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As a Fridge subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.


Fridge Brilliance

  • The Hoxton Breakout heist did not have pre-planning, despite it being contracted by the Dentist. Actually, it already was planned. The crew simply busts Hoxton out, help transport him on the armored truck, and simply get all the barriers out of the way. Day 2 was purely improvised as Hoxton orders the crew to ram into the FBI office so he can collect evidence on someone who betrayed them.
    • Not to mention that the lack of assets altogether is because the whole mission is improvised.
      • A little bit of fridge brilliance regarding the fact that there's Developer's Foresight - no assets in the FBI raid? No problem - the map has a medical station and an armory that have health, ammo, and grenades.
    • In addition, the Hoxton breakout has literally no loot at all note , yet easily has one of the biggest paydays of any heist (1.25 million on normal, 12.5 million on Overkill). At first, this makes no sense, but then you realize, you just snagged a server full of extremely confidential FBI information. There's a number of interested parties that would pay through the nose for that.
      • Due to the randomised tasks Hoxton asks the gang to perform, you may have also sold paper files taken from the FBI archives, files taken from the FBI Director's personal computer and/or the encryption keys for the FBI servers. Furthermore, it is guaranteed that at least one of these may have been 'potentially' acquired during the heist, given that he asks for 3 tasks to be performed, chosen from a pool of 5 without repeats, and that each of these potential acquisitions happens during different tasks. Plus, that FBI SUV you got away in's got to be worth something as well.
    • Alternatively, the loot represents the crew's satisfaction. Rescuing an old friend can't be any more satisfying.
      • An old friend that was also a successful bank robber, don't forget. Could be that Hoxton himself pays the crew for getting him out with funds 'earnt' from the heists in the original PAYDAY.
    • If nothing else, it may be some of their loot that they're taking back as in Firestarter only... bigger.
      • Jossed, in Hoxton Revenge Bain tells the heisters he compensates them for evidence related to Crimenet to keep the network safe from federal investigation. The server is Hoxton giving a part of his personal savings from his estate to keep him safe and Crimenet safe
  • For as calm as he is normally, John Wick freaks out when he sees specials, especially snipers. This makes sense - As a hitman he's not used to fighting cops, especially not elite ones, and he really dreads snipers because akimbo pistols aren't good for hitting targets at long range, where snipers usually are.
    • In addition, John's greatest skills are stealth and short-range combat, both in-game and in his movies. Snipers counter both of those strengths, and make it very hard for him to use his lethal and distinctive martial arts and close-quarters combat drill.
    • Clover is the same way - She's a con woman and burglar, not a gunfighter, and a good portion of her associated perk deck revolves around not drawing attention to herself. It's also why she giggles so much when she does kill one.
  • Another thing about John's prior experience is that his experience infiltrating and taking out guards back when he was an assassin is likely what contributes to his pager responses being the only ones that are not only reasonable reasons or excuses for hitting the button as well as sounding like he was telling the truth.
  • Headshots, either from lucky shots from grunts or from sniper shots, only strip your armor away and bleed over extra damage to your health in case of sniper shots. At first this may seem like an Acceptable Break from Reality since that should be a career ending shot, but look at the inside of the masks: they're padded, possibly with kevlar, and the Gage Edge mask's description even says it is guaranteed to stop a few 9mm bullets. The masks the Clowns wear are armored.
  • A bit of Fridge Funny: Gage's packages are scattered throughout the level, usually in hidden places. However in levels where you are trying to stealth, you can find them within the compounds that you need stealth to get into. This means that a wheelchair-bound old war vet is better at stealthing than the crew.
    • The website promoting the packages and the respective DLC mentions that these packages are stored there to be picked up by various middlemen after being send in, not by Gage himself for the crew. That means that the packages are placed there by people working or visting the respective places. Which in turn makes one wonder why, for example, a senator would accept having several packages spread through his penthouse.
      • Remember what his crime is? Arms dealing.
      • A man of power and prestige like the Senator doesn't clean his own house. Who put the packages there? The cleaning staff.
  • The RPG doesn't destroy armored vehicles or helicopters like you'd expect it to and its rounds explode in a very unrealistic way if you're familiar with the subject... but the standard HEAT rocket would be useless to heisters who aren't expecting to fight armored vehicles. They're using frag or thermobaric rockets, designed for anti-personnel, which work more or less as depicted ingame.
