I almost robbed a bank when I was a teenager. I’m not going to get into too many specifics, but we had the whole thing worked out for weeks ahead of time, and it was a pretty solid plan. The guy leading the robbery, my friend’s older brother, had already successfully knocked over two banks the prior month, and had been casing a third bank for a while. This was going to be a bigger, riskier job, hence him bringing in the two of us, and I was just young and stupid enough to think we could get away with it. A week before the heist, the police finally caught up with him from one of the previous robberies. A SWAT team broke down the door to his mom’s house and dragged him off to jail, so my friend and I decided we should probably call the whole thing off.
Robbing a bank and making off with millions is a powerful fantasy. Most of us would never actually do it (or even plan to do it) but we’ve all at least thought about how we would pull it off, and dreamt about what we would do with the money. There’ve been countless movies about robbing banks, and it’s no surprise that the Payday series is so wildly successful either. There’s nearly 50,000 people playing Payday 2 on Steam right now, a decade after it first released, which goes to show how thrilling and alluring the idea of robbing banks is to most people.
Related:Payday 3 Devs Want Collaborations With Batman And Die Hard
I’ve never been big on the Payday games myself. Partly, I’m just now realizing, because I may have some unaddressed guilt (I’ll unpack that with my therapist later) but also because I think they do a bad job of representing what’s so exciting about robbing banks. In my bank heist fantasy my team moves swiftly and efficiently, everyone working like a well-oiled machine. We know exactly what needs to be done, and we have a plan for every contingency. We’re surgical with our actions because we know we’re up against a clock, and losing a single second over negligence can be the difference between making off with a fortune or spending decades in prison. When we succeed it’s because we’re disciplined and prepared, and our escape is so perfectly planned that it leaves the police baffled.
In Payday’s version of a bank heist, you attempt to be as fast as you may, but always inevitably end up in a shootout in the middle of the street against an endless wave of NPC cops. No matter how prepared you are, every Payday map devolves into a Call of Duty match in the end. That’s not part of my bank robbing fantasy, and I wish there was a version of Payday that didn’t always end in a massacre.
Don’t get me wrong, shoot outs are great. Heat is the greatest bank heist movie of all time, and it ends with an incredible shootout between McCaley’s crew and the LAPD. That’s an incredibly well-choreographed action scene that shows what can happen when a bank robbery goes wrong. But even in Heat’s shootout, only a handful of people are killed. Meanwhile, Payday gives you no choice but to mow down an army of cops the second something goes wrong. They’ll flood into the bank in a single file line to attempt to stop you and they’ll pile up in the streets without any regard for cover just waiting for you to blow their heads off. The process of robbing a bank in Payday is merely a way to complicate and add layers to the process of shooting a hundred people in the face.
I get it, it’s a video game. I’m not weeping for all the digital cops that have been slain in Payday, and if you like doing that - as so many people clearly do - I’m not here to talk you out of it. But Payday is far from the bank heist simulator I wish it was, and even though it looks like Payday 3 is adding a lot of opportunities for stealthy gameplay, it’s still an action shooter that puts way too much emphasis on shooting.
I want a game that pulls from my favorite bank heist movies, like Inside Man, Dog Day Afternoon, and JCVD. I want to be able to case a bank to figure out its vulnerabilities, then create a plan of attack. I want bank tellers with dialogue trees and NPCs that react realistically to what’s happening to them. Some people will attempt to run, some people will try to fight, and you’ll have to be reactive and control the situation before it gets out of hand. I want a game with hostage negotiations and cops behaving realistically, not bots that run head first towards the sound of bullets. I want to play a game that accurately represents the fantasy of robbing a bank, not using robbing a bank as an excuse to go full Rambo on lightly-armored private security goons. If I’m never going to rob a bank for real, and I promise I won’t, it’d be nice to at least see how it would play out in a real bank heist video game. I had a really good plan, and I can prove it.
