Payday 2 celebrates its fifth anniversary with a week of new criminal content
Your name in lights! If your name is Joy.
Five years ago, co-op FPS crime 'em up Payday 2 was a scrawny little thing with only a few missions to its name. Now it's a massive, still expanding ball of hyper-criminality featuring permanent crossovers with five film universes, arguably putting Reservoir Dogs in John Wick canon. To celebrate its fifth anniversary today, developers Overkill are rolling out a week of free updates, starting with cyber-masked heister lady Joy, formerly exclusive to the Switch version. The Ultimate edition of the game (including almost all DLC) is also 80% off for the week.
New character Joy's mask may not be quite as fancy as the one worn by the guy in Ruiner, but it does allow her to be an enormous walking pun. Right now she's the only part of the Icebreaker content released, but the event page does give us a little peek at things to come, including the theme of a big new heist. Looks like we're continuing the increasingly National Treasure-ish main story arc, and going after an ancient, impossibly advanced Astrolabe being auctioned at a fancy black tie event.
For those fashionably late to the party, Payday 2's main story arc has gotten a bit weird over the past year or so. On top of the usual government and police forces gunning for them, the Payday gang have fallen foul of the Kataru, an Illuminati-esque organisation who have apparently been around for millennia. It's bizarre, oddball stuff but somehow it fits right in, considering this is where Jacket from Hotline Miami can bust in on scenes from 2015's Point Break remake. In Payday 2, everything's up for grabs.
While you could get the bare-bones version of Payday 2 for £3.74/€5/$5 on Steam, I'd highly recommend springing for the Ultimate Edition, currently £11.39/€15.14/$15.14. It includes all of the game's DLC, minus a single cross-promotional bit featuring some YouTuber I'm not too familiar with. The discounts will run until Sunday (August 19th), and more free content will be landing on Wednesday (August 15th) and Friday (August 17th).