Payday 2 / Tropes A to L

PAYDAY 2 provides examples of the following tropes:

Tropes A-L | Tropes M-Z

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A-F

• Absurdly High Level Cap:
  • Firstly, players can attain a maximum level of 100, and leveling slows to such a crawl that even Death Wish heists will provide only a fraction of XP than that of the later levels. Taken even further with the "Infamous" prestige levels, which require players to grind to Level 100 for the pleasure of paying $200M in saved offshore cash to lose all normal cash and upgrades; in other words, players wipe the slate totally clean^note players drop everything save for weapons, mods, masks, materials, perk deck cards, perk points and any offshore cash left over; weapons locked to level caps cannot be equipped for a spade logo in front of their name, increased XP rewards, special 'infamous' items, and a better chance of rare drops. Infamy can be done up to five hundred times, making for an effective level cap of 50,100. The grind was somewhat alleviated in a major update that rebalanced XP rewards for everything; XP significantly loses speed around level 70, but early players now earn equipment easier and infamy players can find their feet much faster. Additionally, once you go past Infamy 5, there is no offshore cash requirement, making the grind significantly easier from that point forward. You also are able to instead grind for 30 million XP after reaching level 100, which is more experience than it takes to reach level 100 but allows you to go infamous without losing your levels, allowing you to just spring back into heisting at full capacity instead of having to work your way back up there.
• Acceptable Breaks from Reality:
  • The police would absolutely not send wave after wave of cops to take down four crooks, especially if they were being cut down like blades of grass (which even the cops will note at times, often complaining that "this isn't working"), and they would definitely hesitate to take action if they had civilian hostages (not hesitate as in "delay the next assault by X minutes", more like "surround the building until they have a solid attack plan to save the hostages"). On the other hand, normal people can't take several hundred bullets to the chest and still keep going, nor does body armor somehow return to full effectiveness after stopping a couple dozen rifle-caliber rounds simply by not getting hit again for a few seconds, so the breaks come on both sides. Banks also do not have several hundred thousand dollars in cash, gold and other trinkets on hand, specifically because of the possibility of getting robbed, though Bain will often explain why the banks in question have as much as they do and it's always an unusual circumstance^{such as}Temporary currency transfer, preparations for an influx of people cashing paychecks, wayward gold shipment, notice of "interesting" safe deposit box contents, etc., except for Big Bank, which simply hasn't been robbed in 200 years, and Brooklyn Bank, where the objective is to get at a medallion buried within the vault of the bank rather than its money.
  • You can complete Hoxton Breakout with 3 members of your crew in custody (and thus, in jail) with no penalty beyond the norm, despite the whole mission being to break one member of the crew out of custody. If they were to make it realistic, this would mean that not a single person can be downed and in custody during the entire firefight, which would be a daunting prospect indeed (considering the heist can only be done in Loud).
  • More amusingly, in missions where either a character shouldn't be there (heists prior to Hoxton Breakout or characters not having joined yet story-wise), the only real character restriction is being unable to play the same character as another player. This means that you are able to rescue Hoxton while playing as Hoxton - this is even a safehouse side-job, appropriately named "Spacetime Paradox".
    • If you play as Duke in the flashback heist No Mercy, he will lampshade the fact that he is not supposed to be there.
• Achievement Mockery: The game has over 1,000 achievements to its name, so quite a few are logically going to follow this trope:
  • "F in Chemistry", which can be earned by blowing up the meth lab on Rats or Cook Off by putting in the wrong meth ingredients.
  • "I'm Sure No One Heard That", which asks you to complete Ukrainian Job in stealth, and then ruin the run by activating the metal detectors.
  • "Murphy's Law" asks you to tag the wrong truck in Breaking Ballot, and then find nothing in the vault when you drill into the malls' bank.
  • "I Want to Get Away" asks you to..well...jump. Similarly, "Bunnyhopping" asks you to jump 100 times in less that 30 seconds.
• Actor Allusion:
  • John Wick calls back to Keanu Reeves' role in Bill & Ted in the new safehouse, mentioning a pair of old partners named Theodore and William who never took their training seriously.
  • Aldstone (John Cleese) may mention that Wolf wanted him to buy a parrot (something he doesn't want to do again), and that a cousin of his runs a hotel in the countryside, something he thinks would be "too stressful" for him. Additionally, one may see him doing a walk that looks familiar...
  • Sydney (Georgia van Cuylenberg) occasionally answers pagers in Vanille's voice.
  • The Taser (Spike Spencer) will occasionally announce himself before tasing someone with "target center, pull the switch".
• Adaptational Heroism: The gang - cop and civilian murderers extraordinaire - are recruited by Jimmy to impede Akan's plans for world domination (in this case, wiping out an evil agency's facility and destroying its research on super-soldiers, which is heavily implied to trigger the plot of the film). Bain even lampshades it in the intro and the outro, commenting that it feels really weird to do outright good for once, and get paid for it.
• Adaptational Villainy:
  • John Wick, Bodhi, Jacket, Jimmy, and Scarface all actively avoided civilian casualties in their respective media. Here, they rob banks, shoot up cops with impunity, and will more than likely wind up blasting some civilian in the head to maintain stealth. Word of God says players shooting civilians is not canon, but there's the mass-murder of cops and cooking meth to contend with, too, though it wouldn't be out of character for Scarface to be cooking meth.
  • The Cloaker gets this treatment as "The Necro-Cloaker" in Lab Rats. And he also returns in Prison Nightmare in order to torment the PAYDAY Gang, just like Freddy Krueger.
• A.I. Breaker: Averted unlike the first game. SWAT units are more synchronized in their attacks and will flank players from every possible angle when given the chance. There's almost nothing that breaks the enemy AI - bar having a computer that can't handle all of the simulation work.
  • A programming quirk regarding setting the storage room on fire in the Nightclub heist causes the team AI that are near the room to suddenly stand still and not follow the player until the fire goes out. This is likely due to team AI sharing a similar pathfinding script to the enemy AI, and enemies caught behind the fire are programmed to stand still rather than walking into the fire mindlessly and burning themselves to death, unlike the AI in a certain game this series was inspired by.
• A.K.A.-47: Thrown around. You've got weapons that are accurately named like the Uzi and the Ak 5, you see nicknames for certain famous weapons like the Chicago Typewriter (one of the nicknames for the Thompson M1928) and Buzzsaw 42 (nickname for the MG 42), you have changed names that double as Bilingual Bonus like the UAR ("Universal Army Rifle", English for "Armee Universal Gewehr" or AUG) and KSP/KSP 58 ("Kulspruta", Swedish for "machine gun" as is part of the FN Minimi and MAG's Swedish military designations), mash-up names like the AMR-16 (the M16 assault rifle, which was originally based on the AR-15), Shout Outs like the Predator (SPAS-12, referring to its use in the Jurassic Park films), dev references such as the Lion's Roar (a Croatian VHS-2 rifle, the name referring to Lion Game Lion who produced the DLC that adds the rifle), and then there're some names like the JP36 (rumoured to be the SKU number for an airsoft G36), the Steakout 12G (not the Ithaca Model 37, but rather an AA-12 renamed to fit its DLC's barbecue theme), and the Kobus 90 (P90, the 'Kobus' moniker was simply made-up). Interestingly, the internal names for the weapons for the most part avert this, as even the weapons that are given fictional names in the menu are referred to by their proper names in the games files.
• All or Nothing: The sequel ramps up the trope with having a lot of cash and valuables being optional. You can try to get more of them for a bigger payout, but if you are not careful, your team can get wiped out and you'll lose everything. Prior to the Hoxton's Housewarming Party update, there were also Pro Jobs, which were the ultimate all-or-nothing; if you failed any day of the job, you would be kicked back to the lobby and the job is terminated.
• All Your Base Are Belong to Us:
  • A player-initiated version. The second day of the Hoxton Breakout heist has the Payday Gang invade and occupy the FBI's headquarters long enough to steal some top secret information about Hoxton and the man who sold him out.
  • In "Safe House Raid", your safe house, gets uh, raided by the police, who have no idea the "simple drug bust" they're performing is on the Payday gang. You have to defend the money while they're assaulting your gaffe.
• Alternate Continuity: A few:
  • The world-ending nuclear war that occurs in Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number spares Jacket, in addition to Payday 2 lacking the Alternate History, such as Soviet-invasions and puppet states. The presence of a Hotline Miami arcade machine in his personal room heavily implies that Hotline Miami is merely an in universe videogame and he's just a Nerd Action Villain Protagonist who loves Hotline Miami in addition to eighties paraphernalia.
  • According to the developers, Scarface happens in this universe, so the Scarface seen here is either a descendant or a fanboy. Though given his voice actor it's entirely possible his series of events was just a little different and he's older than he looks.
  • Before the ending, it appears that John Wick diverges from his sequel - he has fully embraced his life of crime once more, and has not been expelled from the underground crime community at large. But judging by the Rumours and Stories video, the events of Payday 2 happened before the events of the films.
  • Jimmy, outside of the short film, does not demonstrate his body-swapping/clone abilities, and actual Jimmy isn't dead yet.
  • The Cabot crime family still stands and is still running successful diamond heists, implying that the events of Reservoir Dogs went off without a hitch.
  • The Murkywater destroys Mercy Hospital in time and prevents the outbreak from happening.
    • It also has been moved from Fairfield, PA in October 2009 to New York on June 26th 2012 as seen on the Breaking News event-site, separating the two even further, as the events of Left 4 Dead would have happened by then already.
• Ambiguous Time Period: According to plot-important political ads that can be seen in the early heists, the game is set in around 2014. Masks of historical and current day presidents including Donald Trump and Joe Biden are available complete with flavor texts. However, the ending all but confirms that the missing president and the one that took his form definitely isn't a Real Life president.
• Anachronic Order: The Reservoir Dogs Heists' first day is "Day 2" while the second day is "Day 1".
• And Some Other Stuff: Incorporated into the gameplay. During Day 1 of "Rats", the crew needs to cook methamphetamine, with instructions provided by Bain. However, he frequently gets them wrong (though this was changed where he will correct himself a few moments afterward). The stated ingredients (muriatic acid, caustic soda and hydrogen chloride) in the ratio shown will get you a huge cocktail of watered down acid or lye, which could very well cause chemical burns if smoked, and in much more specific ratio's, it just makes salt water.
• And Your Reward Is Clothes: Completing heists allows each player to draw one of three cards, and possible cosmetic prizes include masks, as well as patterns, fabric/material, and color schemes to customize those masks.
• And Your Reward Is Interior Decorating: By completing tasks finishing heists under certain conditions or finding special items in heists, you unlock trophies that are displayed around your safe house.
• Animesque: Parodied with the Kawaii mask and its Mega variant, which turn your murderous criminal into a murderous pink-haired moeblob.

  "Lovable, cute, adorable, cool and hip, charming, non-threatening, innocent, happy-go-lucky. These are words not commonly used in criminology. Because of you, they now are."

• Anti-Frustration Feature:
  • Loot bags can only be 'removed' from the map in cases where doing so does not prevent players from winning the level. For example, in Watch Dogs, you can throw the bags into the water (netting you an achievement for the first one as well), but doing so will respawn them back at the truck where you started. Rather than taking a bag past an Invisible Wall or over an Insurmountable Waist-Height Fence, in this case cops will simply take the bag to a location which puts as many of them between you and said bag(s) but is still within the playable boundaries of the level to allow the player a chance to cut through them and retrieve it.
  • Similarly, characters that need to be kept alive in order to fulfill heist objectives cannot be killed. For example, the Taxman in Undercover needs to be beaten up in order to extract codes from him; he can be knocked out, which delays completion of the heist, but can never be beaten or shot to death. Matt on Heat Street, who needs to be escorted to the end of the heist, and the computer technician on St Martin Bank, who is needed to hack the bank's security systems, are also otherwise ordinary characters who are immortal in order to allow for completion of the respective heists that they appear in.
  • In the Transport heists, you need to secure a minimum amount of loot bags, with the exact amount depending on the difficulty. The game will always spawn enough trucks in with enough loot so that, even if you blow open all of the trucks with C4 (which destroys 3 of the boxes in the truck when you do it, potentially depriving you of some loot), you will still have enough potential loot left over to succeed.
  • Advancing to the next tier of infamy resets all your skill points, but as compensation, after the first Infamy level you can unlock bonuses which reduce the amount of points needed to advance to the next tier in two skill trees (Fugitive and another of your choice - and the latter part stacks, so by Infamy 5 you get permanent point-cost reductions for all five trees). Those bonuses also give a multiplier to experience points gained from heists so you can level up again faster. Perk decks are completely unaffected by going infamous, only unspent points are removed (so you can keep them by simply pouring them into a perk deck), and weapons are only locked behind their usual level requirement - you can immediately use it again once you reach its required level, no money needed to unlock a gun you already own or reattach whatever attachments you left it with.
  • Lower-level players are normally barred from hosting maps on Overkill or a higher difficulty until they have reached a certain level, so that they can take the time to learn the game's mechanics and (hopefully) have someone around to help them out. After you've accrued enough Infamy levels, upon a reset you can instantly jump into higher difficulties to make the grinding to later levels easier. The tradeoff is this allows a player who just went Infamous to get back dozens of levels, allowing them to jump start their next infamy level much faster.
  • Getting shocked by a Taser will have your current weapon instantly reloaded so that you can have a fighting chance to break free. Interestingly, The developers tried to remove this in the Day 3 update for the Hoxton's Housewarming Party event in 2016, only to end up having to put the mechanic back in the very next day after it broke other gameplay elements. Bolt-action rifles and other single-action weapons will also rechamber/recock themselves for you, even though visually both your arms are outstretched and probably waving about like limp noodles.
  • Many of the skills are designed to be this. Without any skills, you usually have to wait anywhere from one to seven minutes for a single drill to finish doing its job, even longer when you consider it will jam multiple times, sometimes not even three seconds after you fixed it previously. It's either that or trying to lockpick the object in question (which takes a long time, and sometimes isn't even an option without a very-high-level skill). Then there's moving the bags around, which can be downright hell if you're alone and have no skills to buff it. With the correct skills, drills finish noticeably faster, sometimes restart themselves after a jam or be restarted by you smacking them with your melee weapon, you can pick a wider variety of locks, including safes, in under a minute, bags can be quickly moved all around the map (either carried faster or thrown a few dozen feet at a time), and at times you can break open shortcuts that you would otherwise not get access to (especially with C4 and the Saw). However, by the time you've acquired these skills, you'll have moved on to higher difficulties, where waiting around outside of stealth is no longer an option.
  • The one saving grace from being kicked down by a Cloaker is that it doesn't count towards your down counter before getting into custody immediately. Depending on the skillset of whoever revives you, you could get around half your health back on Normal, Hard and Very Hard. This, however, does not apply on Overkill or above, where the most health you can get after being revived is about 25%.
  • All Infamy levels come with an experience bonus, although some come with a bigger one than others. This is to help with the level grinding back to 100 for those that went infamous, as it can be a chore otherwise. By Infamous level 20 or so, your Infamy EXP bonus alone is usually the same, if not higher, than the total amount of exp you would have gotten from the heist itself (even after all other bonuses have been applied). Overkill also gave a month of extra EXP to players during the Infamy 2.0 update, to jumpstart people's leveling.
  • The ability to intimidate police into surrendering, which acts like a normal hostage in heists where there are only a small handful of or even no civilians to take hostage (especially if they've all run away ages ago), though it takes more effort to take police as hostages, and with other skills you can convert them to fight for you, and can be traded between waves to bring back incarcerated teammates. The only downsides to this are the extra effort to get them cuffed and that you can't move them afterwards.
  • If a player holding a mission critical item leaves the game (keycards, C4, meth ingredients, etc.), the items are transferred to another player so that the mission isn't unwinnable. The Meth ingredients, upon Rats' Launch, wasn't stackable per-player until a later patch fixed the issue.
  • If there's only one player not in custody, or the player is solo without AI teammates, Cloakers can't use their instant down attack, to prevent cheap game overs.
  • In Hoxton Revenge, the FBI boss will always be relatively close to where the panic room is. This reduces both the distance the boss needs to be moved (if you are attempting the heist in stealth, and the room requires a retinal scan) and the time needed to find the panic room (if you find the boss first).
  • Captain Winters will not appear in offline play due to being very hard to tackle in co-op, let alone one man player and bots without advanced tactics, even more so when playing alone.
  • Playing offline since summer 2017 allow you access to AI exclusive perks that can be managed via the Crew Management menu. It allows, among other things, AI bullets able to penetrate Shields, AI's getting the ability to revive you from a distance if you get downed, as well as passive bonuses, such as faster interaction while lock-picking and drill repair, which also stacks with existing boosts from related skills and perks.
  • Upon breaking stealth, there is a grace period between that and the point where your stealth EXP bonus no longer applies. This means you will be safe even if the alarm is triggered at the very end of a heist.
