How PUBG: BATTLEGROUNDS Became a Co-Op Heist Game With PAYDAY

For years, PUBG: BATTLEGROUNDS has been defined by large-scale battle royale tension, long-range firefights, and the unpredictable chaos of player-versus-player survival. With PAYDAY, however, PUBG STUDIOS and Starbreeze Entertainment explored a very different kind of multiplayer experience: structured co-op heists built around objective-driven play, class roles, AI enemies, stealth, escalation, and loud combat.

Rather than simply adding themed cosmetics or a surface-level crossover, the teams set out to translate the core fantasy of PAYDAY into PUBG’s ecosystem while still keeping the mode approachable for PUBG players. That meant adapting heist pacing, rebuilding AI and objective systems, redesigning PAYDAY 3 levels for a more arcade-like flow, and finding a balance between both franchises’ identities.

To learn more about how the mode was created, we spoke with Gi Hwan Park from the Mode Production Team at PUBG STUDIOS and Tobias Remmers, Franchise Director at Starbreeze Entertainment. They discussed the design goals behind PAYDAY, how the teams approached stealth and loud gameplay, why class-based progression was chosen over complex skill trees, what it took to build objective-driven missions inside PUBG, and how this collaboration fits into PUBG’s broader evolution beyond traditional battle royale.

PAYDAY represents a major shift for PUBG, moving from large-scale battle royale gameplay into a structured co-op heist experience. What were the core design goals behind creating this mode?  

Gi Hwan Park, Mode Production Team at PUBG STUDIOS: The starting point for this collaboration was our vision to evolve PUBG: BATTLEGROUNDS beyond a single battle royale game — into a gameplay platform capable of housing diverse genres and play experiences. We felt strongly that PUBG should be able to offer players a wider range of fun within the same space. PAYDAY's strengths in teamwork, role-based play, and mission execution aligned perfectly with the new co-op experience we wanted to bring to PUBG. This mode isn't simply a content addition — it's a meaningful expansion that demonstrates how PUBG can embrace entirely new styles of gameplay.

Tobias Remmers, Franchise Director at Starbreeze Entertainment: We wanted to bring the two audiences together, it was a fine balance not to overstep in either direction. The purpose was to create a small sample of PAYDAY, we knew that to perfectly recreate PAYDAY 3 would be out of scope, so we aimed for a more arcade-like experience that represents the core of what PAYDAY is. It was always first to mind that this is an arcade mode that should be easy to jump into and play. That meant that we wanted the experience to be digestible and fun no matter if you play once or twenty times. That meant reducing some complexity from the design of PAYDAY's heists, making them more streamlined, and focusing on the chaos and adrenaline.

Our priority was on loud gameplay and combat. Initially, stealth was planned in a more limited form, with something closer to a timed casing mode and loud gameplay, but both we and PUBG STUDIOS felt it was missing to make the game feel like PAYDAY.

The idea to jump in and play shaped a lot of decisions in the project for example in the redesigns of the levels, especially "No Rest for the Wicked" AKA "The Exchange" where we removed the thermite, this helps the players to be more open and agile in how they play the level. You still need to defend the drill but it gets interrupted less often, and you can't break it by adding too much fuel. We also don't have skill trees so we opted for class unlocks, similar to how PAYDAY: The Heist worked. We wanted the players to get into the game as fast as possible with minimum hurdles.

PAYDAY-style gameplay relies heavily on tension, coordination, and escalation. How did you adapt those pacing principles into PUBG’s existing gameplay framework?  

Gi Hwan Park: In battle royale, survival is the goal — but in a heist, you need to complete a full arc: secure the objective and get out. The structure is fundamentally different, and if players approach it like a typical PUBG match, the heist simply doesn't work. Our biggest focus was making objective-driven play feel natural. We built a structure where coordinating roles and pushing through objectives in sequence is far more effective than raw combat skill — and we worked closely with the Starbreeze team throughout to make sure PUBG's signature tension remained alive within that framework.

