Lies Of P, Payday 3 And Gotham Knights Coming To Xbox Game Pass

A troupe of Payday 3 characters in suits and masks rob a bank while shooting offscreen.

Image: Starbreeze Studios

Microsoft has announced the next crop of games you can snatch up on Xbox Game Pass for the rest of September and the early parts of October. The offerings are pretty lowkey, but there’s some cool stuff to download right now.

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For starters, Lies of P, the gritty Soulslike by South Korean developers Neowiz Games and Round8 Studio, is available now on Xbox consoles. That was already a day-one on Xbox Game Pass announcement, but since the game’s now officially launched, you can finally go download it. And that’s about it for what’s available right this moment. For the rest of the next batch of games you’ll have to wait between a couple of days to a couple weeks.

The quirky physics-based brawler Party Animals, for example, will be available on September 20. Payday 3, the first-person bank robbery shooter, lands a day after on September 21. Adventure puzzler Cocoon, from the lead gameplay designer of the atmospheric platformers Inside and Limbo, arrives on September 29. And that’s it for September.

Bringing up the rear are the superhero brawler Gotham Knights and The Lamplighter’s League, the turn-based strategy game from Harebrained Schemes, which hit Xbox Game Pass on October 3. While that’s a bunch of games coming to the subscription service, as is customary with these sorts of things, a handful of titles are also leaving very soon. Seven games will get booted from the vault come September 30, including the 2D side-scrolling Soulslike Moonscars, the live-service shooter Outriders, the action-RPG Weird West, and a few others. RIP.

Below is a breakdown of all the Xbox Game Pass games coming and going:

Xbox Game Pass titles coming in September/October

  • Lies of P – Available now
  • Party Animals – Available September 20
  • Payday 3 – Available September 21
  • Cocoon – Available September 29
  • Gotham Knights – Available October 3
  • The Lamplighter’s League – Available October 3

Departing games

  • Beacon Pines (Cloud, Console, and PC)
  • Despot’s Game (Cloud, Console, and PC)
  • Last Call BBS (PC)
  • Moonscars (Cloud, Console, and PC)
  • Outriders (Cloud, Console, and PC)
  • Prodeus (Cloud, Console, and PC)
  • Weird West (Cloud, Console, and PC)

Buy Xbox Game Pass: Amazon | Best Buy | GameStop

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Payday 3 CEO Apologizes For Nightmare ‘Always Online’ Launch

By many accounts, Payday 3 appears to be a disappointing half-step forward for the longrunning co-op bank robbery series. Unlike its predecessor, it also requires players to always be online, a seemingly grave misjudgement given Payday 3’s first-week launch woes. The problems with crashes, slow matchmaking, and disconnected servers were so bad the CEO of creator Starbreeze Studios began apologizing for the state of the game almost immediately.

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“We are so sorry that the infrastructure didn’t hold up as expected, and although it’s impossible to prepare for every scenario—we should be able to do better,” Tobias Sjögren tweeted on September 22, just a day after Payday 3’s debut. “We work tirelessly until we have restored all services and our players can get back to heisting again without issues!”

“Early access” for Payday 3 began on September 18, but the massive influx of new players didn’t begin until its full release on September 21. In addition to PC and PlayStation 5, the multiplayer heist sim also hit Game Pass, where paying subscribers on Xbox Series X/S could download it for free. PC players complained about the game being stuck in “searching” mode when trying to find a match. Some Xbox players also appear to have faced unstable servers and crashes.

“No matter what you choose, public, friends only, invite only, it will just matchmaker forever,” wrote one player in a post that blew up on Reddit. “Release day is usually tough for studios. This…This is embarrassing.”

Players on PS5, meanwhile, began the week with an apparent wrong build of the game. Lead producer Andreas Häll-Penninger blamed Sony for pushing out an incorrect patch. “PS5 players: For reasons out of our control you are currently playing an older version of the game,” he tweeted. “Sony is working on rolling out the proper patch.” The right version arrived a day later, but it was still a bad omen for fans on PS5 who paid $30 extra for the Silver Edition to play the game before others.

