Payday 2 adds prestige-like Infamy unlocks

If you’ve played Payday 2 to death since launch – and I know a fair few people who have – then you probably hit the level cap a long time ago, bought a ridiculous amount of masks, kitted out your weapons, and replayed every single heist hundreds of times. Hoping to incentivise you to do it all again, Overkill have released “Infamy” as a free update.

Infamy is, essentially, a prestige mode. At level 100 you can opt to increase your Infamy level, which removes all of your level progress, all of your skill points, all of your spendable cash, and a whopping $200,000,000 from your offshore account. In exchange you get a level of Infamy, an Infamy point to spend in the Infamy tree, and a playing card showing your Infamy level to other players. Also, you know how words lose all meaning when you repeat them over and over again? Well, that has now happened to me with “infamy.” I’ve typed it so much over the last two minutes it looks wrong.

Anyway: you’ll keep all of your unlocked gear, like masks and guns and so on, but you won’t necessarily be able to use them off the bat as rather a lot of equipment is locked to a certain level. There are 13 levels of Infamy, as marked out by the playing card you receive – the Joker is level one, while the Ace of Spades is level 13. And yes, as mentioned above, Infamy has its own special skill tree. I’m not sure what’s in that skill tree but it’ll apparently be stuff that can’t be unlocked in any other way, and will vary from “vanity stuff” to things that “might be useful for experimenting with how you play the game.” Only the first of four tiers are currently in the game, though. At a guess, it looks like there are vanity helmets and an option to go in maskless, wearing only sunglasses.

It’s a bit of a shame that what’s added is Replay The Game Again And Again mode, rather than some new heists on new levels, but oh well. It’s free, and if you’re still enjoying Payday 2, it’ll give you something to do. You might even get respect from other players when you join their server!