    • This also helps explain why C4 can pop off the door to a safe that rocket launchers can't damage at all.
  • Hector's missions are often the most difficult when done loud, if there's a chance for it to be done stealth at all to begin with. That was all part of the plan, according to the Hoxton Revenge Heist.
    • Every single one of his heists is a brilliant Xanatos Gambit. In Watchdogs, if the gang succeeds, Hector has moved all of his product beyond the reach of the Mendoza Cartel and the FBI; meaning they have less leverage over him, not to mention that Bain would never even consider that Hector would risk so much valuable product just to get the gang caught, and if they get caught Hector delivers on his promise. In Firestarters, if the gang succeeds, the Mendoza Cartel's cash and weaponry supplies are ruined and the FBI is weakened so that they're now more dependent on his continued testimony, and if they get caught, Hector delivers on his promise. In Rats, if the gang succeeds, the Mendoza Cartel is utterly done for and Hector is unchallenged, and if they fail Hector finally delivers on his promise. The FBI always turn up so fast to the airfield and the meth lab because Hector told the FBI the gang would be there. At one point, the gang even walk straight into an FBI branch office. The only thing Hector wasn't counting on was that the Payday gang might actually succeed at every heist.
      • It also gives the 'Rats' contract name a whole new layer of meaning - Both sides are rats!
      • It would also answer why Rats has such an insane probability of getting escape missions; the FBI know ahead of time that the Payday Gang are going to be in the general area, so there would be a much heavier concentration of law enforcement keeping watch for a runaway van.
    • Speaking of which, the other contractors all have an alibi to not be the Rat, as suspicious as they'd be otherwise.
      • Bain, as insufferable as he is, is closest to the group, and had plot immunity as far as Overkill's concerned at the time.
      • Vlad wouldn't do it as he seems to genuinely like the Payday Gang and his motives really aren't all that much complex beyond stealing something or getting revenge on someone, or both at once. He may be erratic and impulsive, but he's not going to deliberately turn on the Gang to this extent.
      • The Elephant may seem like a probable guess, except in Election Day the result of Mckendrick's downfall is for Hoxton to be transferred to a safer prison, thus making it absolutely dubious for the Elephant to be involved in his own undoing.
      • The Dentist and the Butcher were both introduced to the Gang well after Hoxton was incarcerated, giving them an airtight alibi by default for getting Hoxton thrown in prison.
  • Everyone was sure the Rat had to be involved in Payday The Heist. He was - Hector bought the loot from First World Bank and thus knew who Hoxton was. This is mentioned in an email from Bain near the release of Payday 2, two years earlier.
  • When you consider that every pane of glass in the Car Shop is rigged to the alarm, there's no way to disable that alarm on-site, and roughly 25% of the dealership is glass, wouldn't the cops get tired of responding to alarms at the place every time a bird hits a window too hard or some teenager throws a rock at it? That's why the response time is so long; the cops are likely treating it like yet another false alarm from a particularly sensitive security system in their jurisdiction, only realizing it's an actual crime in progress once they arrive on scene.
  • Jacket's appearance in the game is very strange, considering that it is almost certain to be non-canon due to Hotline Miami's own ending. However, Jacket might not be the same person as the Masked Maniac, as Jacket is only available to people who bought Hotline Miami 2, where the Masked Maniac is no longer the focus of the story but rather a number of characters influenced by him. The most notable of these are the Fans, who are copycat murderers trying to emulate the Masked Maniac and his infamous rampages. Jacket, in Payday, is essentially another Fan, as he's a literal fan shoutout to the game AND fits perfectly with the MO of The Fans in the second game. The only difference between them and Jacket is scale; the Fans kept to their city and just did random murder sprees, while he joined up with a bigger outfit to find victims and incidentally get paid.
  • During GO Bank, Bain warns the crew that a lot of force (implied to be the National Guard or the Army) is rolling in and they need to leave NOW, despite the fact it's just a minor bank robbery. But in The Bomb and Meltdown, despite the fact the crew are stealing a MOAB and live nuclear warheads there's no mention of a similar response. Why? Because in both cases the weapons are being illegally smuggled - the government doesn't know they're there and the people moving them wouldn't report them even if they did get stolen. That's the only way you would be able to steal them in the first place, otherwise they would send the Army right away to seize these kind of assets.
