Starbreeze’s Payday 2 is getting a massive engine overhaul 13-years after its initial PC release. Exclusive for PC gaming, the new version of the popular co-op crime game will run better, take up less space, and have major bug fixes.
Announced through a brand-new video on the official Payday YouTube channel, the new engine overhaul brings the game into Diesel 3.0.
Developed over the past nine months at Sidetrack Games, the behind all new Payday 2 updates, the engine overhaul converts the game from 32-bit to 64-bit, allowing it to take better advantage of more modern hardware.
Crucially, this means that the heist simulator will be able to use more than 4GB of memory for the first time. For years now, Payday 2 has suffered from the memory limit of 32-bit applications and frequently crashes from running out of memory. This update should fix all of those issues.
Furthermore, the game will benefit from a major overhaul to its package delivery and asset management systems. This means that the game is now a third of its prior side, slimming down from 88GB to 32GB. The developers joke that you can now move the game to your SSDs instead of your clunky mechanical hard drive. (Although, with how much storage costs right now, maybe you can keep it on your HDD.)
The developers also state that this new version no longer runs via DirectX9, instead moving to DirectX 11. This means that VRAM usage is much more efficient, allowing you to crank up texture quality without having any additional crashes. Alongside these changes, lobby codes have been changed to be just six-digits as well.
Of course, as this is a massive engine overhaul, the majority of Payday 2 mods will be broken when this new version of the game releases. However, Sidetrack Games will be releasing new information to help modders convert their mods to the new engine version as well as helping with any new file types the revised engine uses.
Payday 2 Diesel 3.0 will launch in Open Beta on June 30th with a full rollout later this year. It’s not known if players will be able to stay on the older version of the game, for whatever reason, but we’d assume everyone will have to upgrade.
