At GDC 2025, 10 Chambers Collective invited Wccftech to play Den of Wolves for the first time. After their debut title, the co-op horror-themed first-person shooter GTFO, this is a return to the Swedish developers' true love: heists. Before 10 Chambers was founded, they worked at OVERKILL/Starbreeze to make the first two Payday games.
You can read our Den of Wolves preview here. After the hands-on session, we were also able to interview writer and composer Simon Viklund to really dive into this new sci-fi setting they've created for the game.
How do you feel that the reception's been so far?
I'm a pretty pessimistic guy, but I think we're proud of the build. Obviously, otherwise, we wouldn't show it. We know what works in it and what works less well, and we're working on that. We know stealth may be a bit unclear right now, the feedback and stuff, but I feel that this demo, when it was put together, was very focused on combat and gunplay, which I think works well in it. The hit feedback, the sounds and the animations, everything is pretty tight.
We know how to do that stuff. We've been working on shooters for so long. But there are issues. We know it's unpolished in some parts, and some parts are obviously completely missing. I mean, there are animations missing.
Can you describe your vision for how the game's flow will look, whether in the first early access iteration or when it's fully released?
For early access, we will have one storyline. And for the full release, we will have multiple. We can't say how many at this point. There will be some things not present in early access. It will only be developed in English, with no localization at that point. We'll also use the early access phase to find out where people are enjoying the game and maybe focus on those territories in terms of whether there's voice localization. There are other aspects also that we're gonna hold off until later.
But for the most part, the important thing is the storyline, the ability to play different prep missions, choose which one to take on and avoid or reject others and play a heist at the end and see your choices throughout the prep mission phase sort of manifested, your choices having consequences.
Can you talk about how dynamic these prep missions may be? Are there different mission types or rewards?
Yes, every prep mission essentially has some sort of a MacGuffin that you're looking for. That's a plot device, really, which will unlock an approach in the heist at the end. You're looking at the heist, essentially. You need to get into the vault. It's a cliché, but let's take that. It's like, we can place an explosive on the weakest part of the wall around the vault, but then we need to play the prep mission where we acquire the explosives and we need to play another prep mission where we acquire the blueprints for the building to find out which wall is actually the weakest one. It's a nice climax to the storyline where you're playing this mission that you've been prepping for a long time and you've invested time and it matters more when you play it.
But then there might be other ways to get into the vault. Maybe you could drill, so you're like, let's find out what vault door they have and then you go into whatever company provided the vault door and find out what its weak points are. Maybe you could find out when the changing of the guard is happening, and then you play different prep missions to unlock the way. That doesn't entail playing all the premises, obviously, which in turn creates replayability because you can play the same storyline again and try a different approach.
The geometry of a heist would be the same every time. It's not a complex mission. The complexity, I would say, comes from your ability to play in several different ways, but it will be the same layout every time, whereas prep missions are more like, we're breaking into this bad warehouse or this laboratory or whatever. Those missions would not be narratively different. There's no different ways to do it. They might have a different layout every time you play them, as we randomize their layouts every time you replay the storyline. It's not procedurally generated, but it's us creating and curating a set of versions of that same map, which are then chosen at random by the game.
They're pretty straightforward in terms of what you do in them, and they're snack-sized in duration, but you have to keep on your toes because of the different layouts. With Den of Wolves, we're trying to really create a game where it's a lot of fun playing the same storyline several times because of player agency.
When you finish all of your prep missions, you get everything ready for the main heist. If you either complete the main heist or if you fail, does that progression you've made through the prep missions stay, or do you have to start from scratch?
When you have invested that much time into finding the different intel and the gear that you need in order to beat the heist, you get to try the heist several times. If it turns out that it's too difficult, you can go back to certain prep missions that might unlock things that aid you. You can maybe bribe someone or threaten some guards to look the other way. If you put more effort into more prep missions, that might alleviate a little bit of the pressure on the heist, so that's a way for you to offset the difficulty a little bit.
With this being such a multiplayer-focused title, with these prep missions in Den of Wolves, when you're playing with a group of friends when you're going into the heist, is it based on the host progression, or is it a combination of the team for what they've done for their prep missions?
Let's say I start a heist or initiate a storyline. I do it with the two of you, so we're three together. We agree on the rules that we need to be all three of us in order to make progress in this instance of the storyline. We play one evening and make some progress. The next evening, Robin can't join, but you and I can't play because we set those rules. Still, we can play either another storyline or start a new instance of that same storyline where we make progress and it's a little bit different.
But the next time all three of us are online, that version of the storyline, that instance where we play together, becomes available again. We can also start a storyline and say anyone can make progress in the storyline, regardless of who's online, or only I can make progress in the storyline, and whenever you guys are online, you can join in. You set the rules for yourselves, and then you can have essentially an infinite number of instances of the same storyline, just with different progress within them and stuff.