Tobias Remmers: We wanted to strike a middle ground; PUBG movement is very deliberate which works great in the setting of the game, but for PAYDAY we needed faster, more agile movement since we don't fight against other players but a large number of AI enemies. One of the aspects of tension that we lifted from PAYDAY’s design are where the enemies fluctuate with the assault waves, and you can get specials that punish specific behavior. If you are going alone, the cloaker enemy can quickly punish you for being too bold and appear when you least expect it. His kicks are dangerous but allow the rest of the team to come to your aid. If you stay in a group these enemies are much easier to overcome as speed and stealth is easily overcome in numbers. On the other hand, the dozer has ways to punish players that group up together. His charge and melee attack are dangerous, when players are too close together he even has an AOE ability to trap you when he gets close, but with quick action and coordination even dozers can be dealt with quickly!  

The optimal gameplay is to group around the objectives and help each other as a team. You wanna cover each approach where enemies can attack from and not be so close to each other that you run the risk of getting flanked by special or hitting each other with grenades. The gadgets are built to give benefits to the whole team as long as you are close to each other. We were aware that many would be playing with a random group of heisters, so we did not want to punish a lack of communication, especially when playing on the normal difficulty. But once you feel ready to step up to hard then coordination and a few unlocks will be greatly beneficial to you as the number of enemies and the damage they deal is increased.

The mode introduces five distinct classes—Assault, Medic, Tank, Marksman, and Ghost. How are these roles structured mechanically to encourage teamwork and different playstyles?  

Tobias Remmers:The classes are meant to play off each other and support the group especially their activatable ability and gadgets. A group of skilled and coordinated players could be unstoppable. We wanted them to excel at different things to strengthen the feeling of a crew, at the same time we did not want to force team compositions. If you want to run two tanks and two assaults you can but you will feel that lack of a medic if you start to go down. On the flip side multiple medics can keep each other alive, but without a tank or assault they will struggle with pure firepower. This also goes into the fact that there are five classes for a team of four so there is always a choice. Even if the Ghost has skills that have a great benefit to stealth there is a place for him as a flanker in combat as well.  

Of course this is greatly different from PAYDAY 3 and while the theory of crafting the ultimate skill build and loadout is a lot of fun, we felt it added complexity and mental commitment that were at odds with the arcade style gameplay we wanted. What we wanted was to promote teamwork and a sense of progression to deliver on that core aspect of PAYDAY without overloading the player with choice when they just want to jump in and play. So by looking at the classes of PAYDAY The Heist we felt we had the perfect middle ground where you can work through the class, get stronger weapons and earn more skills to increase you and your team’s survivability chances! All without needing to read through lots of skill descriptions just to get started.

One of the mode’s most interesting aspects is the ability to approach missions stealthily or transition into full combat. How do you design levels and AI systems to support both approaches simultaneously?  

Tobias Remmers: When building a game playable in both stealth and loud you effectively need to create two games at once especially if you want unique objectives in the two modes. This is what makes PAYDAY the best heist experience on the market. There are multiple factors to consider for level design, you need different routes and covers to hide behind that at the same time serve as ways to avoid bullets and detection. In addition to layout, the level script becomes increasingly complicated the more different stealth is from loud. In this case scope, time and budget for things like VO can increase quickly!

The initial scope for the project had a very simple stealth system and one path of objectives. We later wanted to increase the complexity of stealth and make levels completable in stealth. This added a lot of complications in terms of AI and detection that were not planned for originally.  

When building levels for both stealth and loud gameplay there are some key aspects to consider. Ways to hide, traverse the level, and circumnavigate the enemies are very important aspects of the level design. Of course AI in stealth and loud vary very differently, as mentioned with the systems, you need to design two enemies, one guard for stealth and one enemy for loud both in the same entity. In stealth enemies and security cameras are not direct combat threats, they are obstacles that you can either remove or avoid. Therefore there is only one type of enemy present in stealth, in addition to cameras, and since variety comes with higher complexity to implement we rather put that variety in loud enemies and level design. In stealth enemies often follow paths as they patrol and can investigate points of interest like drills, cameras placed at key locations, and points of high player traffic. Once it goes loud the guard’s brain gets replaced with one that works very differently specifically programmed for combat.

