10 Chambers is a studio with serious pedigree. Founded by Ulf Andersson and nine other industry veterans, most of whom had worked on cooperative shooters like Payday 2 and Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter, the developer set out to make exciting games free of corporate oversight.
Following the brutally hard GTFO, 10 Chambers revealed Den of Wolves’ gameplay at The Game Awards late last year, a heist game that takes the best parts of Payday and the difficulty of GTFO to thrust players into a lawless cyberpunk world.
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Den of Wolves – Gameplay Reveal Trailer
Watch the gameplay reveal for Den of Wolves, a co-op heist FPS from the creator of Payday, Payday 2 and GTFO.
I recently visited Copenhagen to check out the game, and while there, I spoke to 10 Chambers co-founder and audio and music director Simon Viklund about the upcoming title.
A Game More Than Ten Years In The Making
During our Den of Wolves pre-brief prior to the hands-on session, Viklund hinted that Ulf Andersson had tossed around the idea for the game ten years ago. The idea likely came about due to the limitations of working on the Payday series and, as I mentioned earlier, the corporate oversight so many studios must contend with.
“Ulf, who came up with the idea of Payday, felt early in development the feeling of ‘ah, it’s a contemporary game, we can’t add this enemy because it’s a contemporary game, we can’t have robotic enemies or whatever. We can’t have this weapon, we can’t have that gadget,’” he tells me. “Contemporary games are great because if you need a 3D model of a lamppost, you just Google a lamppost and you see what it looks like, and then you make a 3D model like that. But it is a bit limiting.
“Now with the sci-fi component [in Den of Thieves], we can go crazy and do anything, as long as it fits the game. We think about what would play well or what would be an exciting challenge to throw at the players: weapons, gadgets, enemies, scenarios. We’re not limited by reality, and that’s super nice. It’s one of those things where Ulf started thinking six months into development of Payday, like, ‘if this were sci-fi, it would be so much better.’”
Viklund also said this is a game that 10 Chambers “had to make,” something I pressed him on a little further. “The process for us is not looking at trends in game design,” he says. “We’ve been working on co-op first-person shooters for a while, you know. We plan to continue polishing that concept and looking at where we can improve in terms of storytelling in a multiplayer game.”
In principle, this sounds great, but it wasn’t something I encountered too often during my time with Den of Wolves.
A “S****y” Corporate World
While Viklund was keen to talk about how Den of Wolves would make strides in storytelling in the cooperative shooter genre, fitting everything in meant striking a delicate balance.
“We’re not having it where you can just find little documents, secrets, or lore nuggets in the surroundings. We don’t want the players to be caught up with that. It’s all about the mission when you’re in the mission,” he tells me. “You create friction within the team if someone’s not interested in collecting that stuff. They’re going to be at the door waiting for the others.”
Instead, Viklund says that much of Den of Wolves’ lore would be learned and absorbed from things happening around the world, like TV broadcasts and conversations enemies have are having during heists.
“You experience it together. It’s important to us that you don’t take the control away from the player. It’s more like you’re walking through it and absorbing it rather than actively looking for it. You’re certainly not sort of going into a cutscene where it’s like, ‘oh, now we’re watching this thing for 90 seconds,’” he says.
It’s a little bit like Succession. That’s the type of story we want to tell, where it’s all corporate greed.
Den of Wolves’ story is that of greedy corporations vying for control and power in a lawless city set on a small Pacific island. After the team put pen to paper on how things would shake out, Vikrum started to draw connections to a popular TV series.
“It’s a little bit like Succession. That’s the type of story we want to tell, where it’s all corporate greed,” he says.
“You can project whatever you want to your character, like what their backstory is and why you’re in Midway City. But it’s not really about you. The real story is being told as you see the residents interact. They’re your clients, essentially, and they’re competitors. It shows how s****y people are when they only focus on success.”
With Den of Wolves having such an exciting setting, I asked Viklund if there was any chance we’d get a game from 10 Chambers set in the Midway Atoll, but more akin to a narrative RPG like Cyberpunk 2077. His answer was succinct. “We don’t know how to do that,” he laughs.
“We have a lot of respect for people who do; It’s hard enough to make the games we do, so it’s a slim chance.”
Customization Is King
During my two missions in Den of Wolves, I tried out six different guns and three different pieces of equipment, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to what players can expect in the full experience.
“There is going to be a wild amount of weapons,” Viklund tells me. “You’re going to be able to be like, ‘oh, I want this with the scope.’ Then you wait for a weapon that has a scope, and you can dismantle it and put the scope on your weapon and craft and customize. He compares choosing between your weapons to a golfer picking between a putter and a driver. “You’re like, ‘How should I tackle this, what should I choose in my golf bag?”
This weapon variety will then work its way into how missions pan out. “It allows you to decide whether you’re keeping distance or are more into close-quarters combat. As a team, you can decide on different approaches.”
Character customization will also play a part in Den of Wolves, but not straight away. “It won’t necessarily be there when we go into early access, but player expression is so important in co-op games,” Viklund says. “It’s such a perfect concept, the mask being your identity or hiding your identity. In a robbery game, obviously, the mask becomes a thing that is your personal expression. We just need to find out how often we drop these different things and how rare they are.”
The team is clearly focused on doing what it does best, and maybe that’s not such a bad thing. You can check out my full Den of Wolves preview here.
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10 Chambers
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10 Chambers