One of my favorite games of last year was Payday 2. I played a ton of it with fellow Buzz Media editor Charles and we had a pretty regular group going on Live with play sessions that would stretch much longer into the night than any of us expected with ‘shit I almost leveled, lets go one more.’ At E3 I got to meet up with some of members of the development team to talk about the new DLC they have coming out that sounds pretty awesome.

The new DLC is called the Big Bank and it is a single large heist that the characters are accepting from a new contact known as  The Dentist, who is voiced by and modeled after the awesome Giancarlo Esposito, because Dallas has learned that he can get the original Hoxon from the first game out of jail. The first step down this road is the bank heist which is one big job that offers up a new sort of experience for players.

The big change here is the pre-planning stage which allows players a lot of control over how things are going to go down. The players can hire an inside man to do things like plant a hidden camera inside or poison food to lay the guards low before you ever go in. You can set things up beforehand like med kit drops and ammo drops based off of a map of the level which will also allow you to choose your points of ingress and egress.

Part of the freedom of planning is that it allows you to tackle the level however you’d like be it through stealth or go in guns blazing. This means you can plan your own perfect heist instead of doing things according to a pre-set job that requires you to do certain things in certain orders. The emphasis here is obviously on teamwork and cooperation so you can send some team members off to do one part of the plan while you accomplish your part. There is no need to be right next to each other the whole time so you can get more accomplished in the shortest amount of time. The objectives can be done in whatever order you’d like so you have all the freedom you need to do things the way you want. If you get stuck on a certain objective, you can change it up to go at it differently if you need to.

I got hands on time with the PC version of the Big Bank and it played just as smoothly as the previous game did with the pre-planning running off an easy to use interface that allows you and your team to set up as you see fit. On my play through, my team and I got the vault open which is, as anyone who has played Payday 2 knows is a feat unto itself and I got to sample some of the new verticality on the roof and outdoor portions while sniping in coming SWAT teams.

The heist can take anywhere from 20 minutes to 2 hours to complete successfully depending on skill and difficulty. This makes for a pretty big chunk of new stuff to do and with a lot of choices involved in the execution the content has a lot of replay value.

One of the coolest things about this DLC, I think, is that Overkill does not want to split the community with the DLC so as long as the host has the content that player can host the level for players who don’t have it. I think this is pretty badass and shows how much Overkill cares about the players and their community. I had a great time with the Big Bank and I can’t wait until I get my hands on it to play with my crew. The Big Bank will be available on PC, Xbox 360 and PS3.