progress, plus this is only on PC, not the PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X|S versions of the game. You also could run into crashes, bugs and so on. And while we don’t imagine Starbreeze would want more bad publicity, it’s possible they could ban you for using a mod.
But if you just want to leap into Payday 3 to practice your heistery offline, and are aware of the risk, the option’s there. Starbreeze Studios hasn’t mentioned adding an official offline mode to the game.
You can read our review of Payday 3 here. The game is out now on PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S and Game Pass.