  • It is common for the game to require players to search for various items in order to fulfill heist objectives. This can be challenging as some maps are very large and/or have confusing layouts. In some of the later heists (for example, the Buluc's Mansion heist from 2020), the game will reveal the location of these items after a certain amount of time has passed without the players being able to find these.
• Anti-Grinding: PAYDAY 2 discourages players who try to grind for EXP and cash by having heists you completed show up less frequently, forcing you to play other heists instead of playing the same one over and over again. The game also had a level limit penalty by reducing EXP gained on heists that are above your level, but it was changed to have the EXP gained be scaled to your level.
  • The game's early single day heists ^note Variants on Bank Heist, Diamond Store, Framing Frame Day 1, Four Stores, Jewellery Store, the Transport heists (except Train), Ukrainian Job, Rats, and Nightclub include an escape sequence if you finish them loud instead of in stealth, forcing you to secure your loot and to not farm a level over and over. The chance of an escape generally seems to be linked to the total completion time. If you take more than a certain amount of time to complete a heist, then you probably won't get an escape sequence even if you do the job loud.
  • The booster system also discourages grinding the same levels by reducing your EXP gains while boosting gains for playing levels you haven't been playing. It was possible to have a 100% penalty, but that was only if you did nothing BUT play one specific job over and over. Patch 35 tweaked the boosting system by limiting it to 15% max while making penalties capping out to only 30% so that players aren't punished too heavily if they want to play specific heists multiple times.
  • Players gain more experience for retrieving more loot bags from a job rather than just more money, meaning that to get the maximum rewards, players will need to play the job as skilfully as possible rather than finishing their objectives as quickly as possible and sprinting to the exit with one or no bags. Alternatively this means that players can do the Rats, Cook Off, Santa's Workshop, and White Xmas jobs for hours on end if they're well prepared, as it's possible to receive well over a thousand loot bags for these jobs, which in turn means it's possible to level up far more than intended.
  • Previously, doing missions in Stealth would often grant a stealth bonus, which boosts the next contract's EXP bonus by a certain percentage. This led to many people doing missions only in stealth because not only is it easier to complete objectives, but you get more experience for it in the long run. The experience system revamp instead made it so that, while you still get a multiplier for your next heist after completing one in stealth, you also get more experience now if you do a heist loud, to encourage players to continue with a heist if it goes south instead of grinding the same stealth missions over and over again and restarting every time the alarm sounds, just for the bonus EXP.
  • The aformentioned XP bonus for extra loot wasn't always in the game. Originally, the game would give a flat XP reward after completing a heist. This meant that the fastest way to grind XP on launch was to purposefully fail the Rats heist. You would intentionally blow up the lab on day 1, let the bomb codes get destroyed on day 2 and simply kill the cartel members on day 3. You would get little money due to not getting any of the loot, but the XP reward would be unchanged. Later changes made it so blowing up the lab killed every player on the map and failed the mission. And with XP being tied to loot, players now had an incentive to get every bag of loot that the map provided.
• Armor Is Useless:
  • A major reason for the Armor vs Dodge debate is because, without specific skills to boost your armor's effectiveness, it's not quite as good as it needs to be, especially on Mayhem and above. This is not helped by the fact that higher detection risk, which heavy armor adds a lot to, makes the cops able to accurately hit you from longer ranges, whereas a Dodge build will legitimately be dodging bullets past certain distances because the low detection risk makes the cops incapable of aiming accurately from there.
  • Defied by the Anarchist perk deck, which turns even a two-piece suit into a human tank suit, though at the cost that your health underneath that is reduced by slightly more than half, while the armor's natural regeneration gets much slower. The idea is that, so long as you keep killing enemies, the armor bar and health bar won't budge all that often.
• Armor-Piercing Attack:
  • If the player aces the Surefire skill, then the armor of the tan Law Enforcers may as well not be there, since ranged weapons will be guaranteed to pierce it.
  • There are plenty of options for dealing with Shields that don't involve flanking them. Aside from their weaknesses to explosions and fire, a player can shoot them with a sniper rifle, a shotgun loaded with Dragon's Breath or AP Slug shells, or the 5/7 AP pistol to punch through the shields, but unless you hit them in the head through the shield, those aren't nearly as damaging as flanking the enemy.
• Artificial Stupidity: The sequel mixes this up. This time around, civilians are less likely to run around if a fire fight is happening near them, only if a cop manages to get them up and tell them to run for it. However, shouts and other intimidation sources now vary in strength meaning that shouting people down may take more or less time; a low level mastermind upgrade can even terrify people by sounds other than shouts.
  • Sometimes occurs with friendly AI. Since starting a heist is only character specific (i.e. Player 1 can mask up and break in the back while Player 2 keeps watch without drawing a weapon) it's entirely possible to start a heist only to have an AI stand about outside unarmed; this can even extend to being downed in a firefight only to have an AI stroll up all incognito, revive you, and wander off again.
  • Friendly AI can sometimes (for no discernible reason) either: 1. Charge into a swarm of enemies without regard for survival; or 2. Hide in cover when you really need help, such as staying hidden in Rats when SWAT start scaling the building. They won't prioritize Tasers unless they're the nearest target, and they won't even attempt to fire at them while being shocked (rendering what should be an annoyance into their kryptonite instead). They also have Skewed Priorities when it comes to reviving players; they will generally only be able to pick between shooting an immediate threat or helping you up, without considering the possibility of changing tactics and often picking the least convenient option (e.g. coming to help you after a Cloaker's kicked you down, deciding to ignore said Cloaker who's preparing to kick them down too).
  • It often happens to the enemy AI as well - setting the gym on the top floor of the Mallcrasher mall on fire can occasionally lead to the cops trying to take cover inside the burning room. They don't survive very long. This is extremely useful on Death Wish, as the cops won't last very long even with their increased max health.
  • Headless Titan Bulldozer AI is intentionally crippled. If you look away from them, they don't fire at you. While this leaves you more vulnerable to cloakers that may approach, it allows players to easily complete Safehouse Nightmare by oneself, simply looking down and waiting at the drill (as cloakers don't tend to actively hunt the player unless provoked). Oddly, it's easier for one player to complete the Safehouse Nightmare achievement on Death Wish difficulty than it is on Overkill, as the "easier" difficulty requires collecting floating masks that may instantly incapacitate you.
  • The SWAT van turrets do a number on the friendly AI. They have over 25K health, deal lots of damage, and only have to reload for a short time. The AI, unless you very tightly control them, will run out to shoot it ineffectively and immediately get stunlocked by its gun, repeatedly going down over and over until you can get them up and back into cover while it's reloading or take care of it yourself.
  • Cops will gladly walk through any fires you created with a molotov and they either die or take a lot of damage. Panicked civilians will also run through molotov created fires, getting themselves killed and netting you a penalty for a civilian kill.
  • Mallcrasher has a similar version, thanks to the fact that it's not officially possible to stealth, but can be done that way with luck and skill. The skylight near the back breaks so Bile can extract the gang, which any untied civilians will dutifully ignore. Part of this strategy also involves shooting out signs above the various stores, which, unlike almost any other breakable object hanging from a wall or ceiling (like the chandeliers), no one will notice.
  • The Heat Street remake, unlike its predecessor, doesn't flood the first set of streets with waves of cops like in the original, and instead has pre-positioned cops and SWATs waiting for you to pass by. One of the easiest ways of beating the first portion of the heist on Mayhem or below, is to simply ''run as fast as possible'' to Matt's crashed van, ignoring the litany of cops shooting at you, as it's not worth the time dealing with them, and subsequently getting stuck in the first assault wave in the street with little cover. Armor builds make this difficult to do, but dodge/ anarchist builds should be fine.
• Artistic License – Geography: The Counterfeit heist is supposedly set in Pensacola, Florida, right by the beach, with Pensacola PD responding, and tall, thin palm trees. There are numerous problems with this. Any house that close to the beach in Pensacola is on stilts and wouldn't have a basement due to the potential to flood during hurricanes, which is the same reason a thicker, shorter species of palm tree grows there. And the Pensacola Police Department has a very limited jurisdiction; the Payday gang would mostly fight Gulf Breeze Police or Escambia County Sheriffs. Also, there would be sand everywhere.
• Artistic License – History: In the trailer for the Diamond, it is shown that Adolf Hitler was one of the owners of the cursed gem, being shown about to commit suicide as a Nazi officer AKA, the latest incarnation of The Dentist looks on. The issue comes from the gun Hitler is shown to be using, which appears to be a Luger P08. Historical records have shown that Hitler actually took his life with a Walther PPK. Of course, this trope also applies to Hitler owning any cursed diamond.
• Artistic License – Law: The FBI Files feature lets you see, among other things, the crimes you've committed in-game. It's actually quite comprehensive for the most part, with even the smallest offenses listed alongside the most egregious ones. The sole issue is that it lists you with violating the Geneva Conventions by killing a medic. All medics in this game are visibly armed combatants, and would therefore be exempt from protection under the Geneva Conventions - killing one would "only" be first-degree murder.
  • As well, the Payday crew aren't bound by the Geneva Conventions, as the Conventions only apply to wars, and the Crew isn't involved in one. And even if they did apply, attempting to claim the Crew violated the Geneva Conventions would actually open the police/FBI up to accusations of having committed a war crime^note Attempting to use the protective symbols to protect armed combatants with the intent to mislead the enemy is considered perfidy.
• Armed Blag: Armoured Transport lets you pull these on GenSec convoys, albeit with more violence than the original trope. Each convoy has between 2-4 trucks, with each truck having several boxes you'll need to crack open to get at the goods. You need at least two bags of loot (gold, jewels, or plain old cash) to complete the heist - each van has at least two, though the exact quantity per van depends on difficulty and van count, plus the risk of some of the rarer loot being destroyed if you use C4 to blow the doors off.
• Ascended Meme:
  • When you first start the game, you'll start a "heist" (actually just a tutorial) where you enter your safehouse. Bain will tell you to go inside, and the first command he'll give is for you to answer the phone on the table. You can't actually answer it, just like in the original game's Counterfeit - fortunately, Bain talks to you anyway, and says "See? I'm one step ahead of you, as always! You didn't even have to answer the phone!"
  • GO Bank and The Benevolent Bank also include phone-answering objectives as part of their stealth sequence. Failing to answer the phone can cause the mission to go loud.
  • When Hoxton was confirmed to return, people started calling Dallas's brother (who had taken up the codename) "Houston" to differentiate. That's precisely the name he's given from the Hoxton Breakout onward.
  • During the Hotline Miami heist, players can cook meth in The Commissar's lab or destroy it as they wish, with Bain noting the crew has probably burned a lot of labs in their time.^exp.Due to the high XP reward of Rats, plus the high difficulty in cooking meth and holding off the cops on Day 1, it's still common to find people deliberately cooking incorrectly to blow the lab and summon the escape sooner.
  • Almir, the lead producer of the game, is known by the fan base to have a magnificent beard. The Xmas 2014 heist takes said beard to another level by making it an actual in-game difficulty "mask" to wear.
  • Players who break open deposit boxes and safes will sometimes find a grilled cheese toast sandwich inside. The sandwich became a meme within the community over how ridiculous it is to find such a thing inside a safe. The White Xmas heist has one of the random pieces of loot be a giant piece of toast, and carrying it is as heavy as an artifact from Shadow Raid. Securing said toast can net players over a million dollars on Overkill difficulty. As of Hoxton's Housewarming Party, finding the toast in the manager's hidden safe in Big Bank gets you your own piece of toast as a trophy for the new safehouse. The trophy's name and description even lampshade the ridiculousness, naming it "It's Not Even Fresh..." and stating that it must have been one hell of a good sandwich for a guy to lock it away in a safe after one bite.
  • The "Paycheck Gang" is a meme originated on bootleg or homemade PAYDAY Gang masks for sale in real life. Late 2016, the unique collectible for the "Stealing Xmas" heist is a pair of garish, neon decorated Chains and Dallas masks called the Paycheck masks, with flavor text to boot!
  • In a weird case of ascending an already ascended meme, when they re-released Panic Room for this game, they adjusted the Giant Toothbrush meme from a stationary item to a lootable item that spawns in one of several pre-determined locations on the map, and securing it adds the Giant Toothbrush to your Safe House, gives you an achievement and earns you about $1.5 million in cash (even more than securing one of the many bags of cocaine that are on the map.)
  • The yacht that Dallas rides in the "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue is named Medic Bag.
• Ascended Glitch: Patch 11 introduced a bug where street cops had triple the amount of power than they normally have, which meant a cop using a pistol could easily shred your armor and health, even if you had obtained armor and health upgrades. Many people liked the bug for the challenge it presented, so the developers decided to create a variant of the street cop armed with the freakishly-powerful Bronco .44 a few patches later, even setting it so that they're the only variety of street cop that still occasionally spawns during assault waves on higher difficulties, where regular cops are otherwise replaced by the much more durable FBI or ZEAL Team.
• Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever: The Necrocloaker, who shows up in the Lab Rats and Prison Nightmare Halloween heists, though moreso in the latter than in the former.
• Asshole Victim: It would probably be easier to list the people who DON'T deserve the Payday gang's wrath. Every other job involves the crew running up against someone who is, at the very least, involved with something very shady indeed. YMMV on whether banks count as asshole victims, but the Crew certainly thinks they do.
  • Lampshaded on Shadow Raid, where Bain will comment that while the crew deals in drugs, counterfeit and smuggling, at least they're doing it the American way and not funding terrorists (which the Murkywater guards are implied to be doing).
  • Framing Frame uses this as its Excuse Plot, by framing The Elephant's Democratic Party rival for drug trafficking. As opposed to the weapons trafficking he actually is doing, which is instead revealed to the public if the mission goes loud. He can't even claim the moral high ground for not dealing with the Payday gang, as the first two days of the heist consist of him hiring the gang to steal art from a gallery for him, which the gang uses as an opportunity to bug his house.
• Asteroids Monster: The Hydra mutator turns every single enemy into this. They will all keep splitting into weaker enemies until they can't go down the food chain any more.
• Awesome, but Impractical:
  • Miniguns and rocket launchers. The mini gun has an insane rate of fire and can quickly clear out a crowded space, but it has an even worse movement speed penalty than a light machine gun. The rocket launchers are the most powerful weapons in the game (with a damage rating of 10,000) and can do a One-Hit Kill on nearly anyone, but they can only hold 4 rockets total and friendly fire damage from the rockets will instantly down players caught in the blast. While the Miniguns can get ammo off of the ground, Rocket launchers can only regain ammo through ammo bags.
  • The Light Machine Guns were this due to the low low ammo pickup rate (5%, as opposed to the 15-20% of most other guns). An eventual boost to this reversed this.
• The Bad Guy Wins: Any heist your crew of murderous robbers successfully pulls off counts as this, and especially if you shoot civilians, and still have money to spare.
  • Averted in Boiling Point heist, which the PAYDAY Gang finally takes the data containing Akan's world domination plans and destroys it once and for all.
• Badass Boast: The Bulldozer is particularly fond of these, and their distinctive voice yelling something is often the first warning of their arrival on the field. They have a large set of lines for several events such as starting an attack ("There's only four of them?!" or "You are up against the wall... AND I AM THE FUCKING WALL!"), having their visor shattered ("I'm still gonna kick your ass, VISOR OR NO VISOR!") and incapacitating one of the players. Cloakers also deliver a quip after incapacitating a player.
• Bare-Fisted Monk: You can choose to go with your fists instead of using a Pistol Whip when it comes to close quarter combat. While your fists obviously lack power compared to the knives, you can throw punches a bit faster than a melee weapon swing and you can build up a charge for a harder hitting punch faster than charging up a melee weapon attack. Your fists also have a decent amount of knockback against enemies. The Gage Ninja Pack DLC added empty palm kata, which allows you to do some karate style moves.
• BFG:
  • The light machine guns are this by having an extremely large ammo pool, magazine size, high rate of fire, high suppression, and being huge. The trade off is you move slower while you have the gun out and you can't use iron sights, forcing you to hip fire.
  • The Thanatos .50cal sniper rifle is a weapon meant to take out armored vehicles. It ignores armor, shields, and singular walls while making short work of everything else in its path, with the only thing requiring more than one hit being a Bulldozer^note One hit for the metal faceplate, another for its glass faceplate, and a third to put the Bulldozer down or a SWAT turret. Unfortunately, the ammunition is so heavy and so massive that you only get five rounds to each magazine, with fifteen rounds total. You'd better hope someone in your crew brought an ammo bag along to the heist...
  • Introduced in the very aptly named Overkill Pack is the Vulcan Minigun, which boasts a massive amount of ammunition and rate of fire for even stiffer penalties than the light machine guns; your movement is slower, you can only hip fire, and your accuracy is fairly bad, with no real way of mitigating these downsides.
• Bilingual Bonus: The Big Bank trailer has a pair of vocalists singing in Italian, which also appears in-game as the map's Plan-B theme. Provided you can speak Italian and have a good ear for opera, you'll find the song (rather appropriately) talks about greed, power, and wealth; in essence, the male singer is filled with avarice, the female singer warns him of it, and he discards her advice only to die and lose it all.
