There’s always something satisfying about teaming up with others to achieve a common goal. That said, I don’t have many friends who play the same things I do, finding a squad to team up with is tough, and too many games aren’t optimized for solo-queue co-op. Payday 3 is an example of this, with matches often falling into chaos as newcomers join lobbies midway through while others argue over what the plan should be. A new Payday rival, however, could be the answer. PCGamesN recently chatted with the ex-Starbreeze devs at 10 Chambers, who are currently working on the upcoming heist game Den of Wolves.
Den of Wolves is a new evolution of the traditional FPS heist formula. Speaking to me at The Game Awards, 10 Chambers co-founder and narrative director Simon Viklund notes that when you boot up Starbreeze’s multiplayer game, you’re met with indecision and sometimes conflict, slowing everything down and making start-up relatively messy.
“One of those things that we think is wrong – and I feel I can say that because I’ve worked on the game and I know Ulf [Andersson, 10 Chambers CEO, ex-Starbreeze] thinks this way as well – is that you spawn in front of a bank and then you’re supposed to decide, ‘okay, so how do we approach this?’ There’s so many ways you can do it and, as you’re trying to convince everyone in the group to do it the way you want to, someone else is already starting their plan. It’s like, ‘fuck.’ Someone joins in the middle of the mission and then you have to explain to them, too – it’s a bit too complex.”
So how is the team planning to change this for its own game? “In Den of Wolves, you have these different options, but you decide what [you’re doing] before you launch the mission or the map,” Viklund tells me. “The options are there, but you can’t choose once you’ve started the map. Someone can drop in and they’ll fall in line – the game will tell them [what to do] with waypoints and objectives… according to the plan that was decided upon.
“[It] makes everything more streamlined and easy,” Viklund continues. “There’s no discussion, like, ‘do it this way.’ ‘No, let’s do it that way.’ It’s a game that’s supposed to shave down all of the barriers to make it easy for people to just sort of play it together. There’s no friendly fire. It’s not easy to jump into a server and mess up other peoples’ games just for the heck of it.”
Voice chat is another vital aspect of co-op play, and Viklund and 10 Chambers are well aware not everybody wants to speak on a mic. “We’re trying to make it so that you don’t even have to use voice chat,” he says. “If you don’t want to, or you don’t have a microphone, or there’s an infant sleeping in the room with you – whatever reason you have not to use voice chat – you can just ping things and use in-game voice lines to indicate what you want the team to do.
“It’s more accessible in that regard, and we really want the game to be that. Yes, it’s a love letter to people who like to play co-op games and already have a team that they usually play co-op first-person shooters with, but it’s a good introduction for people who like to get into it as well.”
Building a better co-op experience as compared to Payday 3 is one of the priorities for 10 Chambers and Den of Wolves, but the studio also wants to hone in on what makes heist games so compelling. Even Payday 2, the best of the trilogy, struggles occasionally because of all the menus, lore, and the sheer volume of ‘stuff’ – it’s meant to be a big game, but the fundamentals of the experience are sometimes lost in the noise. Den of Wolves sounds more stripped-back and streamlined.
“We’re not doing the Payday thing where it’s a set of characters with written backstories,” Viklund says. “It’s more of an avatar that you customize as a player to create your own alter ego in the story. We focus more on the characters you see, so you get front-row seats to this Succession-type Greek tragedy. It’s great escapism because you get to do something that feels forbidden and that you – hopefully – wouldn’t do!”
Viklund refers to a joke by the comedian Dane Cook, who says that men, especially, fantasize about being part of a stylish bank robbery. “We all want to be like Neil McCauley in Heat,” the developer concludes, “in a suit with a duffel bag over your shoulder and an assault rifle in your hand like ‘everybody get down!’ It’s cool.”
A new trailer for Den of Wolves dropped during The Game Awards, offering our best look yet at the futuristic FPS game. The game doesn’t have a firm release date yet, but there are plenty of other upcoming PC games to get your hands on while you wait for the arrival of 10 Chambers’ latest.