You can't collect stuff like resources in one instance of the storyline and bring it over to another version. However, if we're playing together in one storyline and you can't play one evening, I can still play in the same storyline without making progress. There are certain prep missions that are just collecting assets or resources, like consumables and stuff. Or I can be a gun for hire for other people playing their storyline, so I'm joining other people's games as a gun for hire and just protecting them and being sort of a bodyguard, not even completing objectives, just joining mid-game as a random player. That might reward me with stuff that we can use in our storyline.
When you say joining midgame, is this like dropping into a mission, or is this joining a party when they're still in their prep phase in the hideout?
No, you can join in the middle of an actual first person shooter mission. When you start an instance of a storyline, you can say other people can join my game and they get to play with me just as if they were heisteri, really. But you can also say other people can join, but I don't wanna be robbed of the experience and the joy of completing the objectives. In that case, if my mission is to complete the heist, other people can't do that. They can't even interact with the vault door, or whatever it might be, so they're only allowed to protect me.
What sort of incentives are there for Den of Wolves players to take the role of a gun for hire?
They would get progress towards the next drop, just like you would when completing the heist. They'd be rewarded with gun parts or consumables like explosives and stuff like that that you can use in other missions.
Would you consider that to be more like a progression track or a reputation level system? Progression track meaning like a battle pass.
I would say it's like filling out your golf bag with new gear and widening your arsenal with new stuff that you can use. They could be difficulty offset type of things, almost like a card that you would play in a card game. It could be something like calling in a favor from another criminal gang where they can attack another facility that is owned by the same company and that will thin out the security in this heist.
But it could also be something that allows you to find out about another extra vault that is available in this heist that you wouldn't otherwise know about or even be able to access unless you had this drop. Then you can go for that extra vault if you're greedy, but it's also a higher risk because it's more dangerous to stay on the map and try to get the stuff in that vault.
Players who want to play at an easier difficulty level will have to look for these things that help them when they think the game is hard, and people who want more of a challenge have the ability to play permutations of maps that ramp up the difficulty but also give them more reward for that.
The system you're explaining sounds like a modifier system where players use cards before going into the heist to modify the enemy density or increase the rewards, etc.
Yeah, that's a good way of putting it, but we're roleplaying it as some sort of favor or something from a rival team.
Can you talk a little bit about the player expression and customization in Den of Wolves?
Yes, that's a big part of it. It's something we like to explore and give the players the ability to do, but it's not necessarily something that exists as we're going into early access, but yes, we want the players to be able to customize the character and choose the voice and the face and the clothing and weapon customization.
That actually leads me to my next question, which is about weapon customization in Den of Wolves.
It's something that might not exist as we go into early access, but it might be added during early access. What I think it's important to point out is that you're not, like, stealing $1.5 million and now you have $1.5 million to spend on weapons, because then a pistol would have to cost a million dollars.
It's more like we roleplay it as you collecting money and then fencing those things off to some other criminal gang. After they got enough of that resource, whatever it might be, it's a currency of sorts (like the bags that you collect, the more bags you get, the more of that stuff you have to sell). Every once in a while, you level up or get to a point where you get a drop and a reward. It's not like we played this mission where we stole a shipment of weapons and now we have all these SMGs or AKs or whatever. You wouldn't be able to do that. There needs to be some conversion of your time spent in the game, a conversion between that and the reward that feels like it matters.
There also has to be a point to playing longer heists as well because what happened in Payday 2 was that players only played the same small bank over and over because it was the one that had the shortest loop and you got drops more easily. In Den of Wolves, we are trying to create a system that will reward you regardless of the duration of the heist that you're playing in relation to the investment in time and effort.
Would customized gear drops be something that's permanently part of your arsenal, or would you only get to use them one time?
No, that would be permanent.
In the smaller prep mission, we saw a bit of GTFO's inspiration in the smaller discrete rooms that you would enter, clear out the encounter there, and then scan and go into the next room. So, I was curious how much of GTFO's DNA is present in Den of Wolves.
Well, there's a little bit of your DNA in each one of your children, I guess. I mean, we did the PC version of Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter and that had co-op. We've been working on and refining the co-op formula for a long time. Every new game is not so much inspired by our previous games, but more like a refinement, and maybe look at whether we are leaning into a certain direction with this thing?
Obviously, with GTFO, that was horror and hardcore difficulty. For this game, it's not that. I think it's somewhere between Payday 2 and GTFO, maybe closer to Payday 2, but still, it's not an entry-level first person shooter, but it is something that's less hardcore.
The sci-fi component, we feel, unlocks a lot of creativity. We're creating a world. It's not an existing IP; we can make the rules ourselves. We don't have to follow the lure or the backstory of some existing franchise, TV show, or movie, which is a huge creative freedom. It allows us a lot of liberty.
