is there any way to play this without any extra content?

[Licoix]

I just wanna play singleplayer with bots, no weapon dlc, no extra characters or missions, just the base game.
I don't have alot of storage space so 80gigs is not feasible on my machine.

[The man, the myth, the leg]

the game installs everything even if you dont own DLC
its so you can join other poeple hosting heists you dont own and to be able to render things you dont own

so the answer is no

[Blockhead]

You *might* be able to download and play the demo; which will obviously be super bare-bones and nothing like the finished game. The demo has been delisted from the store page, but you can download it on demand from here:

https://steamdb.info/sub/21230/

[Dot]

It might be possible to do it, there's just one problem though.

There is a way to play older builds of the game that don't have any of the additional content but keep in mind that that might also remove other aspects from the game like certain skills if you go back far enough and it might even reintroduce some fixed bugs. There's a guide that explains how to do it which I'll link here:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=892936753

There's one problem though, from what I've heard you have to have the full game installed first to be able to downgrade to older versions, so if you can spare some storage space temporarily to then downgrade and get that space back later then it might work. If you don't have that much space available in the first place though then it'll still be a problem

[Blockhead]

Originally posted by Dot:

There's one problem though, from what I've heard you have to have the full game installed first to be able to downgrade to older versions, so if you can spare some storage space temporarily to then downgrade and get that space back later then it might work.

Directly from the guide you linked:

The process is memory heavy as you have to download several instances of PAYDAY 2, so GBs will quickly rack up on your hard drive. Similarly you might struggle if you have a slow internet connection.
Be sure you have enough space on your hard drive to store backups of the game files and old update game files (approximately three times the total size of PAYDAY 2).

[Mementocity]

I have no clue why ppl dont let this game installed on some 1tb HDD, the SSD barely improved load times for me so I leaved it there.
Anyways, afaik theres a way to compress steam games with some videos talking about it, have you tried it out already?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WiRPYNqIlsk

personally I've haven't used it but you can give it a try

[BlunderingFool]

Yea, the game runs on DX9 for goodness sake, you can run it off 'slow media' just fine. Actually I highly recommend people throw DXVK in or the DX11 shader mod. I tend to have better luck with the former though (Sans some instances of crashing, probably a 32bit memory issue that either the anti-crash mod or memory clearing mod would likely fix it.)

[Sunday Driver]

You for sure do not need SSD speeds for this game. It's nice to have, but not at all needed to run it. The game loads and caches stuff in your system memory and it's not one of those modern open world games that streams off the drive non stop.

[Pixie Demon Queen]

This game was released in 2013 and is peak optimized for older systems and storage. As other has mentioned there is zero benefit to putting this on anything higher than a gen 1 SATA SSD.

[Blockhead]

Not sure why people are commenting on memory speed/load time optimisation:

Originally posted by Licoix:

I don't have alot of storage space so 80gigs is not feasible on my machine.

OP literally doesn't have the storage space for the game and is asking if there is a way to download and play a less 'complete' version of the game.

[Sunday Driver]

Originally posted by Blockhead:

Not sure why people are commenting on memory speed/load time optimisation:

Originally posted by Licoix:

I don't have alot of storage space so 80gigs is not feasible on my machine.

OP literally doesn't have the storage space for the game and is asking if there is a way to download and play a less 'complete' version of the game.

It's likely because the storage amount is so small and cheap by today's standard for drive sizes unless you're trying to run everything off of high speed SSDs where costs go up significantly, which is a mistake a lot of people newer to tech make as they think that using HDDs are somehow impossible or terrible experiences and that they need SSDs for everything.