• Bishōnen Line: The One Down Skull mask compared to the previous difficulty achievement reward masks.
• Bittersweet Ending: After the White House heist, Bain succumbs to the virus and dies after the crew secured their freedom. The ending video shows the crew removing their masks and tossing them into Bain's grave under the rain.
  • Turns out that wasn't the true ending. See Golden Ending.
• Black Republican: John Henry Simmons, known across the criminal world as the Elephant. He's a US senator who is black and is willing to offer the Payday Gang contracts.
• Bladder of Steel:
  • While usually expected of online games (i.e. a pause function is seldom available), this is invoked through the inclusion of escape sequences. Needed the toilet for most of that thirty minute heist? Bet you can hold it another ten, because leaving means forfeiting the entire mission's cash and XP.
  • Averted in general for small emergencies, as each individual Day is fairly short (if done properly) and there are breaks in between that pauses the progress at the end of each Day. However, if you need to leave, you will have to forfeit your progress, as you do not receive your reward until the completion of the final day (even if it's an escape mission). Exaggerated with Achievements and Stealth bonuses, as some will span across multiple days and require you to have started the heist from the beginning. Even disconnecting in the middle and rejoining the same lobby will disqualify you from netting the achievement. Lobby leaders also get hit pretty hard, as Payday does not allow you to pass the hosting duties to someone else, so if the lobby leader leaves, everyone is booted back to the main menu.
  • Partially averted for multi-day heists; you receive XP for each day completed, regardless of completion of the entire heist. This feature was removed for a year or so, but returned in 2016.
  • Also, if you join after the first day but complete the remaining part of the heist, you get rewards for all days completed.
• Blatant Lies: Bain says there shouldn't be many civilians in the Car Shop Heist. He is very wrong; there are around a dozen in the map.^note Depending on the difficulty, of course. On lower difficulties, the amount of civilians is indeed quite low.
  • He also mentions that you can customize your safehouse when you enter it for the first time, which you will since it serves as the game's tutorial. This feature wasn't added until October 2016, three years after the game was released, and even then it's an entirely different safehouse than the one you started with, of which Hoxton had to find, not Bain.
• Bloodless Carnage: Averted; enemies unfortunate enough to be in the way of your bullets will introduce their insides to the walls behind them, leaving for a rather gruesome wallpaper. Jiro can cut off Cloaker heads with a katana, and Bodhi can leave a nice gaping hole in the skulls of Tasers if he headshots them with a sniper rifle. The Taxman in the Undercover heist gets heavily bruised and very bloody on his face the more you beat him up.
• Blown Across the Room: The Bronco Revolver, Deagle, Grenade Launchers, Rocket Launchers, and any shotgun is capable of sending a mook ragdolling through the air. This is often a viable tactic for hiding bodies in stealth, specifically with the silenced Loco or Judge.
• Bond One-Liner: Most units deliver at least one when fighting against you, though the Cloakers and Bulldozers get special mention for having the most of the lot.
• Bonus Level: The "Escapes" can be considered this on earlier heists, as they happen close to randomly if the heist is done loud.
  • The Armoured Transport: Train Heist was this until Update #57 changed it to be standalone.
• Boring, but Practical: Sometimes, even the simplest things can pull you and the crew through a rough spot:
  • Technician's drill upgrades. It is uninteresting and passive, but upgrading all of his drill perks earns you much faster, silent drills that can even self repair every other time they jam (and rarely be whacked back into commission), cutting chunks off heist times.
  • The Mastermind's Forced Friendship skill, which lets you tie civilians faster and carry more cable ties, and acing it gives your entire team slight damage absorption for each hostage you have tied. It may not be anything fancy, but tying up people quickly and having more ties to work with means better crowd control that can help your crew out whether the heist is in stealth or goes loud.
    • The Ghost's Duck and Cover skill; which increases stamina regeneration and can be used earlier, both by 25%, allowing the player to sprint for a longer period of time before tiring out. Acing the skill gives you dodge bonuses for sprinting and using zip-lines. The adjacent skill - "Parkour", lets you sprint 10% faster, and lets you climb ladders 20% faster, and acing the skill lets you reload and run in any direction. Sprinting is the most basic action anyone can do, but the player not taking these skills can also be the difference between someone reaching the escape zone in time, or being shot down.
  • "Transporter", in the Enforcer tree, is considered a mandatory skill for almost every build since it lets you throw bags farther and, when aced, move slightly faster with them when wearing heavier armor. This helps out greatly with the ubiquitous bag-moving that is required.
  • Another Enforcer skill, "Fully Loaded", has the amount of ammunition you can handle increased by 25%. Acing the skill grants you a 75% increase in the ammo that you receive from ammo boxes. It also grants you a 5% chance of getting a throwable when picking up ammo, with the chance increasing as you pick up more ammo. This, combined with the skills at the bottom of this tree, which improve ammo bags in a variety of ways. This can mean never running out of ammo for any weapons, such as the Thanantos .50 Sniper Rifle.
  • The Locomotive 12G shotgun. Given a massive buff from the notoriously mediocre incarnation from the previous game, this shotgun packs a punch, has a decent ammo pickup rate, and has all-round decent stats. But the main attraction is its knockback; this is used all the time to hide bodies in stealth, by simply blasting them across a low wall, into water, or generally anywhere else where they won't be found by pesky guards.
  • The CAR-4, for those who don't consider it Simple, yet Awesome. It is a highly versatile all-rounder assault rifle with a good blend of accuracy, power and stability - though the fire rate could be higher. It is available at level 4 and easily affordable at $95,000. It can be fitted with a lot of different mods though still performs well without many of them, has clear iron sights, and it can achieve a good concealment value so stealthy builds can get use out of it.
  • The two piece suit. While wearing a fancy suit makes you a Glass Cannon, it is also pretty much the only "armor" that gives the most concealment for stealth. The suit also has the most speed and stamina, which lets you zip around the map at hyper speed (and even more so if you are using speed enhancing perks and/or get "inspired" from another player) for a long time before tiring out. It also provides the best dodge value, making it useful when going loud as well.
  • From a practical standpoint, the latex gloves the whole crew (save for Jacket and Sydney, one wears bandages instead, and the other wears fingerless gloves) wears. Not only do the gloves conceal fingerprints, they also act like a second skin so that the crew isn't hindered when holding onto something.
  • In any Stealth heist where there is a camera room, watching the cams. It doesn't get more boring, as you're standing in one place doing nothing but staring at the screen while people are actually outwitting the guards. But since cameras automatically mark any visible guards, by doing this, you just made the heist a hell of a lot easier.
• Bottomless Magazines:
  • The Enforcer's Bullet Storm skill grants temporary infinite magazines for 5 seconds after deploying or using an ammo bag, and acing this skill makes it go up to 15 seconds!
  • The Fugitive skill "Swan Song", which allows players to continue moving slowly and firing at enemies for three seconds when downed. Acing the skill nets you six seconds of Implacable Man status instead.
  • Some weapons are modelled with certain magazines that cannot realistically hold the amount of ammunition the game supplies for them.
  • All armed AI have infinite ammunition, friendly or not.
• Brand X: It seems most of DC uses Pear Computers desktops. The concession stands in the Alesso Heist sells treats like Herp Derps, Crusts! (in a suspiciously Pringles-like can), and WTFs.
  • If you look out the window of the escape route office in the First World Bank heist, you can see "Store," "Office Supplies," and "Over & Keel Hardware & Ironmongery."
• Breaking the Fourth Wall: Several of the Cloaker's lines:
  Cloaker: "I know, I know, I'm late!"
  Cloaker: "I've got your DLC right here!"
  Cloaker: "Now go to the forums and cry like the little bitch you are!"
  Cloaker: "I bet you let yourself get beat up just to hear what I have to say!"
• Break Out the Museum Piece: A couple pieces of DLC consist of adding older firearms to the game. The Gage Historical Pack adds several World War I and World War II weapons to the game, namely a Mauser C96, a Mosin-Nagant, an MG42, and a Sterling submachine gun. The Wild West pack and then especially the Chivalry pack go even further, the former adding stuff like a Single Action Army and lever-action Winchester, and the latter adding various medieval crossbows and swords. The later free World War II pack also naturally adds a few weapons used during WWII, starting you with push daggers and working your way up to a Luger, an MP40 and an M1 Garand.
• Breather Episode: After nine heists revolving around the Kataru storyline ^note  Alaskan Deal to Border Crossing , Vlad contracts us for two (relatively) simple and light-hearted jobs: Robbing the San Martín Bank, and busting out his brother-in-law in Breakfast in Tijuana.
• Bribing Your Way to Victory: The weapon pack DLCs varied between their releases with some content either being Difficult, but Awesome or useful only in the right hands:
  • Subverted with the weapons themselves, as each weapon pack has nifty weapons that have great (situational) advantages, but have some major drawbacks. Unless you're willing to spend a fortune on specific mods and perks, the guns don't overpower the vanilla guns: LMGs have massive ammo and high rate of fire, but have awful accuracy and lengthy reloads; and Sniper Rifles can one-shot multiple units and even pierce through shields (with massively reduced efficiency, but still usually enough to one-shot them with a headshot), but the ammo capacity is low, the refire rate is slow (no semi-auto sniper rifles until much later packs), and the reload times are lengthy.
  • Played straight, then later averted with frag grenades. While the grenades themselves are well balanced weapons,^note Carry a big blast radius, but are usually not strong enough to kill cops instantly and can easily cause accidental civilian deaths or team damage. it used to be that owners of the right DLC started maps with three of them, whilst those without the DLC only had access by playing with a DLC owner and then buying the grenade crate asset. Update 100 introduced a free frag grenade, allowing anyone to start a heist with frag grenades.
  • Played straight, then later averted, with melee weapons, which come in several varieties provided you're buying the packs. While powerful alternatives require a wind up to maximize their power, non-DLC players are stuck with the default fists, similarly weak weapon butt, joke money bundle, a couple unremarkable knives, weak knuckle dusters (if the player joins the Steam group), and the fast-stabbing but otherwise unspectacular psycho knife (ditto). When Sociopath and Infiltrator was buffed in December 2017, Melee weapons, even the free ones, became viable choices for players. Melee before that was mostly used as a Utility slot, with most players taking the Buzzer (Paid) or the ECB's^note The Electrical Brass Knuckles (Free), which stuns most units, basically anything that isn't a Bulldozer or Captain Winters!
  • Played completely straight with the Gage Mod Courier pack as, while it requires level grinding to find enough hidden packs, the outcome lands players with free weapon mods, which can lead to some seriously powerful combos normally unavailable to others (save for some alternatives which require specific card unlocks and tons of cash). Players who don't own the mod pack DLC can still earn extra experience points from the packages they find, though the amount depends on how many the team finds and it's still a paltry amount of points.
  • Also played straight with some DLC assets: the sniper pack, for example, grants the unlockable bonuses like two-way zip lines and vantage points which, like grenades, can be a huge advantage but require at least one player to have paid for the DLC. The assets also have their own downsides: vantage points can put you far away from the rest of the team, which means if cops swarm your location or take enough potshots at you, you're screwed. Zip lines, while cool to use, won't allow you to use iron sight aiming while using the line and you're also open to attack by enemies.
  • The Hoxton's Housewarming Party added Continental Coins to buy upgrades for the new safehouse, which allowed for directly purchasing weapon modifications. The only restrictions are Weapon Stat Boosts, and mods added in DLC that are locked behind achievements, since those are given in infinite numbers once you've pinged the achievement in question.
• Brick Joke: In the Hoxton Breakout heist, Bain complains (after using the parking ticket to open the exit) that $7 for parking is robbery. In the Alesso Heist, a similar parking ticket machine shows up in the garage and you can blow up with C4, earning you an achievement for getting your $7 back.
• Bullet Dodges You: The Dodge mechanic, which is more like Immune to Bullets in practice due to gameplay limitations; it is a chance for shots that actually hit you (complete with impact sound) to be completely negated and do no actual damage.
• Boss in Mook Clothing: The Commissar looks similar to his fellow Russian mobsters and can't be marked, but has way more health and wields the KSP, a light machine gun utilized by the Bulldozers on Death Wish difficulty and above. The Commissar isn't immune to being knocked down though.
• Bullet Time: PAYDAY 2 has the action slow down whenever you get downed in order to get some clean shots off your attackers before the action resumes. Bullet time also kicks in when you put on your mask near a guard and have a few slow seconds to dispatch him before he attacks you. However, it doesn't slow down for everyone else in an online heist, so don't be surprised if everyone in the county is calling the police for what seems like no reason at all.
• Camera Spoofing: The Camera Loop ability allows the player to render a camera useless without breaking it this way for 25 seconds.
• Car Fu: It is entirely possible to ram a cop with a vehicle that you're driving and kill them instantly. Even if the vehicle is a slow-moving forklift, the cops get killed if you ram into them. Pretty handy when there are Bulldozers in the way.
• Casting Gag: Dragomir Mršić, the model/voice actor of Dragan, actually did plan a bank robbery in 1990. In terms of money stolen, it would have been the fifth-greatest heist in history.
• Cell Phones Are Useless: Invoked Trope if you decide to use ECM Jammers. Which is the basis of a successful ECM Rush.
• Chair Reveal: The Bulldozer that appears in the security room on Day 1 of the "Hoxton Breakout" heist has a random chance of revealing themselves in this way.
• Chase Scene: Done off screen in PAYDAY 2 where in-between days of a heist, your group may get ambushed by the cops as your driver fruitlessly tries to outmaneuver them and crashes. You take control of your character after the crash.
  • Played straight in the Heat Street remake in which you chase down Matt for information on foot.
• Chainsaw Good: Subverted. You can equip a Chainsaw as a melee weapon, but it's anything but good.
• Cherry Tapping: You can beat enemies to death with a Pistol Whip, your fists, a baton, or even a wad of cash, though doing so will take many hits just to kill an enemy and is very risky as well. This gets a little more effective with the Sociopath or Infiltrator perk decks, where every attack after the first deals 10 times its normal damage.
• Class and Level System: Mixed up from the first game, as you can't choose a specific class at mission start. A level grants you one skill point (three for every 10th level), which can be placed into one of five classes; each class has certain bonuses and/or exclusive specials, but upgrades can be mixed and matched onto your one character. Each class has skills useful to the other classes as well.
  • The Mastermind (Dallas) has the most team bonuses, and focuses on situation control and manipulation. Also doubles as team medic, getting bonuses to the doctor bag and first aid kits, and abilities can expand to team buffs, greater accuracy with semi-auto weapons, and enemy/hostage manipulation. The Mastermind's weapon is anything that can be fired in single-shot mode.
  • The Enforcer (Chains) specializes in strong armor and high damage, and has exclusive use of the best armor and a circular saw that can cut locks. Is also the only class that can instantly open safety deposit boxes (with the saw). The Enforcer's weapons of choice are shotguns and the aforementioned saw.
  • The Technician (Wolf) is objective based, and has the most gadgets: it comes with better drill abilities, can deploy sentries, multipurpose mines (works as tripwire mine or motion sensor), and C4 (can blast open some doors and secure locks), with an ability allowing them to carry two different types of gadgets at a time, though with fewer instances of their secondary gadget. The Technician's weapons of choice, beyond his various gadgets, would be anything that fires in full-auto.
  • The Ghost (Houston) focuses on stealth, and comes with a jammer to block alarms and electronics, and can pick locks much faster. Also comes with dexterity upgrades, luck bonuses (such as higher unlock chances and a random self-revive ability) and can crack safes. The Ghost's weapons of choice are anything that can be suppressed.
  • The Fugitive (Hoxton) is a new class that Old Hoxton brought with him from prison. Fast and on the fly, they have increased agility, a better chance at dodging bullets, and even critical hit chance. It also comes with serious survival skils and boosts to melee attacks. The fugitive's weapons of choice are pistols, either alone or paired up, or melee weapons.
• Cold Sniper: Certain missions allow you to purchase a Sniper asset for a reasonable sum of money. They generally aren't in the best position and will occasionally miss, but their supporting fire can help quite a bit. You also don't need to worry about the cops taking them out for some reason. The icing on the cake, though, is the voiceovers, as the sniper will count off his kills.
  Ilija: First kill. It has begun.
• Colon Cancer: Every mission briefing is usually displayed as [Contractor]: [Mission name]. For Bain with the bank heists conducted by him, you can get stuff like "Bain: Bank Heist: Gold".
• Combat Resuscitation: Characters who run out of health need to be revived before a time limit runs out, after which they are "taken into custody" by the police and not released until a random amount of time has elapsed. Revival usually requires very close proximity and time, but the skill "Inspire", when Aced, allows you to revive others instantly just by shouting at them from a distance, which is as useful as it sounds.
