Payday 2 first launched back in 2013, and more than a decade later it’s about to get a ground-up engine overhaul. Sidetrack Games, the team now developing the co-op heist shooter, announced a major engine upgrade today that it’s calling Diesel 3.0. Leon, the studio’s lead engine tools developer and one of its directors, described it as a full rewrite of the game’s codebase, the product of nine months of work since Sidetrack took the project over.
By far the biggest of those changes is the long-requested jump to a 64-bit architecture, which Leon says has topped community wishlists for the better part of a decade. The switch should put an end to the Out of Memory crashes that have plagued the game for years. Sidetrack has also moved the engine from DirectX 9 to DirectX 11, a change that won’t alter how the game looks but drops texture memory usage to roughly 1.2GB of VRAM, so it should run noticeably better on lower-end hardware.
Since the move to 64-bit and a new rendering backend forces a full re-download anyway, Sidetrack used the chance to rebuild the game’s packaging and bundling from scratch. The result is an install cut from 86GB down to around 32GB, less than half of what it was. Faster load times on SSDs are also part of the update, along with smaller quality-of-life touches like six-character lobby codes.
All of these changes will be playable in a Diesel 3.0 open beta running from June 30 until the end of July, available to Steam users to start. Sidetrack plans to put out a separate forum post explaining how to switch to the beta branch and submit feedback, with more details promised on the 30th. The studio also admitted that a change this substantial will inevitably break some mods, so it’s encouraging modders to spend the beta window repairing what they can while the team helps out with the new file formats.
What stands out to me here is the timing, especially as someone who watched Payday 3 stumble out of the gate in 2023. We managed a few genuinely fun hours back then before the matchmaking problems set in, and I wrote in a feature at the time that the worst part of the disastrous launch was that the game underneath was actually really fun to play. The always-online requirement, the server issues, and the mandatory Nebula account drowned all of that out.
Even after the matchmaking eventually got fixed, the sequel never managed to pull the community off of Payday 2. So watching a 13-year-old game get a full engine rewrite, while Payday 3 never became the series’ main draw the way a sequel should, it’s hard not to conclude that the newer game just never caught up.