    • On top of this, GO Bank is distinctly outside the generally urban areas the gang operates in, and more to the point, closer to the area the US Army or National Guard tend to have bases, garrisons, armories and whatnot, and thus they're rolling in simply because they're close enough, whereas the Guard wouldn't stand a chance of getting there in time in practically every other heist.
  • Of course the Dentist knows Dallas' identity. He's a friggin' dentist, reviewing dental records is part of his legitimate work! Given a proper starting point, he could do the same for (or to) anyone who got into his chair.
  • Think back to the earlier stages of this game. The gang had regrouped (somewhat), they had new tools coming their way. Then they had new obstacles to overcome (Death Wish) and such new tools to counteract that (e.g. light machine guns, and later the Minigun), but these weighed them down, slowing them. Nowadays, they can run around with it with no speed penalties whatsoever. They also had nothing to equip except for an armour bag back then when starting out with no skills. Now? They can wield all but one equipment type from the get-go. The ideas and skills the gang have has changed a lot from the beginnings. The gang has evolved, much like their enemy.
  • Jacket wrapping his hands similar to a boxer instead of wearing the standard blue latex gloves the rest of the crew wears may seem just like a unique character design, but think back to the original Hotline Miami. One of Jacket's executions on a downed enemy was to get on top of them and beat their skull in. Doing that a few times barehanded would more than likely start to take a toll, so Jacket wrapping his hands would add some needed protection, while still allowing him to use guns if need be.
  • Dallas's live-action actor was doing his voice in the early days of the game until OVERKILL got his old VA back, at which point he did the new in-game lines. No-one else in the crew has that kind of a voice disparity, to the point of them making efforts to hide Hoxton's face to disguise the dubbing after people had a field day pointing it out in the Breakout trailer, and not giving Wolf lines because Ulf isn't with the company anymore. This stops being odd when you realize, as the Mastermind, Dallas probably made an effort to get some voice coaching so he'd be even harder to finger in a lineup; even discounting his mask, he speaks completely differently when he isn't wearing it,, and getting reliable voiceprints on his masked persona would be nearly impossible over the din of gunfire from your average heist.
  • The drills are a very subtle case of brilliance. They're annoying, they break all the time, and the crew never gets better ones. Why not? Because they can't - They need the drills to be portable, disposable, and usable everywhere, which means they need to be cordless. Cordless drills aren't meant for the sort of abuse the Payday Gang is using them for - They're meant for smaller short-term projects, not drilling steel security doors or titanium safes. Those are things you'd want a higher power, greater torque corded drill for. So of course they malfunction all the time, they're doing a job they're not designed for. As for the thermal drill, it looks every bit like a DIY thermal lance rather than a professionally-designed unit. Wolf probably built it himself.
    • In the original PAYDAY: The Heist version of Counterfeit, Bain promises to get you a drill that won't randomly break down for drilling the safe. It turns out to be a standard heavy corded drill like you'd find on any construction site. It's not completely foolproof either, though, because it needs an extension cord to reach the safe and the cops will unplug it.
  • The prize in the Beneath the Mountain heist isn't the stuff you steal from the Black Ridge vaults - that's just a bonus, which is why Locke isn't too bothered if you don't get much of it. His real goal is stealing the helicopter. Without it the whole Birth of Sky job would not have been possible, as Locke wouldn't have a vehicle capable of retrieving the money pallets.
  • The Pager Guy is noted to be very accepting of a lot of outlandish answers to his calls, despite his job ostensibly being to look out for outlandish behaviour. This has caused the fandom to theorize that maybe a lot of the guards frequently play pranks on him with similar antics and that the crew's responses just so happens to blend in. Except it's likely that the guards don't play pranks on him, but since he only calls when the guard's dead switches are triggered, the only interactions he ever has is with the Payday Gang. Him thinking it's all just a long prank on him funny enough probably has made it much more easier to trick him, despite no one ever actually legitimately pranked him.
