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It is no secret that PAYDAY 2 has had a bit of a rocky past. With a boatload of post-launch downloadable content released, the bad loot-box publicity, and everything in-between, it's not particularly hard to imagine why people might've been avoiding the game entirely. Having said all that, PAYDAY 2 has long-since been content-complete and available in its 'Ultimate Edition', which bundles together over 150 new weapons, 250 new masks, and 50 new heists into one amazing package that ensures you put that pesky DLC talk behind you. However, that's not all you get, as with the game no longer being updated, numerous other perks have appeared as well.
Namely, while PAYDAY 2 has always had a moderately active modding scene, the game also received quite a lot of updates on practically a weekly basis. This meant that, if you wanted to stay on top of things, you had no choice but to constantly and consistently keep track of whatever mods you have installed, the game's build version, and various other aspects which are honestly quite tiring, all things considered. This is no longer the case, however! If you are in the market for a rather unique cooperative game, you've come to the right place, because PAYDAY 2 is now at its absolute best.
For the uninitiated, PAYDAY 2 is a cooperative first-person shooter where players take up the roles of brutal-yet-likable heisters as they charge and plunder left and right. Their haunts include both your run-of-the-mill heists such as bank or jewelry store hits, but also some of the weirder stuff, such as running around an Area 51 stand-in, clashing with high-tech private military contractors, and other such stuff. The game offers an incredible variety of objectives and locales, all the while allowing players to customise both their characters and their loadouts to an incredible degree. Each and every weapon can, for example, be fitted with an assortment of attachments ranging from silencers and optical devices all the way to garden-variety gun skins and whatnot, while perk trees ensure that you yourself define what your role is in any given match. A veritable unlock-bonanza, PAYDAY 2 has content for literal days of playtime.
All of this is expounded upon through the use of mods. Mods come both in simple and in complex formats, with the simpler ones providing you with even more weapons, masks, skins, attachments, and even heisters. More complex ones include entire new (highly-polished) heists and extreme gameplay variations, where players can granularly control enemies' AI, equipment, and virtually everything else to boot. New HUDs are a plenty, and you can even add advanced gameplay features such as, say, leaning around corners. The central hub for all your PAYDAY 2 modding needs is definitely the modworkshop.net website, where up-to-date versions of mods are hosted and updated on a daily basis.
Best of all is the fact that, through the use of BeardLib and BLT modules, you can enable in-game auto-update for mods, thus ensuring that once you've got everything set up just right, you'll be free of any further modding problems, short of an odd crash here and there that's, sadly, quite inevitable given the game's outdated engine.
Of course, keeping in mind the fact that PAYDAY 2 is a multiplayer cooperative experience, you might be worried about multiplayer mod support. The great news is that the vast majority of mods work just fine in every situation. The ones that heavily modify gameplay situations, such as the popular Full Speed Swarm mod, are host-dependent, meaning they won't work if you're playing a multiplayer match hosted by someone who hasn't got the mod installed. Custom weapons, on the other hand, are client-side additions, and are invisible to other players anyway. Of course, some mods might break a few things if you're playing publicly, but that's just to be expected given the nature of the situation.
With more and more awesome mods being released on a daily basis, PAYDAY 2 is going to keep growing and improving with each passing week, but even if you're not keen on modding your game, the base Ultimate Edition will provide you with more than enough content to get a kick out of your purchase. If you go out and purchase the game now, you're getting years' worth of content all bundled together into one easy-to-access package, and there really isn't any good competition to PAYDAY 2 in this regard. With all of that in mind, what's not to like?
Get in the Game ! 
