Payday 3 has cop negotiations where you can use hostages to buy time and resources

Payday 3 will let you take hostages during your bank robbery in order to buy time before the shootouts with the cops begin.

The addition of hostages was teased in the first Payday 3 gameplay trailer, but we've gotten a few more details as part of a new dev diary. Lead producer Andreas Häll-Penninger explains that in the new negotiation phase, "first responders arrive to the scene, and if you have hostages, you can start trading them to buy time before the cops get in. Or you can save the hostages for later, because you can trade them for resources."

This is part of an effort to make the distinction between 'stealth' and 'loud' gameplay less binary than it was in previous Payday games. There will also be a search phase, where a bank's security guards will start to become aware that something's wrong and begin actively searching for you.

Payday 3 is set to launch, 2,670 days after it was announced, on September 21. It's coming to PC, PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and it'll be available day one on Game Pass. Fans have been waiting a long, long time for a proper follow-up to Payday 2, and it looks like the devs are making some smart additions to a popular formula.

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Dustin Bailey joined the GamesRadar team as a Staff Writer in May 2022, and is currently based in Missouri. He's been covering games (with occasional dalliances in the worlds of anime and pro wrestling) since 2015, first as a freelancer, then as a news writer at PCGamesN for nearly five years. His love for games was sparked somewhere between Metal Gear Solid 2 and Knights of the Old Republic, and these days you can usually find him splitting his entertainment time between retro gaming, the latest big action-adventure title, or a long haul in American Truck Simulator.