• The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard:
  • Just like in the previous game, cops can shoot through civilians to hit you while you can't do the same thing. On the flip side, the lack of friendly fire when using non-explosive weapons is fine, though annoying when AI teammates absolutely insist on standing right in front of you whenever you're firing your weapon, as your bullets don't actually pass through teammates. Civilians being immune to the cops' gunfire is a godsend. Cops also seem to not understand the concept of protecting civilians, and as soon as they get to one and untie them, the cop will start shooting at you again while standing right next to the rescued civilian, meaning attempts to fight back will very likely will get that civilian killed.
  • Whilst the friendly AI can only shoot, move, revive players, and carry loot bags if you toss one to them, enemy AI are capable of carrying loot bags and interacting with hostages, among other things. The friendly AI can also make some movement types that players cannot, such as rappelling down from high ledges (trying to jump down would just make you take incapacitating levels of fall damage). Or in one heist's case, crawling through an air vent to bypass a closed door you spent probably five to ten minutes trying to break through.
  • Also, enemies are unaffected by item weight when stealing loot bags, so they can move at a brisk pace while lugging around that bag of gold or fusion engine that slows you (and AI teammates) to a crawl.
  • Flashbangs, for the longest time, weren't actual projectiles that got thrown by enemies. Instead, the game just periodically spawns one at your feet when you're not looking. This was later changed to actually be a projectile, by giving them a 4 second delay before detonation, complete with loud beeping and flashing beforehand, and giving you the ability to melee or shoot at them to disable them before they detonate - the very same thing the cops can do to your grenades if you try to throw one head-on at an enemy.
• Concealing Canvas: There is a safe hidden behind a painting in the manager's office of Big Bank. There may be a keycard inside, but there is usually just a partially-eaten cheese toast sandwich.
• Concussion Frags: Played as straight as possible with the grenades available to the players - the first Gage Weapon Pack DLC added "Frag Grenades" which only damage or kill things within a specific radius, and only stun them within a slightly larger radius but are otherwise completely harmless beyond that. The Hoxton's Housewarming Party a few years later then added "Concussion Grenades" which are a player-usable version of the infamously-annoying flashbangs.
• Conspicuous Gloves: All of the playable heisters except Jacket (who wears bandages over his hands) and Sydney (who wears fingerless gloves) wear latex surgical gloves with their attire, regardless of the mission. They're obviously to prevent leaving fingerprints, but they're always left on, even when a heist goes loud and bullets start flying.
• Continuity Nod:
  • The original safehouse in PAYDAY 2 has a front as a dry cleaning store called Bodhi's Dry Cleaning, which is a subtle nod towards the front the crew used in the Counterfeit heist from the first game named Bodhi's Pool Repair. Boxes labeled with the names of previous heists also appear scattered around.
  • If you have Alex drop off ammo bags for you in day 2 of Big Oil, he may sometimes drop them within inaccessible locations, like at the bottom of the cliff or on top of the trees. Bain may say "This is like Panic Room all over again!", referencing the time Alex dropped the bag of C4 in an undesirable location in the first game.
  • The GO Bank heist has you air lifting the loot via a plane with a hook. Bain references the event to Green Bridge, another heist from the first game which also had a similar event.
  • When you find the meth lab in the Hotline Miami job, Bain will reminisce about all the other meth labs you've blown up, which is both a reference to the Rats job as well as a small Take That, Audience! to players who always opted to blow up the lab in Rats rather than cook the meth, in order to try and speedrun it.
  • The Art Gallery heist will have Bain mention how they robbed the gallery for the Elephant the previous year ^note 2013 was the year the game launched and 2014 is when the Art Gallery heist was released and this time, they are robbing the place again for themselves. Likewise, the Cook Off job, which is Rats day 1 as a standalone job, has Bain telling the crew that the meth lab they used for Hector's job is still intact and they can use it to cook meth again, but this time it's for their own gain.
  • There is a unique blue-shirted female FBI agent encountered in Operations during Hoxton Breakout Day 2. She is the same agent who was in charge of investigating the Payday gang and was last seen interrogating Dallas in the web series. Her corrupt partner is nearby. Both are almost inevitably killed.
  • The plan for getting the vault car open in "The Bomb: Forest" is the same as the safe in Counterfeit: fill it with water, then blast it open with C4.
  • The evidence boards in Hoxton Revenge are loaded with photos and sticky notes of the jobs that came before it, including Election Day, Hoxton Breakout, and Big Bank.
  • The First World Bank heist is explicitly the second time the gang hits it - Bain talks a lot about the first one (which, naturally, was in the first Payday). Heat Street is also a rehash of the same route Matt takes.
  • "Meltdown" takes place in the same Murkywater warehouse the players infiltrate for "Shadow Raid". Vlad will even mention the gang's work on that when picking the heist from Crime.net.
  • You can select the first game's outfit of black tactical vests and short-sleeve t-shirts. The game even refers to it as a 'classic'.
• Conservation of Ninjutsu: Normal cops are mowed down by the dozen, but when converted to the heisters' side with Joker, they're much more durable and will last you a few minutes, even on Death Sentence.
• Cool Car: The Car Shop Heist has you stealing these, and you get to drive them to boot. Meltdown added the Longfellow, a muscle car from The '60s supposedly originally owned by Muammar Gaddafi, which returns for the Goat Simulator heist. An odd case with the John Wick weapon pack - you get a Mustang-styled/shaped helmet for you to wear.
• Cool Mask: There are tons of masks as the base and letting players customize their masks with various patterns and colors. The Infamy and Alpha masks, in particular, are noted to be awesome in their descriptions.
• Cool Shades: Unlocking your first tier of infamy gives you a pair of shades that you can wear during a heist instead of a mask. Two more pairs of shades were released alongside John Wick during CrimeFest, based on the iconic sunglasses from Terminator and Reservoir Dogs and three more were added alongside the Reservoir Dogs Heist.
• Corrupt Politician:
  • The Elephant falls squarely into the trope; he wants a lot of shady and high risk criminal activity done under the radar in order to make him look good, benefit his agenda, or ruin the image of his political opponents while paying you handsomely for your work. This is why most of his Heists have a stealth option.
  • The premise of Framing Frame has you double crossing a crooked Democrat by stealing paintings for the Democrat and exchanging them for money, then proceeding to infiltrate his apartment to steal his illegal cache of gold (he got them from an arms deal) while planting cocaine. You really get to see how corrupt the Democrat is if the heist goes loud, as Bain will dig up dirt on him and find out that the Democrat not only exchanged arms for gold, but was also involved with drugs and other illegal activities, sometimes even sampling the 'product' as part of the deal.
  • Invoked for the Plan B of Day 2 of Election Day. If the heist goes loud while you're hacking the machines to swing the votes in favour of Bob Mckendrick, you instead have to hack the machines to make it look like they were being hacked to put Mckendrick's rival in the winning seat. The idea is that now the cops know the machines were hacked, they would obviously be after whichever candidate it was being hacked for. This way Mckendrick's rival would be implicated as the Corrupt Politician.
• Counterattack:
  • The Shockproof skill in the Ghost tree gives you a small chance of staggering a Taser that is stunning you while the aced version of the skill lets you escape without another player's help.
  • There is also the Counterstrike skill in the Fugitive skill tree that lets you counter attack a melee attack while charging your own melee, which rather humorously blows them across the room. The aced version even works against Cloakers!
• Cowboy Cop:
  • Essentially, the entire police force in Washington DC. Every single cop that responds to one of your heists will shoot first and never bother with questions, violating every single police procedure for hostage situations and armed robberies. This goes double for the special units, Bulldozers and Cloakers in particular, who are violent and bloodthirsty.
  • A small subversion in the Hoxton Breakout trailer. At one point, a DCPD officer takes down Wolf, and begins to read him his rights.
  • If players have a lot of hostages and/or don't fire any shots (even at the first uniformed officers on the scene), the initial assault will take longer to occur, and the cops won't shoot as they're assessing the situation.
  • Averted with all non-Murkywater security guards. Unless you attacked them first, they will always slowly walk up to you and try to cuff you. If you run or fire back, they open fire. The cuffing can be a hazard since they can do this action while you're interacting with something, such as a pager.
• Creator Cameo:
  • Simon Viklund, creator of the games' soundtrack, returns to voice Bain.
  • Almir voices Vlad's brother-in-law in White Xmas and Stealing Xmas.
• Crossover: Quite a few:
  • The GO Bank heist is a replica of a bank level from Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. The terrorists that play on that map are called "the professionals", who also wear suits and sunglasses, much like the Payday crew does.
  • The Hotline Miami heist is inspired by Hotline Miami, with a 2 day heists that has Hotline Miami-inspired layouts and designs, along with the games first boss battle. Jacket, the protagonist of the first game, was also added as a playable character for players who owned the special edition of Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number. There are also four animal masks (plus four more for owners of Hotline Miami) based on the game.
  • As of Update 41, John Wick is a playable character. We're thinkin' He's Back!.
  • The Alesso Heist takes places during one of the Swedish DJ's own concerts, who himself composed a song just for this heist that can be heard throughout the duration of it.
  • The Point Break reboot crossed over in the vein of John Wick - in that Reboot!Bodhi is now a playable character.
  • In 2016, the game got a heist based off of Goat Simulator of all things. Indeed, the loot that you're recovering in this heist is goats!^note specifically to recover cocaine hidden inside their rectums And they're in some potentially strange spots as well.
  • To hype up Hardcore Henry, Jimmy from the film was added as a playable character,^note unlike Wick, Bodhi and Scarface, Jimmy is actually voiced by Sharlto Copley, his actor in the film as well as adding two heists; one loud heist set in a snowy Russian compound, and a stealth heist set in a hidden Murkywater trainyard, as well as a trailer for the game made by the film's director.
  • On December 2016, we can now add Scarface (1983) to the list, as the game adds Tony Montana as a playable character, and a new heist taking place at Tony's mansion. This crossover only exists to promote a remake of a film that hasn't even begun filming yet, even six years after the pack was released.
  • Ethan and Hila from h3h3productions joined the crew in November 2017.
  • Reservoir Dogs got a crossover... for what appears to be no apparent reason. It follows the events of the film, in that you start off at the end of a jewelry heist gone wrong, and end the heist at the start of the jewelry heist, similar to its videogame adaptation and the actual film.
• Cross Promotion: While Dell's line of Alienware computers were often promoted with Steam games^*Up until Valve decided to start up a line of Steam Machines, including (but not limited to) Dell this time, with Payday 2 being no exception (even including masks in here and its predecessor), there was a promotion for the Alienware Alpha, their then newest Windows Box.^ExplanationIt was intended to be a steam box to run on SteamOS, but since it wasn't ready, Dell offered their machine with an Xbox 360 controller and wireless adapter, with Windows 8.1 installed, their own version of KODI, and included a bunch of games and content for free for early adopters. They would later produce a SteamOS version a year later On top of featuring unique LED settings (the lights on the case matching up with assault phases), it would provide anyone playing on those machines two masks exclusive to those owners. There were also vouchers for the Alpha Mauler, provided for free but in limited quantities. While the mask can still be obtained by purchasing and playing on the alpha, the Mauler is no longer available.
  • The crossovers listed above also count as this.
• Curse: The Diamond, according to the narration given by Clover, is supposedly cursed due to every owner meeting their end in some brutal way (suicide, beheading, etc) and the trailer shows Dallas possibly being shot in the back of the head by an unknown assailant. It is possible that The Diamond brings misfortune to those who claim it for their greedy ends. In actual gameplay, nothing comes of it.
  • The gang's theft of The Diamond does, in a very roundabout way, lead to its undoing. The whole point of stealing it was to build the BFD, which was used to steal the Dentist's Box from the Golden Grin, which lead to the gang getting further and further involved in the Kataru business that led to Bain being abducted (and in the bad ending, ultimately killed by a virus) and the crew ultimately being disbanded (though in good circumstances in the Golden Ending, somewhat undercutting this).
• Cut His Heart Out with a Spoon: The Commissar keeps giving you these sorts of threats in Day 1 of Hotline Miami.
• Critical Hit: The penultimate skill in the Ghost's "Silent Killer" tree, Low Blow, gives a chance of critical hits (which deal equivalent damage to a headshot) depending on how low the character's Detection Rating is, giving some encouragement to travel lighter even on loud heists. At a max, it provides a 30% chance.
• Critical Hit Class: The Ghost is the only skill set that can unlock the ability to crit.
• Cutting Off the Branches: Among the various bits of lore in the FBI Files, it also gives information about how certain heists were handled canonically:
  • Framing Frame and Election Day were done in stealth while Golden Grin Casino went loud.
  • The deal with the Cobras during day 2 of the Rats heist canonically goes bad since the file reports a shoot-out in the neighborhood, although how it goes bad remains ambiguous.
• A Day in the Limelight: Frequent, as some missions allow certain classes to thrive whilst others tend to be inefficient. The five different classes have drastically different roles, with Mastermind having medical support and hostage keeping skills, Enforcer having skills for heavy armor and extra ammunition, Technician focusing on deploying trip mines and sentry guns as well as quickly opening safes and doors, Ghost mainly providing concealment-friendly skills, and Fugitive having skills for survival and close combat.
  • Dodge builds, made using either the Rogue, Crook, Hitman, Anarchist, Stoic, Sicario, or Hacker perk deck, also happen to be popular in open combat, so long as the player keeps moving about. Dodge builds tend to use the skills Sneaky Bastard and Low Blow, which respectively increase the player's chance to dodge and chance to get a critical hit, so long as they have a low detection risk.
• Death by Irony: With the Golden Grin Casino DLC adding a taser melee weapon, it is possible to give one to a taser enemy by constantly jabbing him with your own taser. The Hardcore Henry Pack added a free variant: The Electrical Brass Knuckles, which do the same thing, but are slower. There is even an achievement for killing a Taser with these weapons.
• Death of a Thousand Cuts: The Sociopath perk deck can turn the Money Bundle into this. It looks hilarious, and is lethal even on Bulldozers! ...after about 30 hits later that is.
• Denser and Wackier: Compared to the first game, save the Left 4 Dead crossover that leads right into a Zombie Apocalypse, and nearly all missions prior to the Reservoir Dogs update were, despite mowing down legions of cops, grounded enough to be a typical crime-action game. Everything post-Reservoir Dogs heavily involves an Ancient Conspiracy and adds in supernatural elements, ranging from Nephilim ruling the Earth in the past (complete with a corpse in a high-tech lab), an Ancient Conspiracy dating back to Mesopotamia, all the way up to The Dentist being revealed to be a being who likely possessed Benjamin Franklin and was responsible for multiple political upheavals, like The French Revolution, and the Dentist using an Aztec machine under the White House that's guarded by smoke-zombie-ghost-police to try and transfer his conciousness into the US President. There were hints of a secret society and that certain objects may be cursed, but nothing quite like this.
• Department of Redundancy Department: Since some masks have the definite article in their names, the achievements that unlock them can read like "Unlocks the "The Gas Mask" mask."
• Developer's Foresight: If a Shield is holding their shield over their head you can jump on them. It is possible to survive dangerous falls this way.
  • Bain has unique reactions to doing some objectives early, such as in Hotline Miami and Boiling Point, where one could find the basement hatch or briefcase early respectively. As such, the objectives that come later are skipped.
• Dramatic Ammo Depletion: In the "Deathwish" trailer, an elite Bulldozer has gunned down 3 of the 4 heisters and was caught in the middle of reloading by Chains. Chains nods and slowly takes aim at the Bulldozer, only to hear that his gun is empty too, before the two race to reload their weapons first.
• The Dreaded:
  • To players; Bulldozers and Cloakers. Bulldozers because they are a Mighty Glacier with the firepower to back it up, and Cloakers because they can down you with a single kick.
  • The Payday gang themselves seem to have this reputation with the police, judging by the level of response they earn from the law enforcement.
• Difficult, but Awesome: Explosive throwables and HE ammo in a nutshell. They're hard to aim, and in the case of HE ammo, you have to be quite conservative, as the ammo is the hardest to find of all shotgun ammo.
• Dissonant Serenity: The BBQ Pack DLC trailer features the aftermath of Wolf and Hoxton's flamethrowers to the quite joyous sound of The Flames of Love.
• Disproportionate Retribution: Since explosive weapons and throwables are viable options to use in the game, you can take down a regular blue-shirted police guy with a grenade, a grenade launcher or a rocket launcher, just because they were standing in your way of the objective.
• Double Unlock:
  • To get new guns, you have to unlock them through levelling up and then purchase them with your offshore cash. The end-of-heist Payday gives you random rewards: they can be weapon mods, masks, their decorations, money, experience and Safes containing weapon skins. Once unlocked, mods and masks have to be bought for an open inventory slot. Melee weapons and armor, however, are free after reaching the appropriate level to equip them, and do not take up any inventory slots. This is averted for going Infamous, however, as guns you've already purchased remain in your inventory, and once you reach the requisite rank to unlock them again, you don't have to spend a cent to get them back.
  • The only time money and skills cross over is when you buy an extra skill set to apply to your unlocked skill points in a different manner and quickly switch between them (e.g. one skillset for more general applications or geared towards open combat, and another set entirely towards stealth, and another one for Dodge).
