Payday 3’s Leveling system sucks – a good idea that needs improvement

Payday 3's levelling system needs a lot of work

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Payday 3 has been around for almost two weeks, and after many hours of playing, I have come to the conclusion that Payday 3’s leveling system sucks. I think the reason for implementing the system in this way makes a lot of sense, but it’s just so repetitive and hard to understand at times.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the game as a whole and think it’s fantastic, but the leveling system has the potential to grind the game to a halt, and make Payday 3 a bit of a grind. Especially since some of the weapon modifications are locked behind such high levels.

If you’re unfamiliar with how leveling works in Payday 3, I’ll summarize it for you as best I can.

The Payday 3 leveling system

There are two main progression systems in Payday 3, you have skills and weapons, and then you have character levels. Both are broken.

How you level up your Payday 3 character is completing challenges for infamy points. For example, you will be asked to slide 5000 meters collectively for around 100 infamy points, each character level requires around 400 – 500 infamy points.

This means that there’s no real “XP” system in the game regarding characters, but there is an XP system for using weapons and skills.

Every time you complete a heist, you gain weapon and skill XP, weapon XP goes towards unlocking new attachments, and Skill XP goes towards unlocking that skill, if you don’t already have it unlocked.

Sounds all well and good right? Complete challenges to level up your character and finish a heist with the weapons you have to gain XP, but that makes no sense to me.

The problem with Payday 3’s leveling system

In Payday 3, unlike Payday 2, you do not gain XP for finishing heists of any kind, no matter the difficulty. So you do not get anything but money for completing heists. All of your progression is locked into completing challenges.

I found myself trying to grind out challenges to progress the game, rather than actually playing it. For example, I have played “No Rest for the Wicked” at least 30 times grinding out kill challenges for weapons. Which brings me to my next point. Sometimes the challenges don’t complete properly, but that’s a technical issue, much less a game design one.

Payday 3 favors going loud, there are almost no incentives to complete heists in stealth mode, and most of the challenges revolve around killing. That’s great though right? Must be great for Weapon XP! Nope!.

Weapon XP is not tied to kills, it’s tied to finishing the heist with that weapon equipped. So USING the weapon contributes nothing to the weapon level.

This decision does however make sense, as it allows stealth players to gain weapon XP even if they don’t use the weapon. But there should be a bonus in place for actually using the weapons.

There’s good news ahead

During a multitude of live streams, Starbreeze Studios revealed that they have plans to readjust the leveling system, add more challenges, and make them more clear.

Starbreeze even has plans to integrate the challenges into heist gameplay, by having progression bars when you make progress in a challenge and pointers to help you complete them. As noted in this YouTube video by Maikyu.

I understand why the devs built the game this way, it’s to make people play the game in as many different ways as possible. All of this in hopes that players don’t stick to grinding one style for levels like in Payday 2. But that sort of backfired now, as many people do just sit and grind weapon challenges for levels.

If I were Starbreeze, I’d be thinking of adding Infamy points to the end of heists and adding some weapon XP bonuses for actually using the weapons. The weapon XP upon completion is a fine idea, for stealth players but it’s too slow for us loud players.