| FBI Van | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Description | |
| Enemy Type | Vehicle |
| Statistics | |
| Health | N/A |
| Armor | N/A |
| Hardness | N/A |
| Extra Statistics | |
| Visor Armor | N/A |
| Visor Hardness | N/A |
| Other | |
| Internal name | N/A
|
| Voice actor | N/A |
The FBI Van is a special enemy in PAYDAY 3. It appears on the Hard, Very Hard, and OVERKILL difficulties. It is driven by FBI Special Agent Rebecca Stone.
Mechanics[]
The FBI Van is essentially this game's version of Captain Winters from PAYDAY 2, boasting a similar mission-wide effect while it is present.
The Van may appear at the start of any assault wave, turning it into an endless police assault. This means that players will be unable to trade hostages for resources or to receive deployables from crew bots until the Van's antenna is gone. Special units will also infinitely respawn, much faster than in normal Final Charges, making sure that Cloakers, Bulldozers and Naders swarm the player frequently.
To disable the FBI Van's effect, a heister must shoot the van's radar dish until it breaks. The Van itself, as well as its driver, are both completely invincible. It will remain present for the rest of the heist, albeit with a non-functional antenna, and can only appear once per mission.
Strategies[]
Eliminating the FBI Van is easy, much easier than how Captain Winters in the previous game was guarded by powerful Phalanx Shield units. The FBI Van is often isolated from any police force and, depending on the map, spawns in one or two locations that rarely ever alternates. When Shade warns of the FBI's arrival, simply leave the building you are in and look for the FBI Van, which often parks itself in an alleyway, an adjacent street, or - in the case of Houston Breakout - the underground garage.
Despite the FBI Van's laughably pitiful weakness, it should be noted that the FBI Van should still be taken seriously. While utterly defenceless and incapable of even fighting off an incoming heister, such as PAYDAY 2's infamous SWAT Turret, the FBI Van's most threatening aspect is not just the fact it can summon an endless police assault, but that the FBI Assault wave will cause special units to spawn almost instantly upon the death of the current active special units.
For example, a Cloaker that has been eliminated by a heister will immediately spawn a second Cloaker within the next few seconds, with the same applying to Bulldozers, causing an infinite feedback loop where players are stuck in a cycle of repeatedly killing Cloakers that's instantly replaced by even more Cloakers. This makes the more dangerous special units (such as Bulldozers and Naders) a massive neverending threat, especially if the Combat Duo modifier is active.
To completely negate the threat of an FBI Van, the FBI Assault phase will not cause the control phase to end early, and the FBI Van often arrives moments before the control phase ends, so destroying the FBI Van's antenna the moment it arrives on the map is highly advised, rendering it useless the moment it spawns and avoiding the painful cycle of getting swarmed by infinite Cloakers and Bulldozers.
Trivia[]
- Strangely, the FBI Van's antenna appears to take no damage from explosives or throwing knives.
- The wave at which the Van appears is seeded; it will always show up at exactly the same time every time the mission is restarted. This can allow players to form strategies to cripple it faster.