LogInTobias Bodlund, a Narrative Lead at Starbreeze Studios, told us how the team has worked long-term with the narrative in PAYDAY to maintain and strengthen the franchise experience and deliver those intense moments and narrative high points that get players excited.
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Nine years after its release, PAYDAY 2 consistently remains one of the most played games on Steam and maintains strong popularity on consoles as well. There are various reasons - the fun and intense co-op gameplay, the strong franchise characters and narrative, the way the music reinforces the action, and also of course the powerful core fantasy of being a badass bank robber taking on the full force of the law and getting away with it.
In this brief article, I’ll talk a little about how we at Starbreeze have worked long-term with the narrative in PAYDAY to maintain and strengthen the franchise experience over time as well as deliver those intense moments and narrative high points that get players excited and make them come back for more of that exciting feeling of gleeful criminal impunity.
It all begins with the core fantasy of the experience - being a daring bank robber, or a heister as we call them. PAYDAY is in its essence a story about awesome criminals and loveable rogues. You can call it neo-noir with a positive vibe, or you can call it a picaresque, but it comes back to the same emotion: Sometimes it just feels so good to be bad. The protagonists are people who challenge society and the forces of law and order, use their skills to take what they want, and never apologize for any of it. It’s powerful since in this fiction you can identify with the awesome bad guy and it’s fine, it’s just fiction. Because in real life you’re a person who’s nice to people, and you don’t rob banks (right?).
And as with any strong video game aiming for quality narrative elements, the themes and conflicts in the story need to match what happens in the gameplay. In a game like PAYDAY where the gameplay revolves around a mix of breaking into vaults, picking locks, taking hostages, and engaging in super intense FPS combat, the main narrative conflicts need to be resolvable by… well, stealing stuff and/or shooting at people.
Much of the strength in it also comes from the characters that populate the PAYDAY universe. In a world where we emphasize greed, corruption, crime, and robbery, we naturally created a motley crew of charismatic tough guys and gals capable of taking on any amount of cops that we can throw at them. Having started as the original group of Dallas, Chains, Hoxton, and Wolf in PAYDAY: The Heist, the gang in PAYDAY 2 expanded over time to include no less than 22 heisters from all over the world.
While there’s such a thing as a core set of values that define a heister (professionalism, fearlessness, loyalty, to name a few), the Payday Gang is also a very diverse and varied group. With different ages, backgrounds, attitudes, vices, and tastes, there’s a heister of every flavor, each one their particular breed of a charming misfit.
We believe it’s one of the main factors that has made the gang so immensely loved by fans over time: the diversity of the crew and the implicit message that it’s what you can do that counts, not where you’re from. The gang is a chosen family and therefore the loyalty is absolute and unbreakable.
In addition to the main cast of the heisters, there’s an extensive gallery of secondary and minor characters - operators, contacts, gun merchants, informers, mercenaries, cops… the list keeps growing every year and with every DLC. For us, every character in the universe is a potential participant or reference in the next story we tell. We treat the world as alive and breathing, all the characters have their agendas and almost anything can happen.
To leverage this great cast of characters in the PAYDAY universe, we like to work with the principle of character-driven storytelling. That means that it’s what the characters want that drives the story, and where their plans clash is where the main conflicts arise.
So PAYDAY becomes a story about robbing banks and getting paid, pulling daring heists for money, but also about rescuing friends in trouble and sometimes just raw revenge. In addition, there’s a strong element of looking for that criminal prestige - when you successfully rob the biggest bank in the country, the FBI main office, or the effing White House, then you know you’re not just an average crook but a member of an elite group of professional criminals.
PAYDAY 2 has had a long lifetime and is still going as strong as ever. Throughout the many years of updates and DLC content, we’ve kept telling new stories in the formats that we think best fit the franchise. In the past few years, we’ve created yearly story arcs around heist releases, similar to seasons in a TV show, as the Payday Gang has left its home in Washington DC and traveled to Mexico, San Francisco, and Texas, each such yearly story arc exploring its themes and introducing new allies and antagonists for the gang. The PAYDAY universe keeps expanding.
It’s been one hell of a journey so far and there’s more to come. Even as I write this, our team is busy creating even more content for PAYDAY 2 as well as the upcoming sequel PAYDAY 3. We always work with a long-term perspective, building the universe with longevity and consistency in mind.
At Starbreeze, we’re always planning another heist.