Crimefest burns on…

Welp, Crimefest, the yearly big, free, 10-day update for Payday 2, is trundling along, and still on fire. Considering all the grinding that’s gone on, the first four days of Crimefest have pretty much crashed and burned. While Day 2 brought in a bunch of masks and Day 1 brought in crates and cosmetics that affect gameplay, things have quickly gone rather quiet on the Payday front.

Day 3 introduced the Aftershock Heist, set in the middle of an earthquake. If you’re thinking of the film 2012 or San Andreas, you’ve got the wrong end of the stick. From gameplay videos, it honestly just looks like it was taken from L4D2.

Not very much happens. And honestly it doesn’t seem like much of a heist or anything. The Aftershock heist comes with two new achievements, 400 Bucks and Aftershocked and with it a new soundtrack called Utter Chaos, which is very fitting, really.

Day 4 of Crimefest isn’t much better. Really, it’s rather mediocre. The major changes, if they can be called major, are to CRIME.NET (what an obvious domain name) and to AI bots. The AI bots change basically means that if a bot is alive and all human players are arrested, assuming the bot survives, they can trade hostages immediately and save a human player. Small problem, the AI bots are not very smart and often just flail, having no idea who to shoot should there be too many enemies. Even in the short amount of time I played, I could see how bad the bots were. On top of this, the change is INCREDIBLY situational. According to ShekelWanker and his 600+ hours, he’s only been in such a scenario twice.

The CRIME.NET change is simple. You can now filter heists for your preferred tactic: either doing things sneakily or doing things loudly, although some missions can’t be done sneakily, like the meth-cooking ‘heist’. Still no way to filter for infamy though, which is what people who have varying levels of infamy want. A somewhat useful thing, but not amazing by all means.

The only silver lining is that Overkill have FINALLY said something. Wolf’s voice actor is pretty much gone, but the character will remain, although his future seems uncertain. Bain is fine. The thing with mods no longer working may be just a general thing due to updates. Happens to TF2 HUDs regularly, but something tells me it’s something more than that. Really, it kinda boils down to “yeah, we can hear you, we’ll talk about it after Crimefest”, possibly when the community is slightly more willing to listen. Oh, and apparently the starter weapon was buffed as well, which is good, because it’s shit.

Day 5 is somewhat interesting, still not really interesting but okay nonetheless, with a new gun, a Swiss-made bullet hose known as the KSP 58 “Kulspruta”, which, according to them, literally means bullet sprayer. It has a magazine size of 200 and 400 maximum ammo, as well as a fire rate of 909, so I guess they’re right. It’s a light machine gun, and a free one – Payday 2 could do with a free LMG as it didn’t have one before. At least it looks cool though.

There’s also a new weapon modification called the Bipod, to go with LMGs. With it, you can deploy yourself on a position that needs to be defended and gain no recoil and much higher accuracy. Apparently it’s bugged at the moment though, and some people have a chance to have their player model appear outside the map or something weird like that, rendering them hard to kill by the AI. It’s a rather weird glitch, and like the minigun-super-speed glitch, it might take a while to be fixed.

Meanwhile, the community is trying to organize itself. Payday 2’s rating on both Steam and Metacritic is dropping due to the large numbers of spurned players changing their reviews or giving it new ones. Perhaps it’s too late to make amends.

Thing is, Day 1 ruined it all. Here’s hoping that the rest of Crimefest improves.