• Dynamic Entry: Cloakers likes to wait until the group is occupied with an assault, then launch themselves at an unaware crew much like a rocket-propelled law-breaker-breaker missile... thing. One of their favourite tricks is also to drop down from ceiling vents, often right behind an unsuspecting heister. If you don't hear the telltale sound of the vent hitting the floor in time, you may find yourself joining it and enjoying a nice view of both a retractable baton and the Cloakers Crotch.
• Early Game Hell: New players will be having a rough time trying to acquire anything, do any serious damage, deal that damage from any sort of range, or survive long enough to not go down in their first few hours of the game. Players only start off with a weak and inaccurate assault rifle, pistol, and no body armor, though they quickly can unlock a new gun and better armor within the first few level ups. Buying weapons and new skills are extremely expensive, which is something the developers pushed for so that "every choice you make matters" (which runs into problems when, in the early game, you rarely get any choices to begin with, and the general lack of detailed information to make informed decisions doesn't help either). Once you start racking up money effortlessly, the expenses become trivial, and even once you have to give up nearly everything to go Infamous and do it all over again, you've got better guns that can be used from the start and/or the skill to make what you start with perform at peak efficiency.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: To say the game in its original state was very different is an Understatement, to the point it felt like a totally different game than what we have a decade later:
  • Due to Pete Gold initially being unavailable, Hoxton was replaced by Dallas' American brother who still used Hoxton's name. Once the original Hoxton returned, the new Hoxton was renamed to Houston.
  • The weapon selection was much more grounded with more sensible guns, as well as the absence of explosives, light machine guns, or sniper rifles. Grenades and melee weapons were also absent, with the player only being able to use their weapon butt just like original game.
  • Not only could you not use your offshore money to set up heists, or buy anything for that matter, you couldn't pick what heist you wanted at all. You had to rely on the RNG of Crime.Net giving you the heist you want.
  • Due to a Game-Breaking Bug in the betas which had them crashing the game when they downed a player, the infamous cloakers were not present until the Gage Weapon Pack #02 in 2014, nearly half a year after release.
  • Depending on circumstances (the heist going loud alongside dead civilians or taking too long), an additional escape level would trigger, resulting in the player having to wait for another getaway driver to come pick them up while holding off hordes of cops and then having a limited time to re-stash all the loot they gathered in the previous stage. These escape levels did not get added to future heists. Unlike most of these example, these are still in the game, but are rarely played anymore because every heist where they can appear now has the option of an "Expert Driver" asset that guarantees a successful getaway for that day of the heist.
  • Some contractors were biased towards one way to do heist. A majority of the days for Hector's heists favor going loud^note Rats and Watchdogs can only be done loud, while Day 1 of Firestarter is loud-only despite the other two days being able to be stealthed while the Elephant favors stealth.^note Framing Frame and Election Day provide very valuable loot if the alarm is not triggered, and become unavailable if the alarm is set off. Day 1 of Big Oil will have the bikers setting the intel on fire if they are alerted and not secured in time. While Day 2 inevitably goes loud, stealthing most of it is desirable due to how heavy the cold fusion engines are and it's much easier to look at the clues for which engine is the right one when you don't have the cops shooting you and destroying the computers which provide those clues Future heists have a more eclectic mix of loud-only, stealth-only, and ones that can be done either way, but they aren't segregated by contractor and you get the same rewards whichever way you do them.
  • Pre-planning was absent, limiting you to only buying assets. Pre-planning would be added to older heists such as Bank Heist and Framing Frame alongside new ones.
  • Weapon modifications were restricted to card drops, effectively making it a Luck-Based Mission to make your existing guns better. The process was made much easier with the Gage Courier Pack, achievements that award mods for their respective DLC weapons, and eventually the addition of Continental Coins to just buy mods you don't have.
  • The Armored Transport DLC had the Transport: Train Heist as a Brutal Bonus Level, which could only be accessed by the random chance of blueprints appearing in the trucks from the other Transport heists. The heist was also loud only, alongside the loot bags for shells exploding if thrown a great distance. Update #57 made it so you could start it off of Crime.Net, added the option to stealth it, and removed the dangers of the shell loot bags.
  • None of the Harder Than Hard difficulties (Death Wish, which was latter accompanied with Mayhem and Death Sentence) existed initially, with all the difficulties, while obviously progressively harder, being the same when it came to the heists' design. Also, Death Sentence was originally named One Down when it was introduced, which had it so you only had one down before going into custody. The One Down mechanic was later made into a modifier for every difficulty.
  • Infamy initially had five levels, acting as a meta-skill tree parallel to your actual skills, where each level granted bonuses to reduce the cost of climbing one of the five skill trees to let you acquire a few more skills in that tree, with promises that they would go up to 14 levels (to fit a playing cards theme). Infamy 2.0, which added another twenty Infamy levels, would do away with this in favor of a semi-linear circuit board-type layout where every Infamy level past the initial five only grants experience boosts and unique masks, making them only good for climbing further Infamy levels - in turn, however, Infamy 6 and beyond don't require an investment from your off-shore account.
• Earn Your Fun: Similar to the first game, PAYDAY 2 pulls no punches and will force new players to learn through trial and error. While there are tutorials of sorts in the old safe house, and later on, tutorial levels, some of it has to be learned on the fly. The game also has a Random Drop feature for weapon mods, so you may not be able to have a fully pimped out gun if luck isn't on your side.
• Easter Egg: Music from the first game playing on the radio in the old safe house.
  • The first game song "I Will Give You My All" can be heard in the biker house on Big Oil Day 1.
  • The GO Bank and White Xmas missions both feature a stereo playing music from the Merry Payday Christmas soundtrack.
• Elite Mook: The special SWAT units from the previous game return and behave the same way. New to the game are tan FBI SWAT units that wear full body armor and can't be hurt unless you hit them in the back, use dedicated armor-piercing weapons (sniper rifles, shotguns loaded with slug rounds, etc) or headshot them. The Death Wish update also added GenSec armored SWAT units, which are more accurate than the tan FBI SWAT and react faster too, and only appear on the Harder Than Hard Death Wish difficulty. The Hoxtons Housewarming Party patch added the ZEALs, black-armored government stormtroopers who are to the GenSec elites what the GenSec elites are to the regular SWAT, and only show up on the Death Sentence difficulty.
• Embedded Precursor: Starting from Crimefest 2015, the game gradually added all the levels from the first game, all of which have been updated and/or redesigned to accommodate the mechanics of Payday 2.
  • The Crimefest 2015 event brought back the First World Bank and Slaughterhouse. The former now has a stealth option, bringing it in line with the rest of the Bank Heists ^note except Brooklyn Bank, which isn't stealthable for reasons too spoileriffic to mention here
  • The Wolf Pack DLC brought in Counterfeit and Undercover, just like the first game's version of the Wolf Pack (owners of the original game's DLC got the second game's version for free, as a nice loyalty bonus). These two heists are partially stealthable.^note And by that we mean, lay low, and quietly do the first few objectives to make the loud portion easier to complete
  • Hoxton's Housewarming Party saw the return of Panic Room.
  • The Search for Kento remade the Heat Street and Green Bridge levels.
  • The Locke and Load event saw the return of Diamond Heist, which is now fully stealthable.^note You can only stealth Diamond Heist in Payday: The Heist until the vault opens, where you have to break the glass to get at the diamonds. In the remake, the crew is equipped with glass cutters, meaning full stealth is actually possible
  • Day 6 of the Breaking News event added in No Mercy, and retcons out most of its allusions to Left 4 Dead (the Bill cameo remains intact, however, and the infected patient still makes sounds similar to one of the Special Infected) and the mission is treated as a flashback Chains is having in light of the news that Bain was infected with the same virus they extracted from Mercy Hospital.
• Enemy Chatter: There are actually quite a lots of them, although it can be difficult to notice over the music, gunfire, and shouting from your teammates. However, you're going to be getting very familiar with the Cloaker's quotes as he taunts you whilst beating the shit out of you.
• Enemy Exchange Program: The skill "Joker" allows the player to convert a captured cop/SWAT/FBI unit to the player's side. Acing the skill will give buffs to the converted unit and another skill on the same tree "Partner in Crime" gives various buffs to both the player that converted the unit and the converted unit itself and another skill, called "Confidence", when aced allows for a player to have 2 converted units at the same time.
• Escort Mission: There are several heists where you have to escort someone or something as well (Vlad's brother-in-law in White Xmas, the truck and Hoxton in Hoxton Breakout etc.), but in these cases the thing you're escorting is, mercifully, invincible.
• Even Evil Has Standards: Bain, and later Locke will NOT be happy if you start killing civilians for the hell of it. And though it may seem like they're only angry because of the increased police response, longer custody time and cleaner costs, several of their lines make it clear that this trope is definitely coming into play.
  • There are other actions taken by Bain and the gang in in various heists that also make it clear that the everyman is not their target. For example, in the First World Bank heist AI-controlled team-mates will sometimes give a version of Neil Mc Cauley's speech from the movie Heat, saying that the gang is after the bank's money and not those of the general public, whose money is insured by the federal government. If you stealth the heist, Bain will take the chance to wipe student and housing loans from the bank's records as you try to find the right PC to hack for the security codes to the gate blocking your way to the vault.
  • In the Meltdown Heist, Bain will chastise Vlad for making the gang steal nuclear warheads without telling them, with the implication that Bain wouldn't have accepted the assignment if he knew what the objective was ahead of time. The only reason the heist actually continues is because Vlad's planned escape by train is simply the best way for them to get out with the amount of heat the gang has on them, so Bain reluctantly tells you to continue on with the heist while being very gentle with the... packages.
    Bain: Vlad, smashing Malls is one thing, stealing Tiara's is one thing, but NUKES?!?
  • Additionally, when robbing the Harvest & Trustee bank, a lot of the non-loot items you find in the deposit boxes are war medals and birth certificates. For all that the gang steals, they refuse to casually commit identity theft and disrespecting veterans.
• Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep": The Elephant^note He is a Republican US Senator; said party has an elephant as a mascot., The Butcher, and The Dentist^note Unlike the former two, the Dentist's full name is never given, and is likely an alias anyway.
  • Only Known by Their Nickname: Slowly averted over time. Currently played straight with Dallas (whose use of 'Nathan Steele' is all but stated to be an alias, as he was talking to the FBI), Wolf, Jacket, Houston, and Bodhi. Averted with the full names of six heisters (John Wick, Kelli "Sydney" King, Tom "Rust" Bishop, "Bonnie" McGee, James "Hoxton" Hoxworth, "Dragan" Zubović, August "Duke" Lindenhurst, Ethan and Hila Klein) and the first names of six (Chains, Clover, Sokol, Jiro, Jimmy,and Sangres), and inverted with one (Tony Montana is never referred to by his codename of "Scarface" by the other heisters).
• Evil Cripple: Gage is the gang's weapon dealer, and is paralyzed from the waist down because of a war wound which has left him bitter and jaded. He is confined to a wheelchair, but that doesn't keep him from shooting out of it. He also helped recruit Sangrez into the gang too.
• Evil Laugh: The Taser will sometimes gloat in an evil tone if he electrocutes you. Bulldozers may also laugh in an evil voice when they wreck you.
  • Clover sometimes laughs or giggles when killing specials.
  • Vlad has a pretty good one too, often after describing what he'll do to his enemies.
• Exact Progress Bar: All drills, saws, and computer hacks show a progress bar with the exact time in seconds it takes for them to finish their job, excluding the downtime from jams and stoppages.
• Expy: Like the first game, PAYDAY 2 is a Spiritual Successor to the Left 4 Dead series, and holds similar special enemies. Specifically: a suicide-rushing instant downer (Cloaker/Charger, Hunter & Witch); a stunner (Taser/Smoker & Jockey); a distant glass cannon (Sniper/Spitter); and a devastating giant (Bulldozer/Tank). The Shield is a sort-of counterpart to the 'uncommon' infected Riot Police from the last campaign of Left 4 Dead 2, who are only vulnerable from the back. In a meta sense, the game itself is also a counterpart to Left 4 Dead 2 as the developers have gradually ported over all the heists from its predecessor - ironically enough, leaving the Left 4 Dead crossover heist for last.
• Executive Suite Fight: The end portion of day 2 of the Hotline Miami heist has you storming what appears to be a rundown and crumbling apartment building, but the top floor is way more furnished with better wallpaper, carpet, expensive art, a security room, and a vault. The penthouse is always the room where the final showdown with the Commissar will be.
• Evil Counterpart: The Commissar and his mooks compared to the PAYDAY gang. The mooks wear suits just like the crew and they use a variety of weapons (revolver, shotgun, assault rifle, etc). Said mooks on day 1 can also barricade windows in the motel for cover and rig doorways with trip mines just like the players. The Commissar himself not only wears a suit, he also wears a bulletproof vest and uses a light machine gun, gear that is commonly used by players. The only difference between the Russian gangsters and the PAYDAY crew is the Russians are willing to get into some business that the PAYDAY gang refuse to get near, such as torturing hostages, unless absolutely necessary.
  • The Commissar is also an evil counterpart (well, more evil) to Bain; they both use a camera feed and watch over their minions via a computer hub.
• Eye Scream: In the Hoxton Breakout trailer, Wolf drills directly into a Bulldozer's eye for funsies.
• Faceless Goons: Especially so, compared to the first game, as the main characters went through several stages of actor changes and character appearances; only the masks remained the same. It's possible to avert this depending on the mask you wear, however, as several are actually hats that don't actually cover the player character's face, one of which is a tiara you stole, which the Flavor Text Lampshades:

  Okay, it doesn't hide your face and it is certainly not going to stop any bullets whizzing your way... but, damn. You're going to look like the belle of the ball wearing Mrs Volkov's wedding tiara.

  • All of the law enforcers above the regular street cops completely hide their faces, though this is averted with the Taser and Bulldozer, where enough damage to the head will eventually reveal their faces.
• Fake Difficulty: There are a number of random variations on factors and events in every heist. Sometimes a room will be located in a really bad spot, or a vault door you need to defend has no cover near it whatsoever. Sometimes, the loot vehicle will just keep missing its mark over and over again, or the escape vehicle will arbitrarily decide to set its landing zone across the map from your perfectly viable and already secured area.
  • GO Bank's stealth runs can qualify as Harder Than Hard if the security call goes badly as, on activating the vault's time lock, Hilary from GenSec asks for Barney to confirm the time-lock check-in. She demands Barney call her back, meaning she sends GenSec officers (with pagers) over; players have to carefully avoid the vault lasers when it finally opens to reach the deposit boxes; the local police chief calls due to the GenSec tip-off and sends cops to investigate; when the cops don't report back, players are finally given an ultimatum of four (or less) minutes before he sends every available cop over, forcing players to then drop everything and run or go loud.
  • The Death Wish difficulty can be seen as this, as the only way it makes cops harder to fight is to significantly increase their health and damage and increase the spawn rates of specials. Same goes for Death Sentence, which triples the damage rate of everyone on the map, and adds in more special units only found on that difficulty. Adding on the Modifier "One Down" can make this difficulty even more hellish.
• Fashion-Victim Villain: Invoked Trope by some players. Try to get in public lobbies and count the number of players whose choice of masks are Santa Claus masks made of circuit boards, candy pink Santa Claus mask with a mustard yellow radiation sign over it, Frankenstein Monsters made of couch leather, and other similarly ridiculous masks.
• Fast-Roping: The cops will insert elite units this way. True to life, they are very vulnerable while doing this, and can be shot off before hitting the ground.
• Fictional Counterpart: FBI in PAYDAY universe stands for Federal Bureau of Intervention, and it also doubles as one to the DEA because of their active strike toward drug running.
• Flipping the Bird: In the Xmas Heist trailer, the crew robs a bank while a nearby civilian records it all on his cell phone. As the crew escapes, the last one to exit approaches the civilian, aims his gun at him, then lowers it as he flips the guy off.
• Forced Level-Grinding: The harder heists require a great deal of preparation beforehand, and level grinding is the direct line to cash and skills. This also applies to online too as, while you can join games well above your skill, expect to be kicked from sessions if you're level doesn't show you've been grinding enough.
• Forklift Fu: Meltdown and The Alesso Heist feature forklifts. While intended to be used respectively for moving very heavy loot and for use as a platform to plant C4, they're also very handy for killing enemies; giving any enemy, even bulldozers, the slightest bump with one will kill them instantly.
• Fragile Speedster:
  • Cloakers move insanely fast and can instantly take you down with a single kick, but they can't take much punishment. Similarly to the Left 4 Dead 2 Charger, they're easy enough to kill if you catch them off guard, but they thrive against divided or bad teams.
  • Dodge builds are this for the player, as you only really have a tiny amount of armor and your basic health. To up your dodge stat to usable levels, you generally have to sneak around or be running at top speed. If you stop and stand for any reason (usually because you got tased) you're very likely to go down fast.
• Friendly Fireproof: In the same manner as the first game; Only explosives are capable of harming teammates, otherwise, any bullets or non-explosive projectiles will do no damage.

