10 Chambers, a Swedish game development studio composed of industry veterans responsible for the first two PAYDAY installments, have revealed their newest co-op heist titled Den of Wolves. With game director Ulf Andersson live on stage at the Game Awards, the game’s trailer and title were first revealed.
“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.”
Pre-production has been over the past two years with much of the time being spent on building the world and the narrative surrounding it.
Midway City, which is the game’ setting, is an unregulated innovation metropolis, founded by big corporations in the wake of deep learning A.I. that turned into an unstoppable hacking tool leading to the collapse of global economies and putting the dollar into free fall.
With the world in desperate need of a revolution in the field of network security, powerful investment firms, backed by Big Pharma and the oil industry, developed an entirely new data transmission and storage concept – biological systems based on the human brain, so fundamentally different from traditional network architecture they were completely inaccessible to A.I.
“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.”
The game is set to release on PC first as Early Access on Steam. However, plans are in-the-works for a console release as well. A concrete release date is yet to be announced.