  • Locke drops a lot of his character tics and no longer acts as a Jerkass Insufferable Genius in the Reservoir Dogs heist. While it can qualify as a textbook case of O.O.C. Is Serious Business, this side of Locke actually could very well be his actual self, and for good reason. Before the events of Alaskan Deal and the Reservoir Dogs heist, Locke had recently managed to crack into Crimenet and had his hand on the trigger to shut them down at all times, which meant he was cocky, rude and condescending to both the gang and Murkywater - after all, the gang couldn't really do anything about it. This was the persona that Locke had, similar to how the other contractors have various tics and traits of their own. Bain's capture likely served as a vital wake-up call to put things right (especially since he was considered a traitor following the events of Alaskan Deal) before the rest of the gang got captured too, and decides to make contact with the crew again - this time, as himself.
  • Payday 2 passes the Bechdel Test! The conversations don't get especially deep because they're short and based on voice clips and they're violent criminals usually killing hordes of cops, but it's possible to have a team of four female characters with a fairly wide range of ages and body types talking about their shared interests instead of a man. Neat!
  • An example that overlaps with Harsher in Hindsight; in The Diamond heist, entering a certain room in the museum (the one with the mummy in a casket in the middle) may have Bain mention about how he liked the room as a kid, but now it "makes him feel uneasy". With the existence of the Nephilim being brought to light, his unease is justified - the mummy is probably the mummified corpse of one of the Nephilim, and Bain knows it.
  • Anyone who passed high school chemistry knows that if you did the cook off with the in-game ingredient, you'd only get salt water... In other words, it's a stealth joke about the cases of people getting high on bath salts...

Fridge Logic

  • You can play the Hoxton Breakout heist as... Hoxton?
    • Considering the structure of the game, it could be argued that for each player the heist is only canon the first time they successfully do it, so no individual player would be able to "canonically" play the heist as Hoxton. And you could still wonder about how Hoxton can be there anyway as a coop player, that heist is no longer canon to them and their presence is about as significant story-wise as having another bot.
    • The game acknowledges this, as one of the potential Safehouse Dailies, 'Temporal Paradox,' is doing exactly this.
  • How can Clover and Bonnie, the female heisters, successfully answer the pagers of the male security guards without triggering the alarms? (Gameplay and Story Segregation aside, of course.)
    • Actually, this isn't as totally unreasonable as you might think. Having briefly worked at a place that uses pager check-in systems for security, people start using the pager all the time without the security company at the other end of the pager being informed. As long as our check-ins weren't completely unconvincing, the police would never get called.
  • How does the pager guy not note that any of the guards have suddenly gained a British, Swedish, or Croatian accent, especially when his replies imply he knows them personally and hangs out with them after work?
    • Or that they're suddenly female?
    • Or Japanese?
    • Pager Guy appears to answer pager calls from all over the city, so it's unlikely he knows every specific guard at a particular location. When he answers with one of the more personal replies, it might simply be the heister reminding him of a different but similar-sounding guard. As for Jiro, he probably assumes it's one of the guards messing with him.
  • How is Bain able to take over the Moretta's controls remotely and move the ship to a different berth when the captain is still obviously on-board and should be able to override everything?
  • It's possible to have a high enough Concealment with a minigun primary to use it for Dodge builds, despite it still being so big and heavy you suffer a movement speed penalty just for having it out.
  • Needing to be a certain level before you're allowed to use a wad of cash as a melee weapon, yet one could have easily taken their own money and bundled it up for the same effect.
  • You can still do Hector's missions even after ratting him out as the traitor.
  • A minor one: Hector has the ICTV when you encounter him (either as a prop in his panic room or wearing it when you confront him in loud) and is kept under security by Gen Sec. However, the ICTV is supposedly a prototype armor stolen from Gen Sec, ostensibly by the Payday Gang, and they want it back.
    • He was technically on their side. They likely made an exception for him.
  • During the Alesso Heist, if the plan goes loud, SWAT engages you as normal, but there's no attempt to get the concert goers watching the show evacuated.
    • It's the wisest thing to do. If the cops tried to evacuate everyone, there'd likely be a panic, people would get injured (either due to getting caught in the crossfire, or through panicked trampling) and the PAYDAY gang might manage to slip out with the crowd in all the confusion, like they do when you succeed in stealthing Alesso Heist.
