Swedish games firm Starbreeze has confirmed that the highly-anticipated Payday 3 is still in the works.

In an update on Twitter, the company said that the project was on-going and that it was currently in the design phase. Payday 3 will be using Unreal Engine, though there's no word yet on when the game will be out in the wild.

This news comes after a rather stressful year for Starbreeze. In December 2018, the company went into reconstruction thanks to several years of poor investments. The firm was in bad financial health and staked its future on Overkill's The Walking Dead, but that project had faced huge development issues and ultimately failed to meet the mark. IP owned Skybound terminated its relationship with Starbreeze and pulled the game from sale on Steam.

Since then, the company has pulled itself out of financial difficulty. It took Starbreeze a year to emerge from reconstruction, but it managed this on December of last year. The firm does now seem to be betting the farm on Payday, valuing the IP at a cool $162.3m in October 2019.

In February, Starbreeze raised $5m to help fund Payday 3, before launching a $26.8m funding round to find cash for the project in June.

The company was on a hunt for a publishing partner for Payday 3, but these talks were impacted by the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic. Italian firm Digital Bros seems to be eying up a takeover of Starbreeze, now holding around 30 per cent of the company's share capital and voting rights. Digital Bros owns 505 Games, which published Payday 2, so it's possible its sequel will receive the same treatment.