G-L

• Game-Breaking Bug:
  • The Cloaker in the pre-beta version of PAYDAY 2 caused a player's game to crash if he kicked that player. Due to the bug, the Cloaker was removed for the remainder of the beta and was not included in the final game until Patch 23, which reintroduced the Cloaker along with some achievements involving them.
  • PAYDAY 2 on launch day had an extremely nasty bug that caused everyone's games to crash at the end of the heist or when an achievement was unlocked. Luckily, Overkill fixed the problem in less than an hour.
  • Patch 11 caused a terrible bug where all armor types had the same defensive value as a two-piece suit, meaning no defense. The bug alone made the Enforcer class nearly crippled because the exclusive full suit body armor now had no protection and the burden of slower movement speed. What made this even worse was that the same patch also caused blue SWAT and gangsters to have triple the amount of firepower, meaning even on Normal difficulty people could get shredded in an instant by regular cops. Incidentally, the latter bug with that patch was actually mildly popular, enough so that after Update 12 fixed 11's issues, Update 13 set it so occasionally a regular cop could use the much more powerful Bronco .44 revolver.
  • For a while, picking up the top secret blueprints in an armored heist mission would trigger a bug that caused the game to crash when it attempted to load the secret military train mission. Not only did players have to restart the mission, but they'd lose any money and experience they had accumulated in the previous heist.
  • The friendly AI still doesn't seem to be quite properly tested for Armored Transport heists. In any other heist, even if they're on the other side of the map from you, if you go down they will do their best to get over to you and help you up. Here, there are a plethora of situations in which they simply won't bother. Getting downed in one of the trucks is somewhat reasonable, since they can't go into the trucks. Getting downed in the middle of the street and being left to bleed out because they're too busy sitting in place in the nearby cafe isn't. There are also the occasional spots where, if you try to stash a loot bag along a wall, random otherwise-intangible scenery will prevent you from picking it back up.
  • It's possible in Diamond Store for a bug to result in the 'Escape Available' objective never activating if too many bags are thrown into the van at once, forcing a restart or termination.
  • A milder example than most, but in some stealth-only missions, there are certain spots where guards can detect players through walls, triggering the countdown to failure.
  • Hotline Miami had an issue where one of the objectives requires placing fuel cans on four cars and igniting them. However, if you placed more than 4 fuel containers and ignited a fifth before the objective updated, it caused the mission logic to glitch and the next objective never triggered. Thankfully, this was fixed later.
  • On Day 1 of Hoxton Breakout, the Parking Ticket can be accidentally removed from the game entirely and force a restart if a client picks it up. There is coding in the game where required objects like the ticket are passed on to a different player if the person holding them disconnects or is put into custody. If the player holding the ticket gets put into custody and disconnects at the same time, the two parts of the code conflict, and the ticket gets removed from their inventory without adding it to another player's, forcing a restart of the day.
  • The Hoxton's Housewarming Party event (aka Crimefest 2016) was this for users of the Linux version of the game. Of the 10 days the event ran for, 5 of those days broke the game in some way or another. Day 1 broke the game upon launching it, Day 2 broke matchmaking and the safehouse, the very point of that day's update. The Day 3 update failed to land for Linux users, while Day 4 broke concussion grenades for a few hours until a mid-day patched fixed all the above bugs. To add insult to injury, Day 10 broke the game entirely (making it impossible to launch) until the next day's bugfixes update.
  • Like with the Housewarming Party, Linux users suffered yet another 10 days of game-breaking bugs for the Search for Kento event (Spring Break 2017). This time, Overkill had gotten savvy to the constant complaints of massive downloads every day during an event, as well as the game breaking constantly, and so opted to patch the game every other instead of daily. Day 2 was supposed to add in Heat Street to the Linux port like it did for the Windows version, but it couldn't be found. The update also broke matchmaking for a few hours until a mod was released to fix the issue. Fortunately, Day 3 fixed the above issues. Day 4 added in the game mode "Crime Spree", which was completely broken for Controller users, regardless of platform, and, of course, matchmaking broke again for Linux. Once again Day 5 fixed the Day 4 issues, bar Controller support for the new game mode. Day 6 broke matchmaking again for Linux users, while Day 8 didn't add updates to the base game, rather, they launched a beta to test out AI improvements. If you think the Linux version got the beta on launch, then you must be new here^note Support for the Beta was added after the event, defeating the purpose of that days' update. Day 10 added the classic heist Green Bridge to the game, but also failed to fix matchmaking for the fourth time.
  • When Update 158 was released in September 2017, the Kingpin Injector that comes with the Kingpin Perk Deck got a buff, in that It had no cooldown. For 18 hours, people could abuse the Injector to basically be invincible, so long as they kept the injector in their throwable slot, and spammed the throwables key every 8 seconds.
• Gameplay Ally Immortality:
  • If you opt to play First World Bank in stealth, you'll get some assistance from a woman on the inside, where she'll have the guards near the vault area entrance leave, she'll open the vault doors for you, and will also open the exit door for you, which leads into an office building. Because the character is critically important to advance in stealth, she cannot be killed.
  • Vlad's brother-in-law in the "White Xmas" and "Stealing Xmas" heists is completely unkillable no matter how much you attack him. The game allows you to take advantage of this both times, where in the former, smacking him with your melee weapon wakes him up after he passes out just as well as shouting at him, and the latter actually requires you to smack him to wake him up again after every objective.
• Gameplay and Story Integration: The side-jobs feature added during the spring-break event typically adds a small flavor blurb to the daily and weekly achievement, serving as an in-universe justification for various odd, difficult, or inane achievements the crew can accomplish. Why bother collecting that rare hockey poster? The Elephant is an avid sports enthusiast. Why go through a mission never touching the ground? The Dentist wants to test your abilities before he's sure you're ready for his next scheme.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation:
  • It's fairly reasonable to assume that all the heisters wear bodycams and/ or cameras in their masks (since whoever's acting as mission control sees and hears everything they do), despite none of the characters having those devices on their person, which is also true of earpieces, though that is explicitly confirmed by Hoxton in "Hoxton Breakout" as he moans at Bains' constant nattering.
  • It's possible to play the Hoxton Breakout heist... as Hoxton.. There is actually a safehouse daily job named "Spacetime Paradox" that requires you to do this. There is also no penalty beyond the norm if you end the first day with three of four players - including playable Hoxton - in custody, even though the entire point of that day of the heist is to break one specific character out.
  • The No Mercy heist is a flashback set during the time of the first Payday game, so logically, only the original four crew members (Dallas, Chains, Hoxton and Wolf) could participate, yet the player can play the heist with any of the new characters, such as Sydney or Jiro. Duke, at least, does make note of this if you bring him along, where he'll pipe up during the intro that he can't help but feel like he's not supposed to be there.
  • In "Birth of Sky", if you jump out of the plane without a parachute, you go into custody once you... er... "land", which raises obvious problems, as instead of being a pile of goo and bodyparts permanently etched into the town's cement for the rest of the heist, as soon as your teammates can find a hostage to get you back for a trade (which is fairly easy to do if you have Stockholm Syndrome), you are seemingly resurrected by the police and Swat teams to fight another day.
• Getaway Driver: Twitch is the crew's go to driver when it's time to bail and they escape by using a van. Sometimes the crew will also summon Bile for a helicopter escape or an unnamed boat driver if they have to escape by water.
• Glass Cannon: You can become this if you carry powerful guns and wear a two-piece suit, which offers no additional defense (bar Dodge, which only really works with the skills and the right perk deck to make full use of it), compared to the various types of body armor. Gangster enemies can easily be killed with two shots to the torso, but their pistols can quickly tear you apart.
  • This goes doubly so for gangsters after certain patches that left MAC-10-armed gangsters capable of tearing through the player's heaviest armor faster than a Bulldozer at close range, but still just as unarmored.
  • Regular uniformed police officers count. Though totally unarmored, some of the regular uniformed cops now come equipped with the Bronco .44 and can drop a fully armored player's regenerating health down in one shot, and on Overkill, can rapid fire.
  • Snipers are deadly to the point where being shot by one causes all damage that exceeds your remaining armor to bleed over into your health (they're the only enemy that can do this, thankfully), making you a One-Hit-Point Wonder if you're wearing only light armor, or none at all. Snipers also have a poor defense, about on-par with regular unarmored guards, and can easily be killed with a single shot with most decently powerful guns.
  • Cloakers can take their targets down in one hit and are reasonably resistant to body hits, but take much more damage from headshots than other specials. Most guns require two or three headshots to drop them at most. They are also very reliant on cover and ambushing to take down targets effectively - catch them out in the open (which can happen easily on certain maps) and they don't stand a chance.
  • The elite FBI agents in white shirts with suspenders are physically fragile but pack extreme firepower. They appear as a fixed spawn on only a handful of maps^note Watchdogs Day 2, Firestarter Day 2, Hoxton Breakout and Breakin' Feds (technically)
• Glowing Eyes of Doom:
  • The default masks from The Completely Overkill Pack have glowing eyes that further accentuate the creepy factor of the masks.
  • The "God-Emperor" mask shares the same effects as those in the Completely Overkill Pack, but it's free for all players, and is a "legendary" version of "The 45th" mask, both of which represent Donald Trump.
  • Cloakers only flare their goggle's lights when they're charging someone, so if you see their eyes glow... run!
• Golden Ending: The true ending has the PAYDAY gang successfully kill the Dentist, dealing a crippling blow into Kataru's operations, and Murkywater files for bankruptcy afterwards. As the gang relaxes at the beach, the President awards Garrett for his actions against the PAYDAY gang, but in truth, he's actually a reincarnated Bain who is selling the con towards him. The gang's new lives are later detailed in the "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue.
• Government Conspiracy: It is implied that this was behind Hoxtons imprisonment, as during the events of Hoxton Breakout, you need the clearance of the FBI Director to gather information, causing Hoxton to note that his case goes way up to the top of the foodchain, higher than you would expect a mere heister's case to go. Somewhat accurate, in that Hector was picked up by the FBI and ratted out the gang in exchange for a shorter sentence or something.
• Grand Finale: The White House Heist. Bain, who is near death from a virus infection, performs his last act as leader of the PAYDAY crew to have them raid the White House for pardons that will allow them to move on from their criminal deeds. In the Golden Ending, the crew kill the Dentist and use the Mayan Gold to activate the secret vault under the White House, which seemingly allows Bain to remain alive and take the identity of the U.S. President, while the team retires to a life of luxury and riches.
• Gratuitous Japanese: In GO Bank, the pilot may refer to Bain as "sensei" for no particular reason.
  • Played straight by Japanese-American Jiro while in a heist, who mostly speaks in Japanese (exceptions are for calling out units and other crew members), but averted by both Jiro in the Safe house (where he speaks mostly English), and with Joy, who is an American-born Japanese woman, and thus didn't had the chance to pick up Japanese while living in the US.
• The Guards Must Be Crazy: Guard behavior in the game is incredibly odd, to say the least. As in most stealth games, guards have very poor peripheral senses, and can only really see what's directly in front of them. They mostly won't notice when normally locked doors have been opened, either. However, god forbid if you shoot a window or camera along their path, because they will notice it and proceed to call in the National Guard to purge the entire area. Another baffling thing is just how gullible pager operators are, as they can be fooled by people speaking completely different accents, languages^note Jiro or are a different gender from the guard they just killed!
  • This is partially explained in-universe. In the FBI Files, Garrett notes that Harvest & Trustee doesn't really have any incentive in upgrading its security since their losses are federally insured, the Jewelry Stores simply can't afford more sophisticated security, and the Art Gallery uses the high-profile thefts as a way to increase their publicity and therefore attract more visitors.
• Guide Dang It!:
  • Doors are given little explanation beyond "pick the locks until you level enough". Granted, it's not too difficult to figure out after thoroughly examining the upgrades pages, but it's unsurprising that most players don't realize you can shoot locks out with enough force.^note As a rule of thumb guide: if the door does not have C4 symbols, a saw symbol, or a secured hinge, simply aim at the lockpick action (i.e. the lock itself) and open fire. It helps significantly if you have either a shotgun or rapid fire weapon, as the threshold for shooting the lock is not actually the amount of damage you do, but how many times you shoot it. Sniper rifles and the Bronco take the same four shots that a SMG does. Shotguns are the exception, because each shot impacts multiple times.
  • The old safe house has a section that lets you practice your skills on opening doors. Every door whose lock can be shot out are marked with a gun icon. Of course, it's not an obvious tell at first, and players who don't bother exploring the safe house fully may not even know about the ability to shoot out locks.
  • Actual upgrade figures, in several cases. Since upgrades are often measured in non-specific figures, e.g. "50% armor regeneration", something which is pretty unhelpful unless you know fast it is normally.
  • Day 1 of Firestarter has you either stealing the weapons for cash or destroying them so the contract's rival gang can't use them. Stealing the weapons for money is easy, and more obvious, but there's nothing in the level that clearly tells you how you can destroy the guns. ^note There's a long horizontal fuel container that can explode and create a fire when shot enough (assuming the container starts a fire in the first place), allowing you to throw the bag of guns into the fire to destroy them.
  • Day 2 of Big Oil is all about sneaking into a scientist's mansion and stealing the working fusion engine prototype from his lab. However, he has a dozen prototypes and Bain will only accept the correct one. Players are supposed to use clues from around his lab (a computer, clipboard, and a few whiteboards) to determine the correct engine. The first two hints are simple, as they refer to the color of the engine's fuel tank^note  look on the whiteboard in the entryway of the lab, and how many nozzles feed into the machine^note  find a clipboard. The hint that qualifies as this however, is the pressure gauge of the engine; you have to find the computer that tells if the P.S.I^note pressure per square inch is less than, or more than a certain figure, and convert it to BAR measurement. Unlike other mission critical set pieces, the computer that contains the P.S.I. info can be destroyed by gunfire and grenades, which makes the guesswork much harder. Good luck trying to complete the mission if none of the team can read the monitor, and there happen to be two or more machines that have both the same coloured gas tank and the same number of nozzles.
  • More generally, figuring out what some skills actually do. Their interactions with the game aren't always clear and some bonuses don't actually do anything - Hard Boiled, for instance, boosts shotgun accuracy, which actually makes shotguns worse by limiting their spread without increasing their damage against targets they do hit.
  • How to defeat a SWAT Van Turret: Uninformed people shoot at the turret and realize they aren't doing direct damage to the turret. The key is to shoot off the Turret's barriers, which will eventually pop off upon taking too much damage and expose the reflective targeting camera underneath the gun. That's where one needs to shoot to destroy the Turret effectively... but even then, they can intepret the turret sinking back into the van and repairing its shield to mean they can only disable it temporarily. The shield has to be broken multiple times before the turret can be completely destroyed.
  • Unlocking the Golden Ending requires you to complete an extremely complicated series of events. First, you must beat the Golden Grin Casino, Breakin' Feds and Henry's Rock to obtain three boxes, Brooklyn Bank to obtain the Medallion of Perseids, and Shacklethorne Auction for the Obsidian Plate, all of which are Safe House Trophies. The trophies must then be put on display in the Safe House. You must enter your Safe House, grab the Medallion from Duke's desk, and open the three boxes, then assemble them into a floating object. You must then go to Scarface's room nearby and shoot some keys on the piano in a specific order. This causes the artifact to display a series of coded messages. Using a substitution cipher, you must translate the messages to find that they are a list of 20 of the game's achievements (which ones are different for each player, out of a list of 57), written from right to left. You must then complete all 20 achievements. Once they're done, you must start the White House Heist on Overkill difficulty or higher. You must then play until you reach the PEOC bunker, and find the Aztec painting; if you have accomplished all the previous actions, the painting will be glowing. After removing the painting, the hosting player will get C4, which they must use to blow open the wall, revealing a secret passage that leads to a puzzle wheel. You must solve the puzzle wheel four times using another cipher (all the while under attack), to gain access to a secret temple. Then you must kill the Dentist, grab a bag of gold, and place the gold bars around the temple before time runs out.
• Gun Accessories: Firearms can be customized using various grips, barrel lengths/extensions, sights, and so on; this even extends to the cosmetic mods. Most, however, have at least some mechanical function.
• Guns Akimbo: The Hitman perk deck is all about this. The perk deck allows you certain benefits if you decide to dual wield weapons. It was meant for pistols originally, but as of Day 5 of Spring Break 2018, almost every submachine gun in the game, including the Mark 10, Kross Vertex and Chicago Typewriter, can be dual-wielded, as well as just about every pistol in the game (with the notable exceptions of the 5/7 AP Pistol and the Peacemaker .45 Revolver). Shotguns can also be duel-wielded, though currently only three are capable of this, those being the Brother Grimms, the Goliath 12G, and the Judge. You'll still suffer a significant stability penalty for doing it, however.
• Gun Porn: Huge list of highly-detailed weapons that has only grown with the addition of more weapons. It puts military FPS games to shame (and this isn't even getting into the above Gun Accessories, where you can outfit your weapons with doo-dads to your heart's content).
