Back in 2025, Starbreeze turned its venerable heist-shooter Payday 2 over to a new studio, Sidetrack Games, so it could focus exclusively on trying to salvage the still-struggling Payday 3. Today we got our first look at the fruits of those efforts, and it's big news—not for Payday 3, to be clear, but for Payday 2, which is getting a major overhaul to its game engine.
The engine update will see Payday 2 ported to a 64-bit architecture, which should eliminate out-of-memory crashes that have persisted over the years, and upgraded to DirectX 11 rendering—that won't make the game look any better but it will use significantly less VRAM and thus run better on lower-end hardware. The install size has also been reduced by more than half, from 86GB to 32GB.
