Video Gamers Podcast - Video Games Quick Take - Payday 1

Episode Date: September 16, 2023

From video games hosts Josh, Paul, and Ryan we're bringing you even more video games content each week.  Video Games Quick Takes are a short series of game recommendations, funny moments, off-topic chat and more. A small dose of gaming to brighten your Saturdays! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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And on Saturdays, we have these Quick Take episodes. These are a little bit older. They were recorded by us back in the day under our old name, the Multiplayer Gaming Podcast. And the Quick Take episodes were initially only available to Patreon and Apple supporters, although there was a little bit of demand that people were requesting to hear them as they got a little bit older, so we started releasing these to the public for everybody to enjoy. These episodes are pretty short. They are generally about 10 to 12 minutes long, and they are recorded by just one of us at a time. Usually, it's us

wanting to talk about something that just didn't really fit the format of the main show, so it always gave us an opportunity to maybe record just a few minutes about something that we've always wanted to talk about. Just keep in mind that as you listen to this episode, if you hear any announcements or upcoming dates, plans, anything like that, just take that with a grain of salt because you're listening to this quite a bit delayed. All right, I think that covers everything here. We hope that you'll enjoy this episode. Let's do it. Hello, squad mates. This is another Quick Take episode here with Paul. And before I jump into talking about Payday the Heist, I just wanted to say thank you so much to all of you out there for helping support the show.

We really do have such an amazing community. We really appreciate the reviews, the people you have told about the show, the financial support through Patreon and Apple. We really do appreciate it. And the show only exists because of you guys. And so we just really want to say thank you from the bottom of our hearts about that. All right. I'm very excited to talk about Payday the Heist. This is the original OG Payday game. Now, if you're a long-term listener of the show, you might remember that Todd, Josh, and I did a deep dive on Payday 2, but this is really the first chance that I'm able to just kind of set aside time and talk about Payday the Heist a little bit more because I feel like

this game has kind of gotten lost over time. It's actually now 11 years old, so I know that a lot of you guys have not played it. Maybe you're not even really completely aware of the series, but you guys out there know how much I love heist movies. One of my favorite all-time movies is Heat. I also love movies like Ocean's Eleven, Den of Thieves, Stanley Kubrick's The Killing. The opening scene from The Dark Knight is one of my all-time favorite scenes. I don't know what it is about a bank heist, but there's just something so thrilling about having to set up a drill and worrying about silent alarms. When are the police going to show up? How are we going to get to the extraction? All of those things are like catnip for me. And so whenever I watch a heist movie, I'm always constantly thinking about

what would I do in that kind of situation? And Payday basically gives that to you in spades. You are basically able to run a whole series of missions along with three other people online, and there are different locations where you're trying to pull off a heist. Now, some of them are at banks, some of them are where you're trying to steal something out of a house or something similar. But to me, what I always remember is the first mission that you run in Payday, which is called First World Bank. And the way that you do this normally, you can either go in quiet and stealthy, or you can go in loud. And so basically, as you learn the map, you get to know where all the cameras are, you know where all the police officers are, and you have different

classes in the game that give you different perks and abilities. And one of the cool things is to try to complete these heists without the police even finding out about what you're doing. And so a lot of times you can sneak in, you can basically immediately hold up the police even finding out about what you're doing. And so a lot of times you can sneak in. You can basically immediately hold up the police, tie their wrists with zip ties. And then basically you have to find the right keys and open the right doors and then drill into the vault. And that always takes a few minutes. And so there's always a risk that someone might see you or set off an alarm or something can happen but you can try to complete those missions stealthy which is very fun now if you want you can

also go in guns blazing you guys can probably guess that when i played payday 2 with josh we always ended up having to fire our weapons on every mission that we ran. And Payday 1, I played completely solo, probably a couple hundred hours. I would play with random people online, but I didn't have any friends who were playing Payday at the same time that I was. So I really loved the genre. I really loved the idea of being immersed into some kind of heist. And one of the neatest things about the first Payday is that there was something that was a special mode called Overdrill. So as you would learn these maps and as you would play on higher difficulties, it was difficult enough just to pull off the regular heist and to steal the cash out of the bank. Well, later what you could end up unlocking is Overdrill, where basically you

would have to learn a series of puzzles and tricks and things that you could do that would make the mission much, much, much harder, much longer, but you would have a much bigger payday at the end of it. So basically I thought it would be fun to kind of walk you guys a little bit through how Overdrill worked with the First World Bank. So normally in the very beginning, you have to get past the initial doors and detectors. You get back into an elevator room, and beyond that is where the vault is located. Well, what you actually have to do is you have to have four people stand in exactly the right spot and also face in the proper direction. So this is almost like preparing for a raid with an MMO. You actually had to assign parts to people, who's going to stand where, does everyone know what they're supposed to do,

