My Favorite Payday 2 Glitches
Payday 2 is built on an outdated engine and has received years upon years of updates, new content, and balance tweaks. Completely divergent mechanics like flamethrowers, explosives, grenades, vehicles, and weapon skins have found their way into the original relatively-simple gameplay, not to mention an ambitious skill system with infinite combinations of dozens of abilities. This is a prime environment for some completely insane glitches!
5. When the Arkansas Toothpick granted 230 Concealment. I think Overkill meant to buff it from 27 to 30, but forgot to finish deleting the old value. Maximum armor, RPG, and Flamethrower? No problem, guards will never see you. Fire all the crits from Low Blow. It was an insanely kooky build and I stayed up till 5am that night getting my entertainment’s worth, because I figured (correctly) they’d patch it extremely quickly. Alas.
4. Press Space to Respawn. After Overkill completely redid the skill system, there’ve been more bugs than usual, not all of which have been fixed yet. Thankfully, they did patch the one that allowed anybody to leave custody by simply pressing spacebar. Stockholm Syndrome is supposed to let you do that, but only if you’ve purchased the skill and have hostages. Oops!
3. Infinite skill points! Ever wanted to see what would happen if you bought all the skills? Well, thanks to Overkill making a typo with the skill trees in the open beta for the revamped RPG system, you could! The resulting heister was completely incomprehensible, I tried a few heists and pretty much got sensory overload due to all the random skills conflicting and things automatically triggering. Almost everything had an extra command to interact with it. I don’t know how the script kiddie cheaters deal with that on a regular basis.
100% dodge. This isn’t one specific glitch, it’s popped up from time to time, but the time I got to participate was right at the beginning, the 2014 crimefest where Dodge was first turned into a real build option. The Duck and Cover skill granted 50% instead of 5%, meaning that cops had a 100% chance of missing you with full dodge specs.
Super Sonic minigun – Absolutely my favorite on this whole list, no questions asked. The Need4Speed HMG was the best build this game has ever seen and I highly doubt any glitch will catch my fancy as much as it.
What happened was, the Minigun originally had its own classification, with speed penalties and an inability to get new ammo except through ammo bags. When Overkill buffed the minigun by turning it into an LMG, they removed both of these downsides but forgot a mod that buffed the minigun’s movespeed. Add all the speed-boosting skills, and you got the Payday equivalent of that TF2 bug that let you use the Minigun with the Buffalo Steak Sandvich.
I highly doubt this list is over. Considering there’s at least another year of support for Payday 2 with endless possibilities for Starbreeze to extend that license, I’m sure we can look forward to old and new parts of the game breaking in completely unfathomable ways.