From a technical standpoint, what engine systems or backend technologies were most important in supporting a more scripted, objective-driven multiplayer experience inside PUBG?  

Tobias Remmers: Our experience from PAYDAY 3 with the Unreal engine was a great help with starting the project. Of course there were some hurdles, most companies modify the engine to their needs, and to get a new team onboarded on the engine, even if they know the foundation is not without its difficulties. However our team was able to get up and running fast. They showed their skill and technical talent when getting familiar around the PUBG codebase and with a clear direction for the project we got to work. We needed some time to recreate and sometimes even partly move over features and functionality from PAYDAY 3 and make it work in PUBG.  

For example, when we created the AI for the enemies the way we needed it for a PAYDAY style experience, it was easier to build a brand new AI feature rather than make adjustments to existing systems. Developing AI systems is very difficult and time consuming. Same goes for the objective systems where PUBG has a fundamentally different core loop, and the systems that support that differ greatly from PAYDAY so a lot of core systems needed to be built. Just how to load the levels was not an easy question to answer due to the vast delta in level script complexity and scale of the maps between the two games.

Can you walk us through your workflow for building a PAYDAY mission—from early concept and greyboxing to final gameplay scripting and polish?  

Tobias Remmers: Normally a heist starts as an idea for a location or heist experience and then a paper design that gives an overview of the heist, its objectives, layout and high-level narrative. Then we start building the ‘greybox’ layout of the level to get a feeling of the player experience, objective flow and combat design. After the early stages of the heist have been completed we can start the objective scripting and art process.

The scripting is a very complicated process to make sure all triggers and objectives interact properly. As the heist can go loud at any time, it should be able to switch to the correct objective flow with a new set of voice lines and triggers for the various combat systems.  

The greater the difference between loud and stealth the more complex this is, especially if we want some progress made in stealth to be retained when going loud. The further along the heist production progresses the fewer opportunities you have to make large adjustments to objectives, VO or general level flow. Once in the polishing phase most triggers and flows are locked in and we focus more on the heist experience as a whole, tweaking timers on drills, enemy spawners, objective reminders, adding waypoints and adjusting payouts.  

We looked at the levels in PAYDAY 3 and selected a set that would offer unique environments, mood and heisting fantasies. Once we had our set of heists that we wanted to work on for PUBG the art department could start the process of porting them over to the version of Unreal that PUBG uses. During this progress the designers were making the adjustments needed to the overall level layout. This meant we did not need to greybox and it saved us a lot of time in the combat design phase as well. When it came to gameplay, our designers looked closely at the heist features that needed to be adapted or adjusted for the heist to make them work in the PUBG version. Some of the more complex mechanics from PAYDAY 3 were reworked or designed around to create a more streamlined and snappy gameplay for an arcade heisting experience. This resulted in a less complex feature set and objective flow.  

When we wanted to add a more involved stealth phase for the game we added in triggers to the levels to change behaviors and VO lines, but adding new objectives were unfortunately outside the scope of the project.

PUBG is traditionally built around large open spaces, while PAYDAY-style gameplay thrives in dense, controlled environments. How did that difference influence your level design and environment art pipeline?  

Tobias Remmers: Not that much since both games run on Unreal, even if it's a different version. We used existing heists from PAYDAY 3 that we redesigned for PUBG and luckily the difference in gameplay between the game did not affect art or level design in a significant way. However, since we really wanted to include the night scene at the bridge of Road Rage, with its stark contrast to the other three levels. This heist did have some significant design considerations, as in PAYDAY 3 there is a single truck that moves along the bridge, this was a very complicated and difficult feature to create initially in PUBG. We therefore needed to find an alternative design for this heist that kept the same feeling and heist fantasy of Road Rage. We took inspiration from Green Bridge and Armored Transport from PAYDAY 2 and PAYDAY The Heist, this allowed us to keep the feeling of ambushing a convoy and moving across the bridge without moving the truck. We really liked this variant of the heist, and it felt suitable for a more arcade-style experience where players are not forced to stay with the truck throughout most of the heist.