  • The Alesso Heist just screams Complexity Addiction.
    • Stealthing the heist involves having to find batches of C4 in closets. 'Closets' as in plural. Wouldn't it be more practical to have all the C4 in one closet?
    • The pyrotechnics make no sense whatsoever. You have to tie down the booth operator, and activate the pyrotechnics yourself. Why bother with that? Couldn't Bain just grab a copy of the schedule, watch the concert remotely, and detonate the C4 in time with the pyrotechnics. It's even worse in loud; even when the alarm sounds, the crew still blow the charges in time with the pyro. Is there even a point to that?
    • Additionally, the screens during Alesso's concert show images of the masks used by Wolf, Dallas, and Houston. Why use the faces of wanted criminals in the gig? Who in their right mind would allow that?
  • The crew has been heisting for at least two years, and they still use those same POS drills. One heist alone has the potential to gather enough funds to upgrade them, or at least buy new ones, and even if that didn't work, they have enough connections to procure more efficient methods. So… why don't they?
    • Most likely because they're cheaply-made DIY drills (the small drills do look like they were taped together), or being used for things they shouldn't normally be used for - the Fridge Brilliance entry on them provides a possibility as to why this is.
  • It's understandable how the prisoner from the Green Bridge remake knows about Kento, because for one, it's not the same prisoner as last time and secondly, he's a former Yakuza like Jiro, so it'd make sense that he'd know at least some details... but how does Matt Roscoe know about Kento? At what point did he acquire this information?
    • An even more glaring issue with Green Bridge that's been present since the first game is the matter of civilian casualties. The gang has a policy of not hurting civilians and Bain infamously admonishes you if you do during any other heist. So why are they suddenly cool with killing what must be dozens of innocents in an explosion? Given that the FBI Files make no mention of civilian casualties for this heist, it seems the intended answer is that, somehow, through either impeccable precision or raw luck, no civs were actually hurt - which somehow makes even less sense.
  • If a guard is intimidated during stealth, you then have to answer his pager. However, the guard’s only restraint is handcuffing himself, nothing covering his mouth. As such, why do they never try to talk during the pager response and potentially clue Pager Guy in that something is up? It surely can’t be that difficult to say something like, “That’s a robber talking to you, get the cops!”
    • Probably because they're just not paid enough to antagonize the crew of heisters in creepy clown masks more than they already did. Many criminals would just kill them out of sheer spite if they raised the alarm that way...

Fridge Horror

  • Jacket as a playable heister. Hope you don't value those hostages...
    • Think about this in the eyes of any cop. Jacket has become a kind of horror story, with him wiping out the entire mob with the cops not being able to catch him, all by himself! Then you are called to deal with a Clown situation and then he comes running out of the bank beating your peers to death with brutal effectiveness, no wonder they have such a high chance of panicking, they have heard of him and they know how deadly he is.
    • Distilling this horror is the fact that the hostages are very unsympathetic. Good riddance if they get killed. Well, that and the fact that Jacket tends to genuinely feel sick if he kills someone he can't readily justify hurting.
  • Hector is the traitor who sold out Hoxton. Now consider how many times people rushed Rats for easy EXP; they played right into Hector's hands by doing that mission over and over and over.
  • The director of the FBI said that the Mendozas are on their payroll when he was talking with Hector. This means that the FBI, an organization built to fight crime, is effectively working for crime (different factions of crime, but still). The amount of corruption within the DC law force is atrocious. Well, at least it makes you feel a bit less sympathy for the thousands of cops you kill in game.
    • Even worse is this has happened in real life, albeit on the behalf of the ATF selling guns en masse to the Mexican cartels for a sting operation that never happened, either due to incompetence, indecision, or corruption, forcing multiple legal gun dealers who volunteered to participate in the sting into witness protection for the rest of their lives for NOTHING.
  • It is possible to leave a vast number of people tied up in a heist where it is stealthed, possibly with the corpses of the guards you killed and those who you didn't have enough zip-ties for. Since no one made a call to the authorities and no one can get away, who knows how long the hostages have to wait for rescue after you've fled the scene.