• Hammerspace: While unmasked, your character can carry a .50 caliber sniper rifle and a rocket launcher, knives, cable ties, a dozen trip mines and six C4 and two automated gun turrets into a bank and nothing will be visible except a bag on your belt and your body armor.
• Handy Cuffs: Once again, security guards can cuff you if you approach them too closely. In return, intimidating cops allows you to force them to cuff themselves, at which point they essentially become either another hostage or, with the right skill, an extra ally.
  • Cuff Cloakers on Holdout and Crime Spree cuff you instead of downing you. The former is needed as the close quarters nature of the game mode would make regular Cloakers too OP, and the latter is a modifier for crime spree.
• Hard Mode Mooks: Which types of enemies spawn depends on the difficulty, with higher difficulties bringing in tougher police. Normal mode brings in regular police and SWAT, and the only specials who appear are Shields and Snipers. Hard adds on Tasers. Very Hard replaces the SWAT with their heavier-armed and armored FBI variants, and also allows for Cloakers and the weakest variety of Bulldozer. Overkill adds Medics and the next-toughest Bulldozer variant. Mayhem replaces the FBI SWAT with even tougher GenSec SWAT units. Death Wish adds even more varieties of Bulldozer. Death Sentence moves on to the ZEAL Team enemies and allows for a variant of the Bulldozer that can heal his allies.
• Hard Mode Perks:
  • Playing on higher difficulties gives out more experience points, which is very helpful, since level-up requirements increase significantly around level 40. Reward money and Continental Coins also increases in value on higher difficulties, as does the loot.
  • As the player continues to increase their Crime Spree level, they will have to apply modifiers that make the game continue to get harder. One modifier is a stacking one that will increase the health and damage output of enemies, which includes converted enemies. So of course, anyone with the Joker skill can get some really powerful allies. There are also modifiers to allow different common enemies with higher base power, who of course, gain the extra firepower and health, and they can still be converted.
• Hand Cannon: The Judge looks like a slightly oversized revolver. It fires .410 shotgun shells; at close range, it's more damaging than the Mosconi. It's also too light to compensate for its own recoil and carries less ammunition than any other secondary weapon, especially when using custom ammo types.
• Harder Than Hard: Pro heists before the Hoxtons Housewarming Party event removed them. Not only is the job even harder, but failing it kicks the players from the map, meaning multi-day heists require a full replay and even single day heists became harder to find again.
  • Mayhem, Death Wish and the Death Sentence difficulties. Similar to Overkill 145+ in the previous game, damage taken increases, every enemy type receives a health boost, assault waves last longer, and you will have lower health when you are revived. Bulldozers with a light machine gun and a new durable and harder hitting SWAT team appear on Mayhem and Death Wish, along with the ZEAL Team units that appear on Death Sentence. Titan cameras can't be broken as well as Titan safes. Additional difficulty factors (such as skylights on Bank Heist variants) have a much higher chance of occurring.
  • Going even further beyond that is the One Down modifier. You can only be downed once (twice if you get a certain skill) before going into custody.
    • To put things into perspective, standard enemies do 225 damage per shot on One Down, with base player health being 230 and the base value of the game's heaviest armour being 170.
  • The Big Bank heist. Advertised as making the original game's bank heist "look like a candy store," players must either go to extreme lengths to avoid an alarm (i.e. navigate a huge, very busy bank and jump through several hoops to simply reach the vault's inside) or hold off massive, swarming waves of cops and move an enormous drill through two huge areas a mere half minute after the alarm, before fleeing through one of four very dangerous (yet theatrical) means.
• Heart Is an Awesome Power: While the Ghost seems somewhat redundant on louder heists, they still have their merits. Fulfilling all speed upgrades, for example, mean you can run/sneak/walk 50% faster, stamina and armor regenerate 50% faster, and you have a 45% dodge chance when running, making the Ghost also cover the Fragile Speedster category.
  • Combined with a couple of Enforcer abilities, the Ghost skills can also make for an amazingly good bag-mover (especially for bags you can sprint with, like meth), able to move several bags to a safer location much faster than otherwise possible. This can save a crew a lot of time and effort, either with moving or potentially retrieving bags.
  • If the Ghost obtains the right upgrades, he can become useful even on loud heists. One example is upgrading the ECM. It can be used as a substitute keycard so you don't have to waste 150+ seconds drilling one door. It can even save your entire crew from an untimely end by emitting at a frequency that paralyzes any hostiles near it with painful headaches, including every Special but cloakers - even Bulldozers. His ability to pick locks at a fast rate and crack safes by hand in forty seconds is also invaluable, especially on missions where the objective is in a safe (Ukrainian Job, Jewelry Store, Night Club) or where many deposit boxes need to be opened quickly and there's no saw on hand (GO Bank, Bank Heist, Big Bank, others.)
• Hell Is That Noise: Cloakers emit a dull hiss/electronic tone (encoded signal?) that observant players can hear. The electronic 'scream' they make when charging definitely qualifies.
• Hero Antagonist: The police are just doing their jobs and trying to protect the civilians from the robbers^*However, the immediate use of violence and overwhelming force by the police would almost certainly qualify the entire DCPD as Cowboy Cops at most generous. To a lesser extent, security guards also qualify.
• Heroic Mime: Jacket could be considered this, albeit without the hero part, as he doesn't have any actual voice lines, and speaks with pre-recorded lines on a tape.
• Highly-Visible Ninja: Cloakers avert this: most of them will hide around corners, in vents, or even under cars, waiting to ambush any player foolish enough to run through the area blindly. Their uniforms are also similar to a normal SWAT unit, which makes them blend in with regular SWAT teams.
  • Potentially played straight by Ghost players, depending on how heavy you gear up. For instance, it won't matter if you're only wearing a two-piece suit when you have a fifty-calibre sniper rifle slung over your shoulder.
• Hitbox Dissonance: Due to the wonky Diesel engine, until Update 107^note three years and one month after release, nearly all enemies lacked hitboxes on their legs, which made shooting their legs do nothing but waste your ammo. Factor in lag and the use of (optional, for performance reasons on weaker PC's) low-quality animations, and this issue got quite frustrating.
• Holiday Mode: Every year, a new Halloween heist^note Except 2014, which repeats the 2013 heist, but making it harder, as well as a Christmas-themed heist has been added:
  • "The Safehouse Nightmare", which takes place in the crew's safehouse. The mission description simply repeats "All work and no play makes Wolf a dull boy." The inside of the vault is on fire, and you have to secure the cash in the vault, all while avoiding headless Bulldozers!. Your last objective is to "Wake Up." There's also random masks floating upstairs; one of them is real and you can keep it to wear later on while the others are fake, including one that changes into a Witch and instantly downs you.
  • In December 2013, the main menu got a Christmas tree in the background and instead of burning money, there's falling snow.
  • For Halloween 2014, the Safe House Nightmare returned - and got even harder. Instead of having semi-automatic shotguns, the Headless Bulldozers now carry light machine guns and are immune to damage from behind, are supported by Cloakers, and there are now two random effects at once.
  • For December 2014, the White Christmas heist was added, which involves the players rescuing a Vlad's brother in law, a drunken, downed pilot. There is an optional objective to search for dropped Christmas presents the plane was carrying, since some of the presents are actually hiding smuggled cocaine and other valuables. Also, the map will endlessly spawn presents, as well as cops, so players could theoretically steal an infinite amount of loot, as long as they can keep fighting off the cops.
• Hollywood Silencer: Averted at first, then later played straight when Overkill updated all silencers to be completely silent, and balanced around penalties to damage, accuracy, concealment and the like instead of noise value. The change was due to the noise from silenced guns being heard by people from a great vertical distance, regardless of what was between the shooter and the NPC. Silenced weapons still sound plenty loud to the player though, with some of them able to be heard from a significant distance.
  • You can now also silence thermal lances, which are about as loud as jackhammers.
  • Played Straight with a Technician drill upgrade; by using a modified drill tip (effectively an industrial silencer) allows you to stealth drill, despite the fact a drill cutting a wall-mounted safe is easily as loud as a gunshot.
• Hostage Situation: Extended here, as assault waves are delayed if you have a lot of hostages tied up.
  • A Mastermind with the Stockholm Syndrome skill can even convince hostages to revive him if he is downed and stay where they are rather than running for safety (and very likely putting themselves right in your sights at inconvenient times) once the cops free them.
  • The Crew Chief perk deck is geared towards, and has significant benefits, for having hostages - and grant a few of these benefits to their team as well.
• Hollywood Tactics: Zig-zagged all over the place. On one hand, expect the police to use plenty of flanking maneuvers, moving from cover to cover, deploying snipers at vantage points, and only attacking in waves or groups. On the other hand, SWAT's general strategy is "let's try to kill them by burying them in the bodies of our dead. After the last three waves were completely annihilated, I'm sure the next wave will do the trick." We Have Reserves really doesn't cut it, you guys...
• Hyperspace Arsenal: Averted, as not only can you only carry one primary and one secondary weapon (reduced from the two primaries and one secondary of the first game), but your total ammo is almost jarringly limited for most weapons (such as a mere 80 bullets for an SMG that uses a 40-round magazine). Even then, your loadout has a detection meter to mark how conspicuous you look, as different types of guns and body armor affect how quickly people notice you; smaller guns are easier to hide, while wearing better body armor or carrying bigger weapons make you more bulky and make you stand out like a sore thumb.
• Impeded Communication: The game allows players to bring ECM^note Electronic Counter-Measure Jammers as part of their arsenal. Among their many useful features is that the Jammers block attempts from guards and civilians to raise the alarm by calling for backup or the police for the duration of their use (though it doesn't work for manual triggers, such as panic buttons during the Bank Heist missions, laser tripwires, or alarm-wired display cases).
• Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy: Both subverted (as the cops are the good guys) and averted. All but the least experienced cops, which won't even spawn on difficulties above Hard, can reliably hit players from dozens of yards away.
  • Played with with actual players, as that depends on whether you and your heisting crew can, well, aim.
• Infinity +1 Sword: Some abilities are near Game-Breaker status save for usage limits:
  • The Mastermind's "Inspire" skill lets you revive downed players 50% faster and also lets you shout at other players to make them move faster for 10 seconds. Acing the skill lets you instantly revive downed players from a distance by simply shouting at them and, provided you're close enough, works through walls and floors/ceilings. The skill was initially balanced by only having a chance to work... which everyone got around by hammering the shout button until the revival happened, hence the "Get the fuck up!" meme. Now it's a guaranteed instant revival but has a twenty second cooldown before you can use it again.
  • The Enforcer's "Iron Man" skill. Basic gives you 30% increased armor for every type of armor in the game. Acing it gives you the Improved Combined Tactical Vest, the single most effective armor available. Combine it with the earlier "Shock And Awe" skill and you and your whole team's armor recovers 25% faster.
  • The Enforcer's OVE9000 saw. Capable of cutting straight through locks, it can completely bypass the 3 minutes it takes to drill a lock or the time it takes to pick a deposit box, and even doubles as a melee weapon. Even the downsides are negligible; the saw can't break into safes^note safes require drilling, cracking, lock-picking, or detonating, with Titan safes on Death Wish and above being immune to the last two and the blades break quickly, though upgrades can increase the ammo refills you can carry and strengthen the blades. One skill even lets you use one as a secondary weapon as well, allowing use of typically more powerful and versatile primary weapons for heists that the saw will be nevertheless helpful in, like Armored Transport.
  • Ghost's "Nimble", when aced, lets you pick locks twice as fast, and lets you silently pick the lock on normal black safes in about 42 seconds - about 25 to 15 percent of the time a basic drill would take! Stacks well as well with Clover's "Burglar" perk deck, the fifth-tier perk of which increases lockpicking speed by an additional 20%.
  • The Ghost's "Sneaky Bastard" skill increases dodge based on concealment level, acing it allowing you to have a detection risk of up to 25 while still getting the full benefits. What normally would be a Dump Stat in a loud mission becomes relevant and can boost one's dodge levels to insane degrees when combined with other dodge-boosting perks.
  • Fugitive's "Messiah". Once per mission, getting a pistol kill when downed grants an instant self-revive, that's even refilled if you use a doctor bag.
  • The Fugitive's Swan Song skill is also incredibly good when aced, giving you a Bottomless Magazine for your gun and letting you move around for a full 6 seconds before going down. It allows you enough time to not only take out whoever might have downed you in the first place, but can let you run to get to cover or somewhere that'd make it easier for your allies to revive you. Another alternative (or good complement) to it is "Feign Death", which allows you to occasionally get right back up after being incapacitated; basic gives a negligible 15% chance, but aced buffs it to a much more reliable 45%.
  • The Thanatos sniper rifle. It can kill anything but Dozers in a single hit anywhere on the body, pierces through thick armor, and can kill those aforementioned Dozers themselves in three hits. Most players equip this sniper rifle when on a sniper-heavy map, such as Undercover or Cook Off.
  • The baseball bat, for melee weapons. It's tied for highest damage for a melee weapon, but also has significant knockdown power and the longest range of any melee weapon. It's also free to all community members.
• Infinity -1 Sword: The C4. Granted, it can't really be used offensively, but it can be used to blow open safes, doors, and many other obstacles. The "Ukrainian Job" heist even comes with an achievement for abusing C4; "Let's do th-": Complete the heist in under 30 seconds by charging to the safe, blowing the door off, and rushing back to the escape van. The C4 and Trip Mines are also given separate ammo counters, allowing a maximum of 6 C4 alongside 14 trip mines, meaning you can use trip mines offensively and for blowing a security door apart.
  • The Fire Axe. Immensely powerful, but takes a very long time to swing, let alone charge.
  • HE Rounds for shotguns. Capable of stunning enemies, tearing off Bulldozer armor, and killing shields, but still not enough to faze the Cloaker and has a reduced ammo pool. They also can't do headshots, and on higher difficulties, the damage multiplier headshots get is absolutely crucial for killing things fast enough to stay alive.
• Insecurity Camera: Downplayed in comparison to the first. Although they are still possible to fool or break, cameras sound the alarm if you stay in their view for too long (at which point not even breaking them will call off the incoming alarm) or destroy too many of them. In addition, the majority of the time, a guard will be paged to investigate any broken cameras, and if one sees it, they trigger the alarm. On the flip side, certain heists have security centers or purchasable camera access points that let you use the cameras to see what's going on in other areas. Killing the guard assigned to the security room renders the cameras harmless to players.
  • Your concealment level makes a difference as to whether or not a camera can spot you, with heavy armor and big guns grabbing its attention instantly, while a two-piece suit and high-concealment weapons let you stand in its view for two or three seconds before the detection meter starts (slowly) rising.
• Informed Equipment: This happens with some weapons, as weapons need pretty high visibility to make you more noticeable. Body armor is averted, as even the level above the basic suit has a visible armor vest underneath that suit, drawing attention towards you.
• Instakill Mook: When they pop out of hiding, Cloakers make a terrifying scream, charging in with an aerial kicks that instantly downs a player. Unlike being downed normally, instakills do not count towards the number of times downed before entering police custody.
• Insurmountable Waist-High Fence: During the White House raid, you need to hack a keypad to get into the West Wing to reach the Oval Office. While it makes sense to quietly do this if going stealthily, if you go loud, there's no reason why the crew doesn't just cross the Rose Garden and crash through one of the Oval Office's windows or the glass door to the Garden. Especially since, by the time you open the door to the West Wing, security lowers barriers over the doors and windows that you must breach with thermite.
• Interface Screw: Smoke grenades block your vision in the affected area as it has done in the first game. New to the sequel are flashbangs which create a flash and a loud noise to blind you and make you deaf for several seconds. You can lessen the effects of a flashbang by looking away at the right moment and the Enforcer has a skill to weaken flashbang effects as well. Flashbangs were changed back in 2016's "Hoxton's Housewarming Party" event, by making flashbangs actual projectiles, and once they land nearby, they can be destroyed by shooting them or hitting them with a melee attack. Doing this enough times nets you an achievement; simply called "Denied".
• Interface Spoiler: In Rats day one, Bain sometimes reads out the wrong ingredient, which can cause you to blow the lab if he suddenly corrects himself after you add the indicated ingredient. This is easily neutralized by turning on the subtitles, which will clearly show him about to correct himself.
• An Interior Designer Is You: Following the "Hoxton's Housewarming Party" updates in October 2016, players above level 25 get a new safehouse that can be customized. By spending Continental Coins, earned through completing new daily side-jobs, acquiring trophies to stash in that safehouse, or after gaining a certain amount of experience, you can upgrade various areas, which may unlock new features like van customization, a target-practice range to test how powerful your guns are, and a punching bag to do the same for melee.
• Interquel: The Border Crossing Heist, released in November 2019, takes place before the Bain's Breakout Heist.