Other complications, as mentioned, came from the fundamental systems of loading the levels. Where PAYDAY levels have very complicated scripts that prefer to run their course once started, this actually caused some issue with the level voting... We could not have all heists be the same level but we also wanted the players to vote on the heist they wanted to play. Eventually, together with PUBG STUDIOS we found a solution that worked for both parties to first load into the safehouse, vote on a level, and based on the vote move to the appropriate heist.

PAYDAY is one of the most recognizable co-op heist franchises in games. How did the team approach honoring that identity while still ensuring the mode felt distinctly PUBG?  

Gi Hwan Park: The most important factor was having Starbreeze — the team that knows PAYDAY inside and out — directly involved in development. Rather than PUBG attempting to approximate what PAYDAY feels like, we took the approach of bringing the core PAYDAY experience into PUBG's world.

Tobias Remmers: Making the game mode feel accessible to both PUBG players and PAYDAY players was something we were very conscious of. For example, we only used PUBG weapons and made sure to have a similar power scaling of the weapons that PUBG players would be used to while still tweaking the weapons to be suitable for the PvE gameplay. There was a lot of discussion in the development team about locking the view to First Person, only like in PAYDAY, or allowing the player to choose First Person or Third Person like in PUBG. Here we made a decision on allowing both and to let the player choose.  

To emphasize the PAYDAY feel we made sure to have some of our iconic heister masks in the game, they are associated with one of the classes and by default when you choose a class you use the class mask. Another aspect of PAYDAY that we really wanted to capture and bring over was the music. We made remixed versions of PAYDAY tracks for PUBG as we wanted it to feel distinctly PAYDAY, while still being fresh and exciting to players from both franchises.

From a production standpoint, what were the biggest lessons learned from collaborating with another major game studio and adapting an established IP into PUBG’s ecosystem?  

Gi Hwan Park: We connected with Starbreeze through a broad exploration of potential partners, and as conversations developed, we found that the core fun of both games aligned far more naturally than we'd expected. Beyond simply collaborating with a well-known IP, what struck us most throughout this process was how a partner studio's unique development expertise and philosophy can become a direct driving force in creating something new within PUBG.

Tobias Remmers: Two things come to mind. Firstly trust and communication being the cornerstone in a great collaboration, and we had a great collaboration with our friends at PUBG STUDIOS. It’s rare a project will ever launch in the exact same state as outlined in the initial contract or Statement of Work and having an open communication about changes and opportunities for pivots and improvements are critical to a good partnership. Especially when you are located in such different time zones as Sweden and Korea. We were very lucky to have a partner team with us on this journey that were able to help with both technical and directional questions.

The second thing was how this project really gave us an opportunity to reflect on PAYDAY as an IP. What makes PAYDAY what it is. Rather than recreating every heist one-to-one and fully porting all enemies and skills from PAYDAY 3 into PUBG, we focused on adapting the core PAYDAY experience to fit PUBG’s gameplay style. So where do we draw the line? In the initial discussion and throughout the project this came up a lot: what did we want this project to be and how do we make sure it feels PAYDAY? Naturally, there were slightly different views on the IP and finding that core PAYDAY experience and delivering it into PUBG was a very interesting, challenging and exciting assignment!

Looking ahead, do you see modes like PAYDAY as part of a broader push to expand PUBG beyond traditional battle royale experiences?

Gi Hwan Park: Yes, absolutely. Evolving PUBG from a single battle royale title into a gameplay platform capable of housing diverse genres and experiences was the fundamental starting point for this collaboration. Going forward, we want to continue creating broader experiences within PUBG alongside a variety of partners.

PUBG Studios and Starbreeze Entertainment

Interview conducted by David Jagneaux