We can interject the gameplay with a change of pace and a change of environment, and the fact that you're in these huge megastructures where people live their entire lives within the same building. These are enormous places: you can live your entire life there and be born in the hospital in that building with its own grocery stores, schools, residential areas, slums at the bottom, and penthouses at the top.
That allows us to create really interesting levels where you're moving between different places and they're all segmented and they can be run by different private security firms and stuff and they're not necessarily communicating with one another.
Then we can have that thing that we had in GTFO, which we think was a huge step forward from Payday, where it's like stealth, stealth, stealth, and as soon as you get discovered, it's just action, and you can never go back to stealth again unless you restart. In GTFO you could sort of regain control and go back to stealth again, exactly the way you described, and that'll be possible in Den of Wolves as well. Losing it and then regaining it and coming back to that several times in the same mission is really nice.
I've been sitting on this for a while, but I loved talking with you about music when we did our first interview. I was curious about what sort of lessons or new ideas you've come up with for the dynamic soundtrack to Den of Wolves.
On a technical level, it's somewhere between GTFO and Payday. Payday's music system is deceptively simple, rudimentary even. GTFO's music system is overly complex. I went on a rabbit hole with that game where it's like I'm making these short loops and they're all pieced together and layered in at one time by the game and the game can react to whatever is happening. The music changes and there are infinite combinations between the drum loops that are chosen randomly with a bass line that's chosen randomly and whatnot.
But it was not a lot of fun making the music because I only made these short snippets that then are arranged and put together by the game engine at runtime, so I never got to write really long songs. This is how the combat music works in GTFO, not so much the atmospheric music, but the combat music.
So I wanted to find a way to make the creation of music more stimulating and inspiring and fun again, so the music system needed to be less complex than GTFO. It goes for everyone involved in game development; I think you need to enjoy the journey as well. You can't just look at the end product and say, if it gets nice reviews, you're happy. You want to enjoy your life while you're making the game as well, and I need to enjoy making the music.
So yeah, the music needs to be larger chunks, like one minute, one minute and a half, two minutes, that I can make a song that has a little bit of changes going on through it. On a technical level, it's finding that balance between simplicity and complexity. On more of a creative level, in terms of the genre, I'm super happy to get back to making music for a power fantasy in Den of Wolves. It was fun making core music for GTFO, but it's not really my wheelhouse. Now I feel I can really utilize what I consider my primary skill within music, which is making music with a lot of attitude that gets the adrenaline pumping,
So, the music is electronic and saturated and distorted and dirty. A lot of it is inspired by hip-hop and trap. Trap music has a lower tempo, so it becomes not as stressful, obviously. It's slower moving and heavier in a way with these bass sounds and whatnot. It has a lot of street vibe and attitude to it, but I think it's really cool. What's nice about that slower tempo is that when you go double tempo, it's a natural transition into a more stressful track, so it's easy to go from 75 BPM to twice that tempo (150 BPM) and get a completely different vibe in the music.
When you're fighting the enemies and things are going well, there's one type of music, but when you're escaping and time is running out, the same track shifts into something else seamlessly. I think I find I've found a style of music that I think is really malleable and I can do at a great level.
Are there any new artists or composers that you're collaborating with for the Den of Wolves soundtrack?
Yes, Jamie Christopherson, who I think might be most famous for making the music to Metal Gear Rising Revengeance. He's helping out.
I think we talked about that in the first interview. I didn't know if there were any other announcements you could share.
Yeah, no, unfortunately not. I'm looking for rappers or vocalists who can contribute because when you come to the success screen, there's rap. The track from the escape as you were running out seamlessly goes to a rap song, and that felt like a good tone to strike with a lot of attitude as you sort of celebrate on the results screen. But I can't really announce at this point exactly who it will be.
Do you plan to have a call to action or recruitment to try and find rappers to contribute?
No, I haven't thought about that. I've looked at the avenues or the channels that I have at my disposal at this point, but that might be something that we use during the access when there's more of a community surrounding the game. It would be cool to find uh talents within the community.
After this whole preview cycle, when do you anticipate the next time that players can kind of get the next info drop for Den of Wolves?
We will be dropping a lot of beats actually this year. We'll be showing more and more, but the next one big like this, it's hard to say. Hopefully, for the beginning of next year we could have a whole storyline or at least more of it so you understand how the prep missions give consequences for the main heist.
Any other parting thoughts you want to leave our readers with for Dead of Wolves?
We'd like to think that we know first person shooter co op games pretty well. We have a pedigree with Payday: The Heist and PD2 and GTFO and even Ghost Recon 20 years ago. Anyone who's a fan of that sort of game, and especially if they're into heists, should check it out; we'd like to think it's going to be pretty awesome. We set the stage for interesting scenarios within this science fiction world with all the corporations and the concept of breaking into people's minds and everything. It's just a juicy concept that I think is going to excite people.
Thank you for your time.
