Minutes after playing Payday: Aces High for the first time, we talked to Fast Travel Games’ Chief Creative Officer Erik Odeldahl about the design philosophies behind the upcoming co-op heist shooter.
The interview is on this week’s UploadVR Gamescast with James Tocchio and me. This interview was conducted on August 12 immediately following our media session and held under coverage embargo until now.
Below are some highlights from the nearly forty-minute conversation.
How much content to expect at launch
Erik Odeldahl: You basically start the game with six heists and five difficulty levels. You can play them stealthily or go loud. We will launch another heist very soon after launch, and then we’ll keep supporting it. So, we’ve got a really good plan to basically keep the game active. We’re not just launching heists. There’s going to be other stuff, which I’m not sure my marketing department wants me to talk about.
Making hard choices on features to cut
Erik Odeldahl: What we decided early on to skip in our implementation, basically, we want to focus on the guns. We want to focus on gadgets. We want to focus on physical interactions. There’s a hostage exchange thing where you can take customers at a bank hostage and buy yourself time before the security come and cops come swarming in. And we basically removed that because one thing that is super hard in VR is to physically interact with other NPCs without it becoming a bit janky. And we really didn’t want this game to be janky.
Also, we felt that we wanted a slightly higher tempo than the flat as well, a bit more hectic, a bit more intense. So that was the one thing we decided early on to actually take out of the design and instead focus and basically try to give players other means of staving off security and more stealth options.
On researching heists during development
Erik Odeldahl: I bought a book, which I can’t remember the name of, but it’s an amazing book which is basically like the city from the eyes of a thief. It’s like how you scale these walls. You know, the walls are beautiful for you and me, but for a thief, they’re perfect.
And when we did research for the game, there’s a classical museum in the game which is very much inspired by the National Museum of Art in Stockholm. And we had a guided tour with the entire team. At the end of the tour, he was like, “Do you have any questions for me?” There was a famous art theft in the late ’90s, I think, there. So we were basically, “How did they get in? Where’s your security room? Where can, you know, if we wanted to disable the cameras or steal the footage, where would we go?” And that got a bit awkward.
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Note: the art theft Erik is referring to happened in December 2000.
Get the full interview on our YouTube channel or your preferred podcast platform.
