10 Chambers know how to make a multiplayer shooter. The team, built from the ground up by Ulf Anderson, Simon Viklund and Anders Bodbacka, spawned from the Payday 1 and Payday 2 team, with their opening studio salvo being the bloody and tough GTFO. If that was the game they ‘had’ to make, Den of Wolves is the game they ‘need’ to make. From our early hands-on session, this is the culmination of everything they’ve previously built, but they’re exploring the genre in some unexpected and intriguing ways.
Den of Wolves is a techno-thriller, a multiplayer heist, and an Inception-like journey into the human mind. Fundamentally, this is Payday and GTFO by way of Deus Ex, set in 2097 in a future where corporations have built their own superstate in the middle of the Atlantic Sea.
Den of Wolves is set in Midway City. The island of Midway began life as one of Pan-Am Airways’ refuelling spots on its way to cracking travel between the US and Asia, before it became a crucial base for America during World War 2, but in this future, a giant cityscape has overwhelmed the island, spilling into the sea and thrusting into the clouds.
This evocative setting, one that ties the East and the West, plays host to the Corporations. The team describe it as a high-tech Venice, with a stock exchange that sits at the centre of global trade. All Corporations have a presence there, and the island is split into five distinct districts, each controlled by a different company.
Within this setting, cybercrime and industrial espionage are rife. You work for the Corporations, taking jobs from the highest bidder, and in Midway City, loyalty is bought rather than earned. You’re not, as you may have guessed, the hero of this piece; you’re a criminal mastermind, putting together a crew that’s capable of shooting, looting and hacking their way to success.
Each heist is built upon a series of smaller jobs, culminating in the central mission. The prep jobs might see you building up your tech or collecting information, but each acquisition affects how the final act plays out. For our playthrough, we got to play a single prep mission, and the team describe these as being ‘bitesized’ experiences, which will fit into a lunchbreak and let you move forward with the game even when you’re short of time.
Our team of four blasted through this vault theft in just under ten minutes – the fact that we were grouped up with Vlad and Calle of 10 Chambers might have helped us out a bit – but you can opt to extend these prep missions by heading back into the area to try and grab more loot.
There’s serious risk to balance against the reward though, and Vlad and Calle told us that the difficulty seriously ramps up the longer you stick it out, making the chances of success much slimmer. It’s a tantalising challenge, and the ghost of GTFO’s hardcore difficulty level satisfyingly rears its head here. The main run through both the prep and the final mission felt tough but fair, and we had to communicate and work as a team, balancing gunplay while breaking into vaults, reviving fallen comrades or throwing up defensive shields and turrets.
So far, you might be thinking that this is Payday in the future, and while it’s undeniably built on the same foundations, Den of Wolves has a digital ace up its cybernetic sleeve: The Dive. You are one of the few people capable of The Dive, which is an ability to hack neural networks in a way that AI can’t. In gameplay terms, they’ve crossed Inception with Cyberpunk.
The Dive can, fundamentally, be whatever 10 Chambers want it to be. These sections of a heist are separate in terms of their structure, and the way they play is notably distinct from the bombastic gunplay of the central heist. In our playthrough, The Dive saw our team leaping through the mind of a prisoner, jumping between floating platforms as gravity tilted and turned the landscape in disconcerting ways. It was set against a timer as well, where failing to make a jump and the inevitable drop into the abyss was a devastating blow to our team. Thankfully, only one player needs to make it to the end to succeed.
What’s exciting, for both players and the team at 10 Chambers, is that the possibilities here are nearly infinite. Simon spoke animatedly about the idea, saying, “The only thing where it limits us it it needs to be a first-person experience. It’s not going to be a Match-3 or an RTS or a side scroller, but you could be running through a maze hunted by a monster. Right now we’re working on a forest setting where there’s a creature tracking you. We can lean into military simulation or it can be a Japanese temple where you’re fighting ninjas, and what’s interesting is that it’s not just providing variation for the players, but for us developers as well”.
This idea is Den of Wolves’ golden bullet. The freedom and creativity that it allows is unprecedented, and the fact that in the midst of a heist you could suddenly be free-running across city rooftops like Mirrors Edge or battling demons in the ruins of a castle. I wasn’t the first to suggest that we might see a GTFO-like Dive, and the team seemed open to that possibility. Hell, they’re open to all possibilities.
Beyond the heists, the guns and the masks, it’s clear that 10 Chambers want Den of Wolves to be a truly global force. The team have already started on this path, releasing deep dive videos into different aspects of the game’s development, including motion capture and music, and releasing a music video for Viklund’s stellar Inject.
The iconography, the visual design and the ethos all speak to a team that are creating a brand as much as they’re designing a game. In the modern development sphere, it’s a canny approach, and much like League of Legends, Den of Wolves’s rich, tangible sci-fi world has the potential to capture fans beyond the game’s frantic robberies.
The music is an integral part of that, and Simon, who was the composer for Payday 1, Payday 2 and GTFO, relished the opportunity to craft something fitting for the game’s futuristic settings. He told us, “In part, it’s the arbitrary choice of wanting to do something different, to challenge myself, while at the same time staying in the wider genre of EDM. I chose to go for something slower and heavier, like an unstoppable force type of energy.” He continued, “Hip-hop and rap music has a little bit of that, with the super deep 808 bass sounds and the slower tempo, and I felt that was a good fit – at least for the parts of the mission where everything is going to plan!”
When things go wrong, the audio tempo ticks up, reflecting the sudden overwhelming enemies that are homing in on your position. As your heart rate ramps up, and your teammates start shouting for support, Simon’s tracks take on a completely different tone.
Eye’s glinting, Simon says, “The music here still has the gritty texture and the electronics, but it’s more high-octane. It’s adrenaline-pumping music. I’ve sectioned off a certain part of EDM where I feel I can move around, and we can cover the emotions that we want the players to feel.” From first-hand experience, it definitely works.
Den of Wolves is another statement piece from 10 Chambers, and perhaps more clearly than ever, this is a game that’s about grasping the anonymity of the teams’ signature masks. Where the Payday games gave you the chance to be the villain, Den of Wolves explores some of the darkness that lurks at the edges of everyone’s psyche.
Simon describes this as ‘moral escapism’, the idea that beyond the mechanical freedom of firing a gun in a military shooter, here players can do something wholly illegal, become someone wholly different. It’s less Ocean’s 11, more neo-noir techno thriller , a dark undercurrent running through its narrative threads. Wherever your conscience sits on this moral scale, Den of Wolves brings a new sense of catharsis and freedom to the multiplayer space.