Battlefield turned Payday 2 designer starts new indie studio

Payday 2 lead designer David Goldfarb has quit developer Overkill Software to start his own indie studio.

Goldfarb will lead a new four-man project, a far cry from his past life working at DICE on titles such as Battlefield 3, Bad Company 2 and Mirror's Edge.

"I'm abandoning triple-A," Goldfarb told Polygon. "Payday 2 wasn't triple-A but it had triple-A sales. But I just want to find genres that I can subvert. To do that I can't be working for people in the way that I was, I just don't want any of that sh**."

Goldfarb has expressed interest in making a role-playing game, although has pledged to avoid popular gaming trends.

"No MOBAs, no comic book-styled art, no pixel art. Like, those are things I will not do. And there's nothing wrong with those things, those things are all awesome, I just don't want to do any of them."

At Overkill, Goldfarb helped steer Payday 2 to success. The title made its money back merely from pre-order sales and went on to shift 1.58m copies in its first month. Payday 2's popularity has continued post-launch too - the title's bustling DLC schedule recently roped in the actor behind Breaking Bad's Gus Fring to star as a new character.

"It's all on good terms and I think [Overkill] are well positioned to succeed as the last Steam sale seems to indicate," Goldfarb concluded. "They're doing just fine. It's just one of those things where I've been making games for a long time.

"If I start fighting with people or I'm restless, you start to see the same things happening. After a while I was just like 'Maybe it's just time to admit the thing I've been fighting all of my career,' which is the fact that the only thing that will make me happy is just doing this myself and not deferring that desire because it's scary. It just felt like the right time."

Goldfarb was jokingly immortalised as "hostile" by his former DICE co-workers in an obscure Battlefield 3 Easter egg.