Naturally, the outages have once again spurred calls for companies to move away from always-online requirements. Payday 2’s offline mode lets players run through missions with AI-controlled characters. While the allure of the series remains its real time online multiplayer antics, being able to still enjoy the game without an internet connection was a nice feature. An offline mod for the game is apparently already in the works.

A three-act play on the Payday 3 Twitter account (sorry, I mean “X” account) perfectly captured the mood of the launch. “HEISTERS! We’re number one on Steam!” the account tweeted on September 21. “Heisters, we’re currently experiencing slow matchmaking,” read its very next tweet. “We’re investigating and working on a solution.” While matchmaking was unavailable for many throughout the afternoon and evening, the studio reported that things were improving by early in the morning on September 22, only for outages to creep back in as the day went on.

The ongoing mess is another reminder of why so many people take a wait-and-see approach to new game launches, especially on PC, especially when they have stringent online requirements. “Payday 3 feels like the kind of game that is not meant for day-one purchase,” wrote one observer on Reddit. “But rather wait until they have a bunch of content released.”

This is effectively what IGN wrote in the very first paragraph of its Payday 3 review. “The usual horrible Payday bugs, a dinky pool of jobs to tackle, and a predictably weak story mean it’s not exactly the giant leap forward I was hoping for,” it reads. “Still, if Payday 2’s post-launch support is any indication, this is at least a very promising start for what could become another decade of happily pistol whipping cashiers and fixing drills.”

A promising start indeed!

 

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Payday 3 Devs Explain Terrible Matchmaking Issues

Thieves shoot guns inside a bank vault.

Image: Starbreeze Studios

Payday 3‘s matchmaking servers were a mess in its first week. What went wrong? The maker of the game, Starbreeze Studios, blames an “unforeseen error” for the issues, and says it’s looking at ways to make the “always online” multiplayer shooter “less dependent on online services.”

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The bank-robbing sim is the latest game to take over Steam alongside console releases, including a day-and-date launch on Xbox Game Pass. The sequel hit almost 90,000 concurrent players on Valve’s digital storefront on September 21, but things have been rocky ever since due to bugs, crashes, and constant server disconnects. Screenshots of the game’s now infamous “matchmaking error matchmaking error” screen began flooding social media. Starbreeze CEO Tobias Sjögren immediately apologized, but problems still persist.

On September 25, the studio put out an official press release to try and explain why the servers for a game that requires players to be connected to the internet at all times in order to play have been such a disaster. It turns out that while a technical issue made things bad right out of the gate, a faulty update on September 24 by a third-party online services partner broke things all over again.

“Matchmaking software encountered an unforeseen error, which made it unable to handle the massive influx of players,” Starbreeze wrote in an announcement today. “The issue caused an unrecoverable situation for Starbreeze’ third-party matchmaking partner. A new version of the matchmaking server software was gradually deployed across all regions leading to improved performance. However, a software update made by the partner during late Sunday again introduced instability to the matchmaking infrastructure. The partner continues to work to improve and stabilize Payday 3‘s online systems.”

The studio said that the matchmaking problems never manifested during the game’s technical betas or “early access” period, and it’s currently working on both short- and long-term fixes. That includes looking at ways to make Payday 3 “less dependent on online services.” It’s not exactly clear what that means, but players have been begging Starbreeze for an offline mode like those offered in past Payday games since the matchmaking issues began. Who knows how feasible that is post-launch, but Sjögren tweeted on Sunday that the team is currently “looking at [the] possibility.”

In the meantime, Payday 3 isn’t out of the woods yet, and it’s already getting slammed in the Steam reviews as you might expect. It currently has a rating of “mostly negative” with just 33 percent positive reviews out of nearly 25,000. “Starbreeze has created an incredible successor to their beloved Payday 2,” reads one. “Too bad you cant play it.”

