Payday 3 developer Starbreeze Entertainment is finally adding what it’s called an “offline mode” to the game but it requires an online connection to access and runs worse than normal.

As reported by VG247, Starbreeze claims to have finally addressed the “online only” criticism by adding what it’s dubbed the Solo Mode Beta.

The mode will be updated over time, seemingly to make it a legitimate offline mode at some point, but for now players must be connected to the internet to access it and they won’t receive progression rewards until they connect again. When will these updates come? “[Solo mode] will be improved once we improve this feature,” head of community and global brand director Almir Listo said in a developer update video.

You will still be required to start the game while online in Solo Mode, which will be improved once we improve this feature.

“It’s not our full vision for this feature,” he began. “For now, we’re setting it as a beta to see how it runs. We expect the performance to be affected since the parts normally frontloaded by our servers will now have to be run on your own hardware.

“It will work though, and you can get progression that will update you once you return online. You will still be required to start the game while online in Solo Mode, which will be improved once we improve this feature. For now though, we want to test that the features that went into this work work properly.”

The initial release of the Solo Mode Beta will be released as part of a greater patch to go alongside the Boys in Blue update, which adds a new playable character, weapons, and more on June 27, 2024.

Payday 3’s launch in September 2023 was somewhat of a disaster, plagued with server issues that forced then Starbreeze CEO Tobias Sjögren to apologise. “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,” he said (but has now left the company).

Almost a month after its launch and Starbreeze apologised again for its lack of communication, and then just a week later said sorry one more time for not delivering a promised patch and again going quiet. It said in January 2024 it was “well aware” fans weren’t satisfied.

Starbreeze boasted Payday 3 had 3.1 million players as of October 2, 2023, but this number has dwindled, at least on Steam, as many more players are currently playing Payday 2 than its sequel. According to SteamDB, Payday 3 has a 24-hour peak of just 565 compared to Payday 2’s 21,584, despite the latter launching over a decade ago.

Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelance reporter. He’ll talk about The Witcher all day.