Overkill Software is adopting a brand new way to upgrade your stats, get new weapons and get new weapon skins. They have an update called The Black Market, where Vlad's safes will allow players to unlock all new cosmetic gear that will also boost stats.
The news was made over on the Payday 2 website and it was accompanied by a six minute short film that you can check out below, which describes ever-so-briefly what the content update is about.
Vlad's weapons contain a number of different skins for a wide variety of the game's very extensive cache of side-arms, shotguns, assault rifles and sniper rifles.
Different skins can actually boost the stats of the weapon when the skin is applied. On the update page they use the example of a M308 rifle, and then show that with a skin applied, the weapon receives a 4+ boost in stability. With certain mods and the skin, the M308 rifle receives a damage bonus, lesser concealment and the stability boost.
On the Payday 2 website page they describe how to acquire the skins and where the come from, stating...
Vlad’s operation is smuggling brand-new, precision-engineered Safes from Washington state to Washington D.C. But these safes are tough to open. Only the best heisters, with the right tool, can crack them.Each safe drops a slick weapon skin, and each skin may have special mods and a stat boost associated with it. Sometimes, very rarely, a safe may even contain a precious Legendary skin.
Players will have to acquire special drills in order to unlock the safes. Without the drills the safes cannot be opened. Acquiring the safes themselves will sometimes happen during the end of a heist when players are flipping through the random cards at the end of a match.
While this might seem cool, a lot of Payday 2 veterans feel this moves the game closer into Counter-Strike: Global Offensive territory. According to some gamers, this new method focuses more on stat boosting through the skins than the simple enjoyment of unlocking new skins through the traditional method.
However, for those of you out there who feel as if Payday 2 is turning too much into Counter-Strike with this method, Overkill Software will be introducing a new Steam Workshop page for the game. That's right, you will be able to modify and create your own custom skin modifications for the weapons and host them through the Workshop.
I think that's a nice offset to the whole safe thing, because for people who don't care much for the safes they'll at least be able to get their hands on some brand new skins through the Steam Workshop page.
Overkill didn't put a date on when the Workshop would go live, but they did mention that it's coming soon. You can learn more about the new stat-boosting skins for Payday 2 by paying a visit to the official website.