  • Jimmy. Oh, Jimmy. Spoiler alert for Hardcore Henry! He's fucking doomed. Jimmy's tenure in the Payday Gang occurs as a sort of prequel to the movie, so in as much as time really means anything to the game itself it's fine, but think about what that means for the future: one day, Jimmy is going to completely disappear out of the gang's lives. Whether that means he just heads off for his favorite brunch for some hookers and coke and never returns, or just drops randomly into a coma, he'll be completely gone and no one will really know why or how.
  • (Also may be more spoilers for Hardcore Henry) The Boiling Point job's aftermath has the gang leaving the facility with the data, but there's no mention of where the bodies of the test subjects have gone or what the gang have done to them sans scanning them. And given the nature of said test subjects with Hardcore Henry's plot in mind, they probably could have woken up from the EMP-induced sleep and broken out, depending on how much security is left between them and freedom.
  • At some point during the White Xmas heist, Vlad's brother-in-law may mention amid his drunken ramblings that his plane collided with something. The FBI Files on the mission also states that the plane's black box recorded a collision with an unknown flying object. This points to one of two equally-disturbing possibilities; either Santa Claus really did exist in the Payday universe, or Santa's sleigh was just an alcohol-induced hallucination for Bubba and the actual object he hit was something such as another plane.
    • Given that the paranormal exists in the Payday universe, the former possibility seems more likely now.
  • Just what would Commissioner Garrett have done if he did find out about those warheads from the Meltdown mission?
  • The new story line introduced in the Locke and Load update once again shows us about the traitor, Hector... whom of which Vlad seems to be aware of, at the very least (evidenced by the flavour text/intro to the Goat Simulator heist). The heists as portrayed in the story line reveals that Vlad was the one who let the crew in on Hector in the first place, meaning that he set the gang up with their eventual traitor and could possibly have been partially responsible for almost getting the crew caught. Vlad, being Vlad, may or may not be aware of this.
  • Bain should probably be very concerned - the future of Crime.net might very well be in jeopardy since Alaskan Deal reveals that Locke is yet another traitor against the crew, and he managed to crack into Crime.net to reach out to them in the first place, meaning he likely still has access and could wipe it at any time he pleases now that he feels that they have outlived their usefulness.
    • Unlikely. Locke went off the grid soon after the events of Alaskan Deal; popping up again to take down Crime.net, even if he was successful, would put him back on the map for all to see. There is also the sheer number of people who want his head; Bain, The Butcher, the PAYDAY Gang, the cops, and I'm fairly sure that Murkywater probably want to plug a few bullets into the traitor's head. If Locke is smart (though with him betraying the PAYDAY gang, that's debatable), he'll stay low...for now.
  • The Nephilim are a case of Fridge Horror in and of themselves, but of particular mention is the fact that Henry's Rock - a Murkywater facility - has a lab in which a mummified corpse of what seems to be a Nephilim is floating in a tank... as if being experimented on. Are Murkywater weaponizing the Nephilim?
  • The Crimefest 2018 event sees that Vlad's bakery front has been shut down. In addition, the kitchen of the Safe House has a few cupcake tins... with The Diamond situated underneath them. Considering Vlad's sidelining for now and the shady dealings of the Dentist, it could be pretty easy to guess his fate. However, the horror of this doesn't really kick in until you realise that one of the things you did for Vlad was boosting nuclear warheads from a Murky warehouse... and that Day 3's news site event saw a nuclear detonation right where Point Nemo, the suspected location of R'lyeh, is...
  • The military blows up the entire Mercy hospital to prevent the spread of the virus. Let us hope that they weren't desperate enough to do that before evacuating the civilians and helpless patients inside.
  • Days 7 and 8 of the news site event has a rather chilling news story. On day 7y, an earthquake hits Washington D.C. and it also brings a spike of radiation, which forces the President and several staff members to evacuate. Day 8 shows that Air Force One crashed in California and while there were survivors, the President himself is missing. Between the nuclear explosions, the radiation in D.C., and the President vanishing, things are looking pretty grim...
  • The No Mercy heist ends with the hospital being blown to bits while the gang are in the midst of an escape. How many cops and innocent civilians died from the result of the building collapsing? How many of them may have died from the Green Flu, considering that the sick ward was turned into a warzone? How the hell did Murkywater cover up firing missiles at a hospital in a crowded city? Did they pay off the inevitable slew of witnesses, or worse?

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