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Payday 3 Matchmaking Finally Fixed, Big Update On The Way

Thieves prepare to matchmake.

Image: Starbreeze Studios

After a terrible launch week riddled with error messages, Payday 3 maker Starbreeze Studios says the matchmaking issues have finally been fixed. The promises come ahead of the heist shooter’s first big patch planned for early October.

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“The scheduled maintenance carried out last week has fixed the initial matchmaking issues that occurred during Payday 3’s first few days after launch,” the studo wrote in a new update on its website. “Matchmaking has been stable and has had good performance after the completed maintenance.”

Buy Payday 3: Amazon | Best Buy | GameStop

The studio says that matchmaking infrastructure for distributing players to different servers was updated on September 26, followed by an upgrade on September 29 that added more regional nodes for distribution to “increase the speed of matchmaking and create greater redundancy across all online services.” Anecdotally, it does appear that many of the matchmaking errors players were previoulsy bombarded with have gone away.

But Payday 3‘s widespread problems right out of the gate certainly did the always-online bank robbery sim no favors, casting a shadow over a paid “early access” period and big Xbox Game Pass launch. And even with the server issues mostly addressed, at least for now, players are still clamoring for a bunch of quality-of-life improvements. With any luck, they should be coming soon.

Starbreeze says the early October patch will include over 200 improvements across all platforms, followed by additional waves of new content and fixes in November. The fist paid DLC, “Syntax Error,” is set to arrive sometime over the winter. It remains to be seen whether an offline mode will be one of the new features added to the game in the coming months. The development team had said it was considering the possibility.

“I don’t really need to repeat that this was not the start we wanted,” Tobias Sjögren, CEO of Starbreeze, wrote today. “But at the same time, our business model is a marathon and not a sprint and we will tirelessly continue to build Payday 3 bigger and better to deliver the greatest possible value for our players.”

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Payday 3 Devs Apologize Again For Missing Major Update

A Payday 3 heister uses a civilian as a shield.

Image: Starbreeze Studios

Payday 3 devs have extended their apology tour that began back in September, when Starbreeze Studios CEO had to apologize for the state in which the co-op heist game launched. The always-online bank robbery simulator suffered from major server and matchmaking issues that were fixed a little over a week after launch, but the game still needed another major patch to fix some of its remaining major issues (particularly quality-of-life stuff). The team is now apologizing for going radio silent in the absence of said update.

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An October 25 post on the official Payday website attempts to “lift the curtains a little” and let players know why the major patch, which was initially promised to arrive in early October and bring with it over 200 improvements, isn’t yet here. “We’ve been quiet over the last few days, and for that we apologize,” it reads. “It’s not easy to communicate when we have not been able to offer any updates on the one big topic that’s on everyone’s mind right now: When are the patches coming to Payday 3?”

Read More: Payday 3 Devs Explain Terrible Matchmaking Issues

The post promises that the team is still working on the upcoming patch, before getting into the true cause of the delay: Starbreeze Studios’ update pipeline.

The reason it has taken so long to get this first patch is very long and complicated, but the short version is that we discovered critical errors with our update pipeline shortly after the game releases. There was a significant risk to player progression being wiped if we didn’t address this and ensure a solid test environment.

The issue is so prominent that the team can’t “consistently deliver patches” in the game’s current state, which means new content has to wait, as well—though the blog does promise that there will be “free content updates for the game before the end of the year.”

Though Payday 3 boasted an impressive 90,000 concurrent players on Steam shortly after its September 18 launch, those players were quickly inundated with the now-infamous double “matchmaking error” screen. Since the game requires players to have an internet connection even if they’re playing solo, the server issues rendered it unplayable for many.

As Kotaku reported on September 25, the cause of the matchmaking issues were twofold: “a technical issue made things bad right out of the gate” but “a faulty update on September 24 by a third-party online services partner broke things all over again.” It’s unclear what is the cause of the current flaw in Payday 3’s update pipeline.

Kotaku reached out to Starbreeze for comment.

 

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