PAYDAY 2: A Year of Planned DLC & Female Robbers

Female characters possibly joining the career cast of criminals!

(Please note that header image is not a planned DLC character, but rather ZC Girls Bank Robber Carol, which is done in similar detail to the PAYDAY crew.)

Overkill Studios is living the high life with profits from PAYDAY 2 – this, when the much-hyped sequel to the 2011 PAYDAY: The Heist was released only yesterday!

Following in the hit footsteps of its predecessor, PAYDAY 2 brings back the four-player co-op shooter model within a series of action-packed heist missions. The original crew is back, and Washington DC is their new high-stakes criminal playground. But this time they’ve expanded the original premise, allowing you access to the criminal CRIMENET database that lets you choose what kind of crimes you and your crew will take on.

Choices range from simple jewelry store heists to big-time bank vaults a la Saints Row and Grand Theft Auto, employing an easy to hard difficulty rating to help cull the inexperienced from the veterans. Similar expanded customizability has been added across the board, from the design of your character to your guns and character loadout. 

And it’s only going to get bigger.

The stock release of the game already takes the heist fantasy to newer, bigger heights, even channeling a little Walter White with the inclusion of a meth job as a tribute to the television success story of Breaking Bad. But Overkill intends to increase the replayability even further.

As Game Director David Goldfarb from Overkill told OXM, they have a year’s worth of DLC already planned for the new title. The first, “Armored Transport” will be free for all pre-order customers, but the price for non-preorders has not yet been announced.

When questioned further, Goldfarb also revealed that the inclusion of at least one female character is definitely in the works, and in fact one of the top priorities.

“[A]ctually that’s one of the first things I have on my list, is to make sure we get a female character. I’m hoping–I don’t know if we’ll get it as our first DLC, because we’d have to redo all the animations so it doesn’t look like a dude walking around with a female body. But I’d like to do that.”

Regardless of whether or not ladies are making it onto the team in the first DLC release, according to Goldfarb it is only a question of when. 

“Because I want, like I said, I want my daughters to be able to – no, I’d need to wait a bit for that [considering the M-rating of the title] – but in theory, it’d be cool for them to mask up. I just think it’d be cool if we had both, that’s all. It’s definitely on our list. One of the many things that are on our list.”

Unlike PAYDAY: The Heist which was only released on the PS3 and on Steam for PC, this time around you can find PAYDAY 2 across the map: the PS3, the front page of Steam… and it also debuts on the Xbox 360 for the very first time.

For Xbox fans already leaping for their controllers, be aware that you won’t find this title on Xbox Live. It is strictly retail box only. 

“The problem with the original digital release plan was that they have a limit of, I think it’s 2.4GB or something. And our release is like 14GB. So that wasn’t happening. [laughs] So we were like, “OK we’re not going to be Xbox Live”. Originally we were Xbox Live, pfff. So it became – when we started really working on it just after I got there, I think it became more and more clear, as the days passed, that the game was just [makes expanding motions with hands] and then it was just huge. So there was nothing we could do to get it on all platforms but to have it for retail.”

Here’s hoping the character will be less Christina Ricci in Monster and more Michelle Rodriguez in The Fast and the Furious.