Recent reviews by Ever

As someone who has spent over 850 hours playing PAYDAY 2, I had high hopes for the third installment in the series. However, my experience with PAYDAY 3 has been far from satisfying, primarily due to issues related to the online-only nature of the game. Don't get me wrong, the game itself is a large step-up gameplay wise from what PD2 had to offer, but making it online only was a mistake. Those who say that PAYDAY 2 is better because of the variety of heists it offers fail to understand that PD2 had 10+ years of development. I am not expecting 80+ heists on release day with PAYDAY 3, just some good quality ones, and we have definitely gotten high quality levels in this third installment of the series. I bought the gold edition of PD3 for those of you wondering.

One of the most significant drawbacks of PD3 is its heavy reliance on online connectivity. Unlike PD2, which allowed for both online and offline gameplay, PD3 forces players into an online-only environment. This decision has had a detrimental impact on many user's overall experience for several reasons:

1. Dependency on Stable Servers: PD3's online-only structure leaves players at the mercy of the game's servers. Unfortunately, my experience has been marred by frequent server issues, including disconnections and lag, which disrupt the flow of gameplay. As you can probably see from other reviews at the time of this writing, the PD3 servers have been struggling to keep up. As a result of this, the servers have gone down multiple times in the past day and a half-ish, for MULTIPLE HOURS. This is unacceptable. Remember, you can't play offline AT ALL for now. But an offline mod is in the works at the moment.
   
2. Long Queues for Solo Players: In PD2, I often enjoyed playing solo heists to challenge myself and test my skills, especially on the hardest difficulty, death sentence one down (DSOD). However, in PD3, the matchmaking system for solo players is frustratingly slow. It can take an excessive amount of time to find a match, making solo play a tedious experience. For example, I started grinding out this one specific heist to unlock the rest of my skills in a skill tree. How PAYDAY 3's skill progression works (not to confuse with level!) is that upon completing a heist, whatever skill tree you have a point into, you would get a set amount of EXP to unlock the next node for future use to allocate more points into. The annoying part? EVEN IF YOU MATCHMAKE FOR A PRIVATE HEIST, YOU STILL HAVE TO WAIT 10-30 SECONDS JUST FOR A HEIST THAT ONLY YOU WANT TO PLAY.
   
3. Limited Accessibility: The move to an online-only format makes PD3 less accessible to players who may not always have a stable internet connection. Imagine, you spend 30 minutes+ trying to stealth a heist. You're on your last bag to secure before escaping. Then, you lose connection to the servers. All that time you spent in the heist? All for nothing. What about people who travel often and want to play without internet? Those people are completely excluded from being able to play until they are able to reconnect to the internet. Also you can't pause the game, even in a solo game.

1. The progression being challenge-based only is questionable. While I see what the developers are trying to do, I don't think making your account level (now called infamy level in PD3) tied to challenges was a smart idea. This is especially concerning when you realize that after you complete a heist, eventually you will just straight up not receive any infamy level experience if you have already completed a large majority of the challenges.
   
2. The user interface. I don't know how Starbreeze managed to f*ck this up in both games on release. No CRIME.NET or similar system for playing games with others was a mistake. Sometimes, you will play with a really good crew on a harder difficulty and you will want to continue playing with the same crew. Now how does it work? Well, as soon as a heist ends in success, the only option you have is to continue to main menu. Now, If you FAILED a heist there's also the option of restarting with the same crew. NOT ONLY THAT, but why did they bring back STAT bars for the weapons? They did this initially in PD2 when it first came out as well, and it was terrible. Eventually after some time, they changed it and let you view the exact numbers of the weapons stats in the second game. It feels like they've gone a step backwards with this change. For example, some of the descriptions when putting an attachment on a weapon is just +Targeting speed. Okay? By how much? +Reload speed?
   
3. The skill tree system's descriptions. This is also a step backwards. The skill tree itself is fine, I get that they want to make the game more grounded like the first game, Payday: The Heist. But the main issue I have here is how some of the skills are described. For example, there is this skill that states something along the lines of: "Having GRIT and EDGE increases your reload speed." Okay.. No numbers? Increases reload speed by how much? Some other skills have %'s and more accurate descriptors but why is this one left so vague? The inconsistency among how the descriptions work is dumb, and should be addressed. I'd give more examples, but ironically enough the game is literally down AGAIN right now (It was down for like 5 hours earlier last night!).

