Fast Travel Games Put a Free Heist on December 14 and Five $2.99 Items in the Store on Day One

Fast Travel Games has committed to shipping every future PAYDAY: Aces High heist (Steam, Meta Horizon Store) at no extra cost. The first one is dated December 14. It is called Coup De Grâce, and it will be the game’s seventh heist.

The pledge went up as a Steam announcement on November 5, the day the game launched at $24.99. "All new heists in PAYDAY: Aces High will be COMPLETELY FREE," the post reads. The studio said it would hold to that "for as long as we are developing the game." One line draws the boundary: "No hidden fee, no battlepass, nothing." Fast Travel repeated it the next morning inside a dated roadmap. The roadmap carries dates, which the pledge on its own did not.

Four dates before the end of the year

November 19 brings the first large patch, carried mostly by bug fixes, with a haptics intensity slider and a restart button as the named features. November 26 opens the first Community Challenge, which hands every participant a pair of gloves and adds a Gage’s Shop pack with the Jupiter and Queen of Hearts masks "and more." December 10 runs a second challenge with a seasonal reward. December 14 delivers Coup De Grâce. The same day adds new weapons and masks in what the roadmap calls The Bank Robber Pack, with no word yet on whether it costs anything.

The roadmap hedged on one item. Fast Travel wrote that the restart button "MAY come earlier" than November 19. It landed the same day the roadmap did, and party leaders now get two options. Restart Heist reloads the map in place, and Abandon Heist returns the whole crew to the safe house. Fast Travel posted the hotfix that morning, then announced it a second time about an hour and a half later. Beating your own public estimate by thirteen days is not the usual direction of travel for a live VR shooter.

What the store sold on day one

Five items went on sale beside the game on November 5. Each costs $2.99. Four are masks from the flatscreen series: Dallas, Hoxton, Chains and Wolf. The fifth is a weapon, the AMR Classic Assault Rifle with a red dot sight. Not one of them is a heist. Together they come to $14.95, which is sixty percent of the base price of the game they attach to.

None of that contradicts the pledge. The pledge covers heists, and heists are the content that splits a co-op playerbase when it sits behind a paywall. Masks and guns do not. That distinction is the whole design of the promise, and it is the thing to hold onto on December 14, when a free heist and The Bank Robber Pack arrive together.

Whose promise it is

The pledge is Fast Travel's to keep, not Starbreeze's. Starbreeze owns PAYDAY, and its announcement in March describes Aces High as an officially licensed game. Steam lists Fast Travel Games as both developer and publisher. The "no battlepass" line reads as positioning against live-service habits across the genre. It binds only the studio that wrote it.

VR.org covered the launch date and the final playtest in October, and the earlier closed playtest in August. The game shipped with four classes and six heists. Cross-play covers Quest 3 and 3S, Steam and Steam Frame. Reviews split on solo play. UploadVR called it VR's best new co-op shooter, while Road to VR advised against playing alone because the enemy AI falls apart without a crew. A PS VR2 version has been described by the studio only as possible, with no date.

For a buyer

At $24.99 the arithmetic is simple. Six heists are in now. A seventh lands on December 14 at no charge. A stated policy covers every heist after that, for as long as Fast Travel is developing the game. Quest owners subscribed to Meta Horizon+ can already play it through the subscription this month. Everyone else is buying a $24.99 co-op shooter with a cosmetics store attached, from a studio that has so far shipped early. December 14 tests the policy, not the roadmap.