because it was very easy if you had just one person make a simple mistake, you could very easily end up losing a whole hour of running one of these missions. So let's say that you and your team know what to do in the first room. You stand in the right spots. You all face in the right direction. And basically, a little button would start beeping and flashing on the computer desk. And that's how you knew that you have now activated that you want to start overdrill mode. And so basically, this would open up a secret door, and now you have a new door that you would have to drill through. Now, believe it or not, this would take 33 minutes to drill through this door. There was no way to make it faster. There was nothing that could make it slower. You just had to survive 33 minutes of the police coming and you'd have to hold them off and shoot them and be able to stay alive. And this would go on for 33 straight minutes. No bathroom breaks. You're not able to go, you know, pause it to go answer the door. You know, this was high stakes. Everyone had to be fully committed to the mission in order to pass it. Now, once you finish the full 33 minutes, that would open it up.

But then behind that, you would see a vault door that you would now have to get past. And this was basically where you could activate tiles that were on the floor. You had to know what kind of pattern you would have to do. And so you would have to activate certain tiles. And if you accidentally activated a wrong tile, it would shut down Overdrill, basically mission fail. You'd have to go back to Lobby, start it all over again. But as long as you knew the pattern, you would activate the right tiles. And then that would allow you to then get access into the full vault, which was full of gold bars. And so this was always really exciting. As soon as those double vault doors would open, you would just see all these gold,

just stacks and stacks of gold bars. You start pulling out those giant cloth bags, you're stuffing them to the gills with gold bars. And now you've got to carry these out. And meanwhile, you're still getting pummeled by SWAT teams. And Payday would bring in some bigger units that would cause a lot of damage. Some of them you couldn't really shoot from the front. And so you're still at risk of dying or losing money. And so as a group, you're running these bags out to the extraction,

and then once all of you are able to get onto that final truck, the mission would end and everybody would get a ton of experience and a ton of currency that you could use in the game, basically to unlock new abilities or to unlock certain attachments or whatever you wanted to do with your loadout. So I really look back on the Payday days with a lot of nostalgia and a lot of fun. I feel like when we did the deep dive of Payday 2, it didn't really get its fair shake. I know that we ended up rating it pretty low on our leaderboard, and I think a lot of that was simply because Todd and Josh really only experienced the arcade side of it. We never pulled off a single mission with stealth. We were also all brand new players at the time. I had lost my original Payday account. And so we were all minimal level. No one really had any unlocks. It's not like we had enough time to play the game for 40

hours. Now watch all these guides. Now let's jump back into it and tinker with our builds. We just didn't have enough time to do all that. So I'm really sad about the fact that Payday 2, we currently have rated number 51 out of 67. I don't think that's entirely fair. I do think that Payday 1 holds a special place in my heart because of doing those overdrill runs and being able to have the time and the ability to learn those fights and to do it. It really did feel like a fun, thrilling accomplishment. You guys have heard me say on the show, video games are supposed to be fun. They're not really supposed to be work. I don't mind watching a couple short guides learning how to unlock overdrill. What I don't like is where I have to watch 30-minute guides on how to beat a certain boss in a game. That's

when it starts to get a little ridiculous and it starts crossing the line into work. But Payday had that sweet spot where it was just so much action. Your heart would be pumping the whole time. You can feel your blood pressure rising. You've got the clock running, and you're talking on comms, and you're yelling for someone to check the clock. How much time do we have left? All right, who's guarding the east side doors? It required a lot of coordination.

And when you beat it at the end, it felt like a great accomplishment, but it never felt like work. It just felt like you pulled off this amazing heist and you would get that shot of adrenaline when it was all over. So I absolutely love the first Payday. The second Payday, I think, has so much more content. It can be very fun. I think in the very beginning, it can feel a little overwhelming because there's so much to do because even Payday 2 at this point. I think in the very beginning, it can feel a little overwhelming because there's so much to do because even Payday 2 at this point, I think is like nine years old. But you can regularly pick up Payday 1 or 2 for only a couple of bucks. I think it's well worth the investment and the money.

You might not get to the point where you're doing the overdrills in Payday 1 because you had to progress enough to upgrade your character in order to do that kind of stuff. But even just hopping into it for a few matches I think is well worth your money. I'm pretty sure you can normally pick these up for $5. It might be $10 at the most. But I know that Payday 3 is something that's very much on my radar. I cannot wait to play the next installment, which we know will be coming down the pipeline. It is, for my money,

much more fun to pull off a heist than it is to play something like Left 4 Dead 2 or Back 4 Blood. As much as I love those games, I think they're great. I would just rather pull off a bank heist. And so if you're into those kind of heist movies, I think you would absolutely love the Payday series. If that's not your cup of tea,

then that's fine. You might prefer something like Vermintide to play co-op. But for me, give me those bank heists day in and day out. They're an absolute blast. All right. Well, that's all that we got here for this Quick Take episode. Thanks so much for listening. Thanks again for the support. We really do appreciate all of you, and we will be back with our next episode shortly. We'll see you guys then.