PAYDAY 3: Blog Update #36 – First World Bank Recap & Insight from Ilija

Heisters, it looks like heist-santa is right on time ahead of the holidays!

First World Bank is coming to PAYDAY 3! Heck yea! Leading up to this heist, we saw a bunch of heisters requesting their favorites from the previous two games, and were always happy to see First World Bank mentioned often.

It’s always fun to see a legacy heist make a return, and we’ve used this line before, but having the same level across three games is really cool! The changes made between PAYDAY: The Heist and PAYDAY 2 were not as pronounced as they are now, in PAYDAY 3. We’re very happy with how the heist turned out, and hope you love it.

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Let’s recap what Almir and co-founder of OVERKILL and Lead Level Designer for the very first First World Bank heist, Ilija Petrusic, have said in the Dev Update & Interview. If you’d rather watch the full videos, they’re right here:

Watch Dev Update 10 Watch Ilija Interview

• Ilija provided both face, voice and name to Ilija the Sniper in PAYDAY 2.
• The PAYDAY series started with First World Bank. Ilija and Ulf were out for lunch, Ulf suggested making a bank robbery game, and they started on the heist the very same day.
• The team that created the first FWB were only 8 people, so Ilija created most of the environments meshes in addition to the heist itself.
• Ilija and the team created First World Bank, and all the heists for PAYDAY: The Heist in SketchUp.
• The first version of the heist had a much bigger outside area.
• The main layout idea was to have the 3 “wings” of the bank.
• The escape was initially way more involved, crossing several buildings escaping via helicopter.
• The team was watching a lot of Batman when they made PAYDAY: The Heist, and were planning for the escape to have 15 garbage trucks in the escape, but ran out of time.
• Ilija’s team at Lion Game Lion worked on Diamond District, and have now worked on all three PAYDAY games.
• It always bothered Ilija that the balconies in First World Bank weren’t connected to each other, they broke the flow of the heist.
• The version of the heist in PAYDAY 3 is slightly different from its previous two versions. It has improved player movement all around, as well as having some walls removed to make the stealth gameplay better.
• Ilija is not confident in his voice-acting abilities. But was helped by audio legend Simon Viklund who put him in a dark room with a recording device and told him to just count.
• Ilija doesn’t quite know what makes some heists more popular than others, but thinks that’s part of the charm of being a level designer.
• Ilija’s favorite heists from PAYDAY: The Heist are FWB, Green Bridge, Diamond Heist and from PAYDAY 2 it was Framing Frame Day 2.
• The first playtests of First World Bank didn’t click with the friends who were play-testing. They managed to fix it eventually.
• The “office” where they created PAYDAY wasn’t really an office, it was a basement without AC, meaning they had to keep the door open to not run out of air, sometimes getting strangers walking in. When they started the office microwave, a random computer would shut down.
• Ilija thinks the heist is successful partially because it so strongly fulfills the fantasy of robbing a bank.
• First World Bank was the heist the team used to tune the enemy AI, spawns and such, a possible reason why it feels so good, perhaps.

We also sent Ilija some questions after the interview with Almir that he was kind enough to answer for us:

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What was your favorite element of the new version of the heist?

I was really happy that we got a chance to fix some elements of the layout that always bugged me with the original; most notably, the balconies. Other than that, I think the team did a great job adapting the level and layout to all the new Payday 3 features while still staying true to the original.
Hopefully, players get to see something new, while the familiarity of the original is very much intact, which was our goal.

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Where does the name First World Bank come from?

Fairly early on in development on FWB (this is around 2009 – 2010) when we already had some of the map done and needed the artists to make logos, etc. for the bank, we just started coming up with names. I cannot remember who actually came up with the name, but I know that we liked it; it felt very much like a bank you would steal money from without feeling any guilt, if that makes sense. And also, it was very far from any real bank names we could find, which was another criterion for the name.

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Did you do any research/location scouting before making the original?

Tons of research on different banks, layouts, and vaults on Google and just the internet in general. I’m probably tagged somewhere on an FBI list for all the “bank layouts”, “bank security”, and “bank vault vulnerabilities” searches. I remember going to my actual bank to get something sorted during that time, and just looking around for cameras and the different offices, and just feeling, in general, very “guilty”.

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Are there any small details players might not notice?

There are a bunch of small tweaks to some placement of props and movement of environment pieces just to make the layout a little more friendly for stealth. But I think it’s more fun if the players find and notice those rather than me pointing them out.

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Did you consider adding 15 garbage trucks to this version?

Not really, but we were thinking about some other things, and I’m going to keep them secret so that maybe those ideas can be used in the future for new heists. One thing that I can say is that the original idea had the bank security actually carry the money to your vehicle if you managed to do the full heist in mask-off mode. But we had to cut it due to time and other technical issues; maybe for another heist.

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What gave you the idea for the insider originally?

We got the idea when we played Payday 3, and a security guard escorted us out of a private area (with the circle), and Ennio (our senior level designer) had the idea that maybe we can make that a feature where you have to follow a guy like that instead, and he takes you into some area which you cannot access otherwise. But again, time and technical issues are something that comes into play, and sometimes you just have to kill your darlings.

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Any hidden stuff in the original two heists that you’re not sure people know about?

There are probably “cheeses” all over. I can’t remember, but usually, when I work on a level, I make all the interactions with our temporary interaction box. It’s a 1x1m cube that is glowing, and when I replace those with actual content and real assets, I always get paranoia that something would break (because during development it usually does), and since Diesel didn’t have an undo feature, I would just keep those boxes around the level, like under the ground, etc. And some of those have been found by the community, and it’s such a fun, innocent little thing. But yeah, if there is anything, it’s probably cheeses.

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Well, heisters, that’s how the cheese crumbles. Now all that’s left is the release of First World Bank. Make sure to let us know what you think when you get your hands on it next month!

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