PAYDAY 2: Update 172 - Community Safe 6 & Open Beta

What's good, heisters?

Skins, skins, and skins! You created and voted for them, we’ll bring them in the game! Today we release the Community Safe 6 which includes 16 new Skins. Do you like a bit more future tech? Our new legendary Kross Vertex SMG Skin “Vanguard” could definitely be something for you. You like it less white and more toxic looking? In that case, you should maybe name your AK-17 “EVA” from now on! Check the website for all skins: Community Safe 6 Shout-out to all you skin makers out there who made it into the game today! Great work!

Improved Difficulties

We have been working on several improvements on how the different difficulties feel in PAYDAY 2 and finally reached a state good enough to go Open Beta! The full changelog can be found on the Steam Forum: Difficulty Beta Changelog

Improved AI performance

With the goal to make the game experience more even for everyone, from now on the AI will no longer be dependent on what kind of beast computer you run at home. Especially low-end PCs should be able to notice more responsive AI. We have also improved how fast the enemies travel through the level. It will now take them less time to track and find the player, so stay focused heisters! It is important to us to make sure that we don’t push players out of the difficulties they are comfortable with. Since both of the above changes will make the game harder for a lot of players, we made additional tweaks to the difficulties to mitigate the impact of our improved AI performance.

Tweaked Mayhem

Based on your feedback and our own observation, we could see that Mayhem was too similar to Death Wish in terms of difficulty; while it’s supposed to be a gateway difficulty between Overkill and Death Wish. While revisiting the difficulties due to the improved AI performance, we made a few changes to the Mayhem difficulty which should bring it closer to Overkill.

Improving PAYDAY 2’s top difficulty

It was apparent that the list of viable builds was vastly limited in One Down making the difficulty less fun to play. This is mostly due to the high health of enemies and the limitation given by the One Down mechanic. In order to make the top difficulty of the game a more fun experience, we reduce the health of all enemies, removed the one down limitation and spiced it up by, for example, adding the Minigun and Medic Dozers who you probably already met during your Crime Spree. The One Down mechanics will be turned into a selectable game mod, available for all difficulties, at a later stage of the Open Beta. What the “new” top difficulty will be called and how we handle the One Down achievements will be communicated at a later date.

New Skill: Graze

We are introducing a new skill in the Mastermind’s Sharpshooter subtree!

Basic

4 Points Snipers that hit their target deal 20% of the damage dealt in a 100 cm radius around the bullet trajectory.

Aced

8 Points If a bullet would headshot-kill someone, the graze skill will deal 100% of the weapon’s damage instead of 20%.

Sniper Rifles have been struggling to find a spot in the PAYDAY 2 meta and we have high hope this skill will make them more viable and fun to play with. To