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Payday 2 gets a new update – with daily skins, a pager counter, Holdout changes

"Skins! Skins! Skins! and more skins!". Oh, and a pager counter.

Overkill’s 2013 shooter Payday 2 has just got a brand new update, bringing a fresh batch of content, features, tweaks, tinkerings, and fixes to the game. Highlights include “Happy Holdout” – that is, changes to the mode to make it “a bit more appealing” – as well as a summer-ready heist outfit and quality-of-life adjustments to make heisting easier. Oh, and “Skins! Skins! Skins! and more skins!”

As just posted on the FPS game’s Steam page, the Payday 2 199.3 update brings a bunch of stuff “to help keep you busy while we are all holding out in our homes”. First up, there’s those many new skins. Seven times as many, in fact. “We have increased the drop rate of skins from once per week, to once per day,” the dev says, so “you will always have something to look forward to when you log in to play Payday 2”.

Plus, you’ll now receive your new skins via loot drops directly, rather than have to leave the lobby and go open a safe. Sweet!

They’ll still be linked to a particular safe, though, and if you still have some safes lurking in your inventory, don’t worry – “Nothing will happen to them. Those safes will still only be able to yield skins associated with that safe,” Overkill says.

The endurance mode, Holdout, has also got some adjustments “to make the mode a bit more appealing”. There are five new Holdout levels “based on existing heists from the game”, and each features a specific set of four achievements for waves three, five, seven, and nine.

Plus, there’s a key change to the weekly Holdout – it’s been removed. Instead, “you can choose what level you want to play similar to how you would choose a normal heist”, the studio says. The weekly rewards specific to the mode are still, er, specific to the mode – but now you can scoop them via any Holdout level.

As for those quality-of-life “conveniences”, you’ll now be able to know exactly what to do to fulfil an achievement with goodies locked behind them, AI loadouts will now get saved alongside your profile “so when you switch, they switch as well”, and there’s now a right-click menu to let you select your weapon and mask inventories, too. Plus, there’s now a pager counter, so “your converts will be colour-coded in a darker blue than your follow heisters and the number of both pagers and your converts will be listed on the TAB screen.”

Last but not least, the “old favourite: the outfit from the Slaughterhouse and Diamond heists in Payday: The Heist” is back, ready to grab by playing the Slaughterhouse heist. Phew.

Head here to read about all the latest changes (there are more), ahead of your next heist – and go get stuck in.