10 Chambers, a Swedish game development studio composed of industry veterans known for PAYDAY: The Heist and PAYDAY 2 — revealed their new co-op heist game today. While the studio has been teasing that they’re “back on that heist shit” for a while – few details or even a name has been shared. With a mind-twisting trailer aired at the Game Awards, the name Den of Wolves was revealed – with the game director Ulf Andersson live on stage.
“Coming from having worked on heist games in the past, much focusing on the classic bank robbery themes, the sci-fi aspect will let us elevate what a heist can be,” says Ulf Andersson, founder and game director. “You can only rob so many banks. Den of Wolves will have a wider range of heisting – corporate espionage, sabotage, assassinations – really, the sci-fi theme lets us try many things.”
For more than two years, the game has been in pre-production, and considerable effort has been spent developing the setting and the narrative that surrounds it.
Midway City is an uncontrolled innovation city in the North Pacific Ocean, built by large businesses in the aftermath of deep learning AI becoming an unstoppable hacking weapon, destroying world economies and sending the dollar into freefall. With the world in desperate need of a network security revolution, powerful investment firms backed by Big Pharma and the oil industry created an entirely new data transmission and storage concept: biological systems based on the human brain, which were so fundamentally different from traditional network architecture that AI couldn’t access them.
“The game isn’t open-world, but we still value worldbuilding enormously, and the narrative we’ve built around the island is vast. We want Midway City to feel like a believable city of the near future, where late-stage capitalism has gone rampant and corporations set the rules,” says Simon Viklund, co-founder, and Narrative and Audio Director. “As a player, you reside in the city’s underground domains without any real identity or papers, building your allegiances to become a criminal entrepreneur on Midway City’s black market of gig jobs.”
While the game will be released first on PC, on Steam as Early Access, it’s already being designed and developed to also work on console. No release window is being shared yet.