Den of Wolves Preview - Walking the accessibility and hardcore tightrope

The air is thick with anticipation in the little Unity office reserved for the 10 Chambers briefing on a cloudy November morning in Copenhagen. The first part of the briefing is all about GTFO, the studio's first and incredibly successful offering, which tonight has received its final "Rundown", and is considered a complete experience by its developers.

But it's all leading to somewhere, to the inevitable question; when you've built your debut IP over many years, and constructed a loyal community by promising difficulty, necessary teamwork and communication skills and what the studio heads numerous times call "player unfriendliness" - well, where do you go?

You go to the Den of Wolves, that's where. That's the name of the studio's brand new sci-fi IP, a new universe which, while seemingly structurally similar to GTFO in that it's once again a mission-based cooperative first-person shooter, is also the studio's attempt to walk the tightrope between appealing more broadly, while maintaining their hardcore roots - a difficult job for even the very best.

Now, I should stress that Den of Wolves is once again developed without a publisher, because the studio says it's "too auteur" for that (although a sizable investment from Tencent probably didn't hurt), the team behind it has grown to many, many more than the intended "10 chambers" that was director Ulf Andersson's original intent, but he insists it's built exactly for the project, and it's intended to be a little less hardcore.

Den of Wolves takes us to Midway Island, a late-stage capitalism tax and regulation haven free from prying eyes and suspicious government agencies, where big tech, pharma and AI companies can experiment, compete and grow. That's the idea, anyway. In reality, technological advancement is running amok, and these companies hire talented mercenaries to investigate and ultimately steal each other's secrets - welcome to 2097. It's a setting described as "happier and brighter" by GTFO management, although they say that with a sly smile, because this is gritty sci-fi with ill-fated mercs going up against the odds while greedy corporate overlords are happy to look away, as long as they stay competitive.

As stated above, the core tenets are the same. Cooperative structure, remixed sections, mechanics and cohesions gives off the illusion of playing a different heist set-up every time, and where you spend several set-up missions preparing and laying the groundwork for a massive culmination in the form of the steal itself. I want to give you a more pragmatic description of what it's like to play Den of Wolves, but I can't, because no direct gameplay was shown, just the very teaser you've now already seen. Small snippets show aiming down sights at various mechanical foes, safety precautions no doubt, and sprinting across corporate offices and cyber-esque vaults. But that's about all there is to say about concrete gameplay initiatives.

Midway is divided into separate districts, seemingly like the different Rundowns of GTFO's mysterious crater, where they'll be made available over time, and what that will enable 10 Chambers to achieve is to basically enjoy that there are so few narrative or design-based restrictions on a freeform sci-fi universe like the one used for Den of Wolves. Ulf says repeatedly that while developing the original Payday, the team "ran out of ideas pretty quickly", but one could easily speculate that that's much harder to do here, as the fittingly eclectic teaser trailer can attest.

10 Chambers has been in pre-production for two years, and maintains that there won't be a concrete release window for Early Access "for a while". But while Den of Wolves surely won't be something as drastic as "accessible", this is 10 Chambers, the GTFO developers after all, the team did reveal that they are aiming for a console release of the game at some point too, opening the doors for a much larger audience.

They also revealed that unlike GTFO, Den of Wolves will have microtransactions, and while it was clear that the team leads did not enjoy talking about it at the briefing, all the participants, including yours truly, did at the very least enjoy the honesty, and the will to tackle that particular conversation head first.

I'm usually critical of events held for games where the developer clearly isn't ready to show it off yet, and to be quite frank, that did seem to be the case here. It's a shame that while much of development remains, 10 Chambers doesn't really have a proper in-game presentation ready at this stage, but still chose to show it to all of you regardless. What I can say is that the concepts on display do seem cool, fitting and well balanced, and if the studio can maintains its reputation for gameplay-centric design, we're in for something special - in a few years.