Microtransaction Mishap: Payday 2's 'Safe' Skin Tweak

We can be fairly certain that affordable time travel won't exist within our lifetimes because Payday 2 [official site] developers Overkill Software evidently haven't travelled back to last week and erase their mistake of adding microtransactions to unlock more-powerful versions of guns. If they had, memories of CS:GO-style weapon crates and keys concealing a random selection of garish weapon skins with better stats would fade away. No, clearly we don't have time travel, because instead they're now fiddling with the heist FPS's safe system a bit, trying to placate riled-up players.

Heisters can now earn keys (or 'drills', in its terminology) to unlock crates ('safes') for free as they play, rather than having to buy or trade for them. It's a start.

To briefly recap: last week, Overkill added 'safes' which contain a random new weapon skin from a selection, which make the gun look fancy but could also have stats that were simply better than their unskinned original form. They're not massively better, but they're better. These safes were randomly dropped as heist rewards in the place of actually useful unlocks, and initially cost £2-ish to open. Paying real money for a chance to randomly get a better weapon is a bummer, especially considering Overkill had once said Payday 2 wouldn't have microtransactions.

So! The development: a patch yesterday included this change:

"Added Drills to the Card Loot Drop reward table. Players can now be rewarded with Drills that can open Safes after successfully completing a heist."

It's a start, but they're still hiding the game's best guns away behind something they hope you'll pay real money to bypass. I'd suggest they also remove the stat boosts from skins and make them purely cosmetic, make safes and drills come in addition to regular heist reward loot, then apologise for this shoddy nonsense. Cosmetic skins in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive are big business so it's not like Overkill don't have a good role model.

This change comes as Payday 2 continues to roll through its ten days of updates for the Crimefest event, which so far has added new weapons, new masks, a remake of a classic Payday map, and a new heist set after an earthquake.

The game's on sale too, down to £3.74. It really is quite good, this tomfoolery aside. Though it was a bit weird when it went Wild West-y.