• Inventory Management Puzzle: Invoked in that you have a limit on how many guns and masks you can store. If you want a second copy of a gun that uses different mods or want to make two masks using the same pattern, you better make sure you've got room and sell your stuff if you don't. The available storage space has since been quadrupled so now most people can keep all their favorites in their inventories.
• I Resemble That Remark!: When the Cloaker was fixed and returned to the game, Overkill took a friendly jab at its colorful fanbase by giving the Cloaker several lines that insult the player, including one where he tells them to cry on the forums like a little bitch. Naturally, this went over poorly with some of the fanbase.
• Ironic Name: Twitch, the crew's getaway driver, has almost no character animations, and yet, he is called Twitch. The one exception is a possible escape plan in Breakin' Feds, in which we see him move away from an explosion to blow up the wall, while covering up his ears.
• I Shall Taunt You:
  • The Special SWAT units will taunt you with various lines before attacking you and even have lines that play out if they down you. The Cloaker in particular has taunts that are Leaning on the Fourth Wall, one stating "You wanted me back, so I'm back!", making fun of the fanbase for clamouring for the Cloaker's return, then complaining when he did return.
  • The Commissar also taunts you in the Hotline Miami heist, though his threats and taunts sound more childlike than threatening.
• It's Raining Men: The "Birth of Sky" and "Boiling Point" heists. The first has the crew jumping out of an airplane after they jettisoned money pallets out of the plane, and using parachutes to land safely in a nearby town. The second has you already in the air with the parachute out at the start of the heist. "White Xmas" also has the crew "going in like the paras", though that all happens off-screen, with the heist proper fading in after everyone's landed.
• Jack of All Trades:
  • Possible, but in a different way to PAYDAY: The Heist. Since it's impossible to master all classes like PAYDAY 1, the closest a player can come to this is to be a mix of all; players cannot even master one class entirely, as acing all abilities requires 145 points against a cap of 120.
  • The Technician tree gets a skill named as such. It lets you carry two types of deployables at once, switching between them with a button press, though you can only carry half as many of your second deployable (e.g. only one body bag case or ECM jammer, even with the skill that would let you carry two of them as your primary deployable).
• Joke Weapon: A bundle of cash can be used as a melee weapon. As one would expect, killing an enemy with a wad of cash takes forever, but it comes with a fast wind-up, quick swing, and a funny-yet-satisfying "whap!" noise. The Hoxton Breakout update also adds a toothbrush sharpened into a form of a shiv that barely injures foes, but can be spammed with lightning speed if you don't charge it up. There's also a pair of boxing gloves you can use to punch people to death with and despite their bright colors and large size, they have an extremely high concealment stat.
  • The Lumberlite L2 Chainsaw Melee weapon, which, outside of a stealth-oriented build, used to be this trope. You'd think a chainsaw, of all things, would be an awesome and powerful melee weapon to use? Nope; it had damage stats equivalent to the weapon butt, except it's slower to actually charge up. It's such a slow melee weapon that it can't even be improved by the reworked Sociopath perk deck ^note If you hit or kill an enemy in the last second, you get a damage boost of up to Ten Times its base damage!, which makes a lot of other questionable melee's, including an ice-pick, various knives, even ''your own kung-fu style hand-moves'', all of which were more viable than a freakin' chainsaw... something that is powerful in the first place! Nowadays it has damage on par with the top damage melee weapons, but it still has its slow swing, putting it more in Infinity -1 Sword territory.
• Justified Tutorial:
  • While completely optional, there is a mission at the safe house where upon visiting it for the first time, you're given a message by Bain about arriving at the safe house and he explains how certain things work (grabbing loot bags, taking loose money, putting on your mask, picking locks, CrimeNet, and so on). The trip to the safe house is due to you moving to Washington D.C. and needing a place to lie low after doing a heist. Luckily, you don't have to endure the tutorial when coming back to the safe house.
  • The "Get the Coke" and "Flash Drive" heists teach you the basics on loud and stealth heists. They're justified by Bain easing Dallas back into the job after two years off.
• Katanas Are Just Better: The Yakuza Character Pack released in late August also added a 'Shinsakuto Katana'^trans.(roughly; 'new sword', referring to post-1953 manufacture) which is one of the deadliest melee weapons available. In addition to enough charge damage to oneshot any special that isn't a Cloaker or Bulldozer (and even then, with skills it can oneshot a Cloaker), any Cloakers killed with the katana by Jiro will either be decapitated or bisected.
• Kill It with Fire: The BBQ Weapons Pack DLC offers flame based weapons to roast your enemies with, such as a flamethrower, molotovs cocktails, incendiary shotgun ammo, and incidental grenade launcher ammo. Certain heists also let you purchase gasoline can assets that you can use to light an area on fire to prevent cops from going to that spot.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: One randomized intro to Buluc's Mansion has Vlad complain to Locke that the tech he's using to watch the Payday Gang hopefully kill his hated rival is old and busted. Locke says it's probably time for a change. PAYDAY 3 was still in development, and was confirmed to be switching to the Unreal engine.
• Later-Installment Weirdness: Suffice it to say, when a game that starts with four bank robbers ends with storming the White House to stop a secret society, the gang has come a long way from holding up jewellery stores and local banks. This is reflected in the weapon packs, too, as the game goes from mostly real-world weapons to hi-tech railguns, a machine gun with a flamethrower mounted on it, and a triple-barreled AK prototype.
• Lawman Baton: The Telescopic Baton, another melee weapon added by the Gage Shotgun DLC. Of note is how it's used: it has very low damage but very high knockdown, making it perfect for intimidating law enforcers into submission without seriously harming them, much like how it's used in real life.
  • The basic street cops will also use a regular straight baton against you as their regular melee attack.
  • The Cloaker also employs a nightstick to beat the stuffing out of you once he's kicked you to the floor.
• Lethal Joke Item:
  • The Freedom Spear is a melee weapon that is in the form of an American flag on a pole. Jabbing the pointy end at enemies looks and sounds ridiculous until you charge up the thrust and unleash it; the spear has the most charge up damage out of all melee weapons (beating out more practical lethal weapons like a fire axe and a hammer), and also has great reach. The weapon's only downside is needing 4 seconds of wind up before you can maximize its damage, and a long delay between thrusting the weapon and actually dealing the damage.
  • Another joke weapon is a wad of money, which deals practically minimal damage but has a ridiculously high knockdown stat. Players can spam attacks with the money wad to permanently stunlock enemies, which can buy you some time on stealth runs if you need to neutralize a guard but don't have any pagers left.
• Legacy Character: The Hoxton alias that originally belonged to the mean Brit from the first game. After his arrest, the name went to Dallas' younger brother. The name went back to "old" Hoxton once he's freed from prison and "new" Hoxton is renamed "Houston". However, Houston keeps the design of Hoxton's old mask, while Hoxton himself wears his old mask that was horribly disfigured and warped due to the circumstances of his arrest.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall:
  • If you pre-ordered the Criminal Career Edition, you'll start the game with a bundle of cash and then you get a bit more when Bain shows you around your safe house for the first time. He calls the extra cash as a gift towards you for your generous donation to OVERKILL (the developers of the game).
  • The long-awaited Cloakers rest some weight on the wall, as well. Occasionally, after downing one of your crew, he'll say "I know, I know... I'm late."^note  Cloakers were removed during the beta because of a Game-Breaking Bug they caused, which was finally rectified as of patch 23. With OVERKILL's sense of humor, it's likely a gentle rib at the players and the unit's in-universe exasperation.
  • At the end of "The Dentist" trailer, the Dentist says "Because I need my payday... too."
  • The Aftershock heist has the crew transporting safes full of weapons with customized skins so that Vlad can sell them to criminals on the east coast. This ties in with the actual safes and custom skins that players could once trade and buy on the Steam marketplace.
• Leave No Survivors: A common tactic in smaller stealth runs, usually the H&T Banks, the jewelry stores, and especially the Car Shop. Better to pay the cleaner costs than fail stealth and usually the mission outright, after all.
• Level Grinding: Discouraged through slower leveling from around level 40, which then becomes even slower from level 60 onwards. It possible to acquire a total of 120 upgrade points, but the later XP requirements mean even a flawless multi-day heist on the highest difficulty will never get you more than 3/4 of a level. Thankfully, upgrades now come with a respec option that refunds all your points. Before skills were updated, a respec also got you around 50-60% of your upgrade expenses back.^note The point of a partial cash refund means you still have to work and save up cash again for the best abilities, preventing abuse of the respec feature between missions.
  • Also discouraged further with the boost and penalty systems that rewards players more experience points for playing heists they haven't played in a while and reducing experience points gained for playing the same heists too many times in a short burst.
• Limited Animation: Both the player characters and the cops and SWAT units share the same animations for moving and melee attacks. Even civilians reviving the player via Stockholm Syndrome skill use the same syringe revive animation that the team AI uses. Word of God says that keeping animations limited helps save on time and development costs since the game doesn't exactly need unique animations for an NPC that will probably get killed as soon as he appears.
• Limited Loadout: Despite having the ability to hold over 100 guns in your inventory, around half a dozen field equipment (ammo bags, jammers, etc) and 20 or so melee weapons, you can only use 2 guns, 1 melee weapon, and 1 field item in a heist.
• Linear Warriors, Quadratic Wizards: Big guns and heavy armor are remarkably effective at lower difficulty levels and are often the easiest way to do a heist, but as a player approaches higher levels and Overkill and Deathwish difficulties stealth becomes easier on most heists because assault waves scale to difficulty while stealth elements rarely do. Even for straight gunfighting, all but the heaviest armor and largest guns tend to phase out in favor of highly-mobile dodge-based builds as the difficulty increases.
• Loophole Abuse:
  • Doing heists in stealth on the highest possible difficulty (Death Sentence) is a good way to ensure some gameplay consistency in stealth, as guard spawns are locked to Mayhem and above, meaning there's no further difficulty increase from playing stealth on that difficulty.
  • Similarly, there is also nothing stopping you ticking the One Down modifier when in stealth either, which lets you get the achievement for doing the heist with One-Down enabled...despite the entire point of stealth being to avoid the firefight.
  • The "I Have No Idea What I'm Doing" achievement is unlocked for completing Shadow Raid, a stealth-only heist, while bringing a minigun and an RPG launcher. Nothing says the guy going for this achievement needs to do anything more than stay back at the van and toss in bags for more competently-geared teammates who do the actual stealthing.
  • There's also the "The Turtle Always Wins" achievement, for completing the Art Gallery heist in stealth in four minutes while wearing the ICTV, the heaviest armor in the game that basically makes stealth impossible. The least painful, if not only, way of doing this involves abusing another loophole regarding what counts as breaking stealth: ECM rushing.
• Luck-Based Mission: Most missions can be approached with stealth, but factors like the AI Director and general luck greatly influence your success. If the stealth fails, you can still beat the level, just with more difficulty.
  • The Rats heist is heavily luck-based, though most of the random elements are limited to Day 2. Day 1 is rather predictable, except occasionally Bain will tell you the wrong ingredient. ^note Not everyone hears the 'wrong' ingredient, so asking your team what they heard can prevent you from adding the wrong thing For Day 2, you have to trade the meth you cooked in Day 1 (and kept through the Escape sequence afterwards, if there was one) with some gangsters and the deal can go sour if you failed to bring the minimum of 3 bags, and WILL go sour if you didn't bring any. However, if you do have meth, there are still several uncontrollable variables, such as if the gangsters decide to screw you over or if the cops just happen to turn up. Day 3 has no variance other than the C4 in the bus, which cannot be disarmed if you failed to take the intel from Day 2.
  • The Harvest and Trustee bank (Random version). There's always a chance the vault is empty, meaning you have to break into the safety deposit boxes. Granted, it's easily done with a saw, but lacking one means you have to start picking into each and every one until the team can scrape enough together.^note If you just want to leave ASAP, there's a little-known workaround: once the outer vault door is open, all you need to do is pick up sufficient loose cash to trigger an exit. The cash lying around in the teller area is enough, or you can pop an ATM, but you have to wait for the door to open; if you got bored and cleaned up while waiting, you'll still have to pick.
  • The Armored Transport heist has a small chance of spawning military blueprints, which you will need if you wish to play the Train Heist.^note No longer true: as of Update #57, Train Heist is a separate job and picking up the blueprints does not trigger it. Another smaller element in these jobs is that, on higher difficulty levels, the game can decide to spawn a massively-armored and highly dangerous Bulldozer enemy in the back of one of the armored trucks, just to keep you on your toes when opening them up. The type of loot you need to secure is also random ranging from easy to move (jewelry) to a pain in the ass to haul (gold).
  • Mallcrashers on Death Wish has an interesting variation. There are two police officers standing out front drinking coffee. Because Death Wish increases sight ranges, it is possible for these two officers to detect you and raise the alarm almost as soon as you load into the map unless you back up immediately. You probably weren't going to stealth it anyway, though, right?
  • GO Bank is so random it's cruel, especially as achievements require a zero alarm run and/or zero civilian casualties. Even if everything is perfect, stealth runs mean you must take a call to confirm the vault unlock, and the said caller can randomly ask to speak with "Barney" to confirm, or can be a police chief demanding to speak with an officer; if Bain can't convince them otherwise, either of the callers will send enemies to check out the bank and then raise the alarm when they don't report back things are fine. In other words, unless you're willing to leave a chunk of loot, you'll being forfeiting stealth achievements and XP and, since the driver flees at first alarm, you have to do the tedious "Plan B" method.
    • If that isn't bad enough, do note that several random factors can sabotage the mission. Not only do passing civilians frequently spawn into the map, but even cops can sometimes walk past and sound the alarm; even one of the portable toilets out back can randomly open, resulting in a bank guard wandering in from the back without warning. Throw in things like, for example, how a blackmailer can call and demand you throw a cash bag over a fence or he calls the cops, and you've got some unleaded Fake Difficulty. Finally, the vault is almost always secured by motion-sensing lasers, so it only takes one person on the team not knowing about them to rush in and ruin the stealth in the mission's final moments. Plus, the lasers move in a semi-random pattern, taking massive amounts of either luck or pattern-observation to get through the door safely. Repeatedly, since there is no way to disable them even once inside.
    • Not even Plan B is safe from the RNG gods. While you can buy the Ace Pilot asset to have a better chance that the pilot will use the roof as the extraction point for the loot, there will be times where the pilot will refuse to use the roof and opt to either use the street (which is filled with cops) or the parking lot (shootout for snipers) to pick up the loot. When the time comes for the pilot to pick up the loot, he can miss several times in a row if you're unlucky enough and each miss forces you to wait several more minutes until the pilot circles around to try again. If you're REALLY unlucky, the pilot can get shot down and crash, causing the loot bags that you secured to be scattered all over the place and force you to move them yourselves through the sewers while under a time limit. Even if the snag is successful, there's a chance the pilot just flew away with an empty cage because the cops took all the bags out before the pilot got there.
    • Basically the only thing about this heist that can be said to remain consistent is that 2 guards and 6 cameras will always spawn in the beginning... and the level geometry doesn't change. Everything else is completely up in the air, but it can also be to your benefit (Hillary can be fooled, and 1% of the time the vault can be completely open, lasers deactivated and the phone calls will never come).
  • Being a purely stealth-based heist, Shadow Raid can be a lot easier or tougher depending of randomized elements in the map. Chief among them, there is a chopper that has a high chance to spawn minutes into the mission, carrying a varying amount of guards which will start patrolling. Plus, those guards may simply stay still, guarding key access points that you need to pass in order to access the loot. On the other hand, it's possible that the chopper won't bring any guards, but leave a crate containing a valuable but extremely heavy artifact.
    • The assets available for purchase on this mission are incredibly useful, but completely unreliable. A loot-bag drop off point in the form of a zip line behind the warehouse, where plenty of loot is but not close to any other drop off locations? Good! A 50% chance for that zip line to spawn on the roof, away from all loot and lead back to the start of the level, completely eliminating the purpose of it? Bad. Another alternate drop off point, allowing you to throw loot over the main fence to instantly be collected in the courtyard, the location with arguably half the loot in the job? Good! A 25% chance for that to be there, where otherwise the drop off point is in the form of one of three dumpsters, all of which are right next to the starting drop off point anyway? Very bad. Naturally, there's no way to tell where these are going to spawn until after you've already started the heist and spent the money. This however, was mitigated a bit by a later patch which enabled Preplanning.
  • It's rare but possible for five guards to spawn in Ukrainian Job. If you don't know this and try to stealth the mission by getting all the guards down, as is standard procedure, then you'll run out of pagers and the alarm will go off.
  • If you do Election Day loud, there is a 50% chance that Bain will get the wrong location for day 2 if you only hack the computer once. Hack it twice and it bumps it to 25% chance. There is no way to guarantee the warehouse on a loud way (fortunately, the map is very easy to ECM rush).
• Lumber Mill Mayhem: The "Boiling Point" heist takes the crew to a remote russian lumber mill where a secret russian organization is doing research on super soldiers. To complete the job players will have to go in shooting, disable a few big guns, set off an EMP, breach the facility, get the data they need and then fight their way to the escape.

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