In a turn of events that the ESRB still hasn’t figured out how to rate, the newest in the Payday series will allow players to rob their family and friends, at gunpoint, in elaborate and daring heists.

“The beauty of this feature is that it really just opens up possibilities that are beyond what we could ever hope to create in-engine,” comments Overkill Software director David Goldfarb. “Players have always been able to blow the hinges off of their neighbor’s door and steal their valuables while wearing masks, but now they’re able to do this and also rank up in Payday for their efforts.”

Copies of Payday 3, digital and otherwise, ship with instructions for accessing deep web markets to purchase guns and munitions.

“I think it’s great,” claims Jason Bard, who is currently serving a minimum sentence of 7 years. “Not only did I rank up, but I got to keep all the stuff I stole. It’s this fresh new take on alternate reality that they’re doing that I really like. Alternate alternate reality—it’s just reality. Actually, really sieging my friend’s mom’s house and stealing all of their family heirlooms. It’s a really cool new model.”

“One of the things we’ve always had trouble with is emulating the chaos of pulling off a big job in the real world,” Goldfarb told Nerfwire. “We toyed with a lot of procedural generation to try to get things to feel fresh, but players were always able to outsmart the AI in some way that really disrupted the suspension of disbelief. We wanted it to feel like there were stakes. That’s why we encouraged our players to buy real guns and challenge their local police to high-octane shootouts.”

Reception to the game has been mixed, with loyal fans of the series calling Overkill’s choice “revolutionary” and “a fresh take on a great series,” while national law enforcement have panned the game as “a clear and present threat to our country’s security,” and “a way to force a multiplayer experience onto the player base.”

To get a real feeling for the new Payday’s gameplay, we shadowed local criminal Adam Lynch as he prepared for an alpha test. “For this job, we’re going to go in through the bay window, throw the family dog into a burlap sack, and threaten everyone at gunpoint while robbing them of their prized possessions. I’ll go through the back, Gomez is on intimidation, and Robby is on lookout. Everyone got the plan? And wait, what was the reporter talking about, Payday 3? Never heard of it. Let’s go.”

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