To be honest with you I'm getting tired of writing this review so I'll give a shorter description here for what this game does good. There's more things, but these are the things that especially stuck out to me while I played:

1. The stealth system is SO MUCH better compared to PD2. You have many more options of tackling stealth. Not only that, but the stealth skills definitely change up how you play it completely. You are able to complete certain heists without even putting your mask on!
   
2. No more artificial difficulty scaling. The one thing that was annoying in PD2 in my eyes (despite playing DSOD often) is how when you cranked up the difficulty, all it did was increase the enemy's HP, damage and units that showed up. While this is okay, the biggest issue in my opinion was the health scaling. Now in PD3, all enemies have the same health, and all enemy types show up on all difficulties. Increasing the difficulty (as far as I'm aware) increases the amount of cops that show up, and their damage. At the time of writing this review, I'm not sure what else happens but it seems much more fair.
   
3. The quality of the levels are much better. Even though there aren't many heists present in-game at the moment (8 on release), they feel much better to play compared to some of the heists PD2 offered on release (I'm looking at you, Ukrainian Job). You also spend less time waiting for a drill to complete, and more time actually doing something for the most part, which is a step in the right direction gameplay wise.

While I understand Starbreeze's intent to prevent cheating by making the game online only, the decision to eliminate offline and solo options feels restrictive and alienating to dedicated fans like myself. I hoped for a game that built upon the strengths of what the PAYDAY franchise offered, while addressing its shortcomings. Instead, PAYDAY 3 has introduced new challenges that hinder the enjoyment of the game.

Despite all it's issues, I'm still going to keep playing PD3 when I can since I like the game. If you are coming in for the first time as a new-comer, or expecting something that holds up to present-day PD2, you will be disappointed. This review may change in the future, but for now, I would hold off.

Well.. for most people that quote applies.

For some reason, steam doesn't format this review properly so click on the blue thumbs up next to my name to read it with better formatting.

Just to clarify, there are TWO VERSIONS OF RUNESCAPE PRESENT:

Old School Runescape (OSRS), where Jagex basically found an old copy of Runescape 2 back from 2007, and they chose to continue making updates onwards from that clone before the controversial updates that are currently present in Runescape 3.

Runescape (AKA Runescape 3) is the more modernized version of Runescape that I am reviewing here. Basically the one with better graphics. If you played RS2 many years ago, or maybe even RS1 (RS classic), your character will be transferred here, like mine was


+There is ALOT of content in this game. So much to the point to where when I first started, it felt extremely overwhelming to get started with at first. From having 28 skills to level from, all the way to having 227 quests (at the time of writing this review), each varying in how long they could be and having very interesting lore. Personally, I enjoy the quests in RS3 compared to some other MMO's because there is more to them then simply, "Kill 5 cows," or, "Pick up 5 flowers." There is enough content and variety here to keep you entertained for hours on end. There's a reason to do these quests too, since they may unlock new powerful abilities, or gain new items to equip.

+The newer bosses (ones that have been added after 2012 ish I'd say) are very interesting. There are 119 bosses total in this game, and the reason for killing them could be for money, collecting a specific item if you are an ironman, or going after pets (which are basically companion collectibles).

+The lore. All the lore present within this game is excellent, although everybody might not care about it. The vast amount of lore you can find within this game is fantastic, some being much better then others. Not interested in the lore? No problem, just hold spacebar through every quest and skip every cutscene and you'll be fine. Whether or not you know the lore to the game is insignificant as to how you will play and level your stats.

+When you chase after a goal, no matter how long or how short it is, it feels satisfying just to eventually hit it. Going after a goal like unlocking the invention skill which requires level 80 in 3 skills is something that may take a while, but it isn't just for nothing. It unlocks powerful perks that will assist greatly in bossing or skilling. Even getting level 99 in a stat on it's own is satisfying and you are able to buy an accomplishment cape that has a special perk (such as reviving you once every hour should you die).

+You can pay for membership by using something known as "bonds," which are similar to WoW tokens where you can redeem them in order to get 14 days of membership per bond. These can be bought off the Grand Exchange for roughly 30 million gold pieces (GP) at the time of this review. Not only that, but members translates from OSRS/RS3 as well, as long as you have members on the same account when switching between both games.



