I'm not a payday person so I have no horse in this race, but this is still such utter horseshit. The more games that continue to do this where it is completely unnecessary, the further away the date is when devs stop doing this bullshit.

but I do believe you will have to have a connection in order to play cause it's made in the Unreal Engine, it's using cross-progression, crossplay, I do believe we need you to be online," said Listo.

this person should be a politician

Well, fuck you and your shitty game then. Wasn't interested in the first place, but this kills any possibility of that ever changing.

Yup. I'm gonna wait for the crack then. Those usually enable offline play for obvious reasons

This game went from a "maybe" to a "never" for me. Great job, Overkill.

Payday 2: Terrible Performance and Optimization Part 2: Pay Overkill and Buy Another Always-Online Game

Remastered

So too do far too many other games.

Usually because they want to sell you cosmetics and other junk and the only way to ensure you don't just mod it in for free is to make the game phone home and verify itself constantly.

Whatever, PAYDAY 2 was already going to be the better game at launch, might as well make it the only one worth playing at all.