Payday 3 developer Starbreeze Entertainment has announced the addition of an offline mode to the game. However, it's worth noting that this offline mode still requires an online connection to access and reportedly runs less smoothly than usual. According to VG247, Starbreeze has responded to criticism about the game being online-only by introducing a feature called the Solo Mode Beta.

This mode will be updated over time, seemingly to make it an actual offline mode at some point, but for now, players are required to be connected to the internet in order to access it and they won't receive progression rewards until they connect again. "Solo mode will be improved once we improve this feature," head of community and global brand director Almir Listo stated in a developer update.

"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 front-loaded by our servers will now have to be run on your 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 Solo Mode Beta will be released alongside the Boys in Blue update on June 27th, 2024. It will feature a new playable character, new weapons, and more.

The launch of Payday 3 in September 2023 was a disaster, as the game was plagued with numerous server issues. Starbreeze CEO Tobias Sjögren issued an apology, acknowledging that the infrastructure didn't hold up as expected. Shortly after, Sjögren left the company. About a month after the launch, Starbreeze apologized again for its lack of communication. A week later, they apologized once more for failing to deliver a promised patch and then went silent. In January 2024, the company acknowledged the dissatisfaction of their fans.

As of October 2, 2023, Starbreeze reported that Payday 3 had 3.1 million players. However, the number of players has decreased since then, particularly on Steam. Currently, most players are opting to play Payday 2 over its sequel. According to SteamDB, Payday 3 has had a 24-hour peak of only 565 players, whereas Payday 2, a game launched over a decade ago, had 21,584 players during the same time period.