-+One of the most controversial updates to ever happen in Runescape, known as, "The Evolution of Combat (EoC)." To summarize, EoC was basically a combat update where the game's combat changed from clicking once and your character would fight, to eventually having ability bars, revamped the entire combat triangle, etc. One might think, "Why would it be bad? Doesn't that make the combat more innovating?" Well.. sort of. You see, the problem with EoC was that upon release, it was horribly unbalanced. Some ability's totally overshadowed others, and it had ALOT of bugs. It also made many weapons that were once very useful irrelevant, like dragon daggers and dragon claws. Not to say it was a complete failure though. Later on it became better as more bugs related to it was fixed, but it was too late by then because most of the playerbase had stopped playing the game. Personally, I feel indifferent towards this but it is difficult as to whether or not I should truly label this as a positive/negative about RS3 so I will leave it here.

-+The grind to get to certain content. While not as long and tedious as OSRS, just to be able to do some sort of efficient bossing, let alone skill decently takes a significant amount of time to get going. I'm almost 300 hours in at the time of this review and I still am working towards things like combo overloads. I would not have some of the progress I had today if I did not swap gold from OSRS to RS3, which shows how significant the grind is. Some may like it, some won't. It's all personal opinion, but in the end I can say for sure that RS3's grinds in general are definitely quicker than OSRS'.



-Microtransactions (MTX). Compared to OSRS, there are a f**kton of MTX's in this game compared to it. There's literally a minigame in RS3 known as, "Treasure Hunter," where you can open chests and have a chance of getting exp or 200 million cash. This is why it is much easier and faster to max in RS3 compared to OSRS. Combined with DXP events, being able to literally buy EXP for basically every skill in the game is something that puts off many players, myself included. Some people may say, "oh just ignore it," or, "it doesn't affect you," or even, "just login every day! You get 2 free! or do quests! You get 2 every quest completion, so it balances out!" Yeah.. no. It doesn't matter if they give it to me for free or even if I ignored it, I still get reminded every day that I have treasure hunter keys available to be used.

-The tick rate in this game. In this game, a tick is the way both Runescape 3 and OSRS process your own character's actions. It is f**king horrific. Being at 0.6 seconds every tick. Think of it as playing at 600 ping, plus the latency from whatever country you are connecting from to that server. All server sided actions are determined by this tick system, which is extremely annoying when doing things like bossing. You want to move to a specific location? No problem, just click on a tile and wait 0.6s for your clicks to register! As frustrating as this is, Jagex has acknowledged this and are planning to turn the tick rate to 0.1s instead of 0.6s which.. Well that was like last year or the year before that so that's probably gonna be a while.

-The UI in the game they give you by default is f**king horrible. They desperately need to change it or revamp the default version somehow. Despite having the ability to customize the UI to your heart's content, I shouldn't have to spend an hour or two in game just to readjust the UI so it is to my liking. Of course, some may say to switch to legacy mode or the legacy UI which changes your entire HUD so it is similar to that of RS2, but you will not be as strong as if you were to use EoC instead.

-Account security is a joke, across both OSRS and RS3. Even with 2FA, you can still have your account taken from you just from basic social engineering. Recently, a popular streamer known as Woox (some may say the best OSRS player) had one of his OSRS accounts taken from someone just because somebody asked Jagex for his account information. Absolutely horrible and this needs to be addressed.


Personally, I prefer OSRS over RS3 because of nostalgia and I enjoy the PvM content there more. Despite being more simple, it still manages to find innovating ways to encounter the bosses with the simpler combat system. Even though I believe OSRS > RS3, that doesn't mean RS3 is necessarily a bad game. Both are good in my eyes, and which one you like better is up for you to decide.

not bad

This game here, it's surprisingly good. I almost bet you I went in for the first time playing this game and I got my ass kicked by sea raiders, and then after a while searching google things about this game (because the tutorial doesn't teach you "good" stuff besides the besides) it became fun.

These hours that I have put in, are all in the campaign alone and with mods. The workshop has some insanely fun ones, so you should definitely buy this game when it is on sale. Idk if it's worth the full price however.

A must buy if you love tactical shooters!
(Just make sure you have friends to play/que with, unless you don't mind being paired with 4 other Re***ds who are toxic to the community in competitive)