I think an open source payday-like community project would be neat.

[Skywalker]

Pros:
- Community balanced weapons, that'd mean no forgotten / underpowered guns.
- Another engine, as I understand it Diesel is not the best at a lot of stuff a modern engine can handle better, could probably be Godot or a custom version of it to better fit a payday-like game if it's not sufficient.
- Easier modding, that could involve custom models (that PD2 has, but break often as I understand), units and their behaviors, skills, weapons and maps, without considering them cheats with something like a mod hub that flags stuff as game breaking and the like, like with Deep Rock Galactic's mod,io.
- Community patches, if someone spots something someone knows how to fix then it would be a quick fix, rather than having to wait for an update that packs a lot of other stuff with it.

Huh:

/ Probably better bots / pathfinding in the base game / engine. There could be official rules in map making to make sure bots don't get stuck or do dumb things, like making bots teleport neraby and the like if they get stuck or something, i didn't really thing this one through, but it's a possibility.

/ Maybe a simpler matchmaking system than the one with EOS, only depending on a 3rd party to check for the compatibility between host and user/s with their content, updating it if necessary as a user joins, and allowing that user to replace a bot if the game has already started.

Cons:
- Community balance could take long discussions, but would ultimately reach somewhere with a poll (and could otherwise be solved with a mod, was a significant minority wanting a contrary change).
- Modular content could be hard to implement if there was a lot of disagreement, so it would be better to create an engine with a platform like Minetest, having separate "games", that could share maps and mods without creating unnecessary conflicts.
- Users with poor connections could take some time to join a match, having to check and download whatever content the host has, but this could be fixed with forced optimization to file weight, or a limit to how much a mod / map should weigh. Other solution would be to make the project tolerant to model incompatibility, replacing with default models conflicting and or inexistent models, whilst downloading the data that allows the game to know how that weapon / npc / map object works, for example, if there's a 25 MB shotgun model with a couple of kilobytes of data, you could set the game to not download the shotgun model, but just the data, and replace the 25 MB shotgun model with an existent model that sorta matches the colors of the 25 MB one, with already established animations that come with the game / engine.

(Now that I think about it there's a lot of solutions alternate to having to download the entire game and maps to play only certain content, but I don't wanna post them here, for that would be boring.)

- All this complexity could worsen user experience, but the people that are most likely to be involved in the project are already familiar to deal with bad UX / UI (with this I mean it takes more time to reach somewhere, not that it's harder to understand or do) in order to get to the good stuff.
-Probably no clowns in the base engine / game, also probably no fully voiced characters in the majority of cases, and none of the cool music from the Payday saga (at least in the base engine / game)

I'd like to know what you all think.

[VerrucktMedic]

In a perfect world, there would be tons of open sourced video games. But you're not taking into account how momentous of a task making a game from scratch is. Finding people with talent that would pull together for free and have the game ever get fully finished would be a hard search, so it'd be more likely a crowdfunded project.

Plus there's just a lot of assumptions here that the talent you'd find could make a better game than a funded studio. I think mods for Payday 2 work well with the game as a base. There's tons of content and rebalance mods already, and they're usually hosted on GitHub with the open ability to contribute.

[i c wiener]

With the number of mods - many of which fix actual issues with the game - PD2 is basically more than halfway there already