Den Of Wolves is the heist game we've been waiting for since Payday 2

“We’re back on that heist shit.”

As far as unofficial mission statements go, it’s not bad. 10 Chambers might not have made the Payday games, but the series is an inseparable part of the company’s DNA.

Many of the team at the Stockholm-based studio worked on Payday and its massively successful sequel Payday 2, a game so beloved it’s still overshadowing the more recent Payday 3 in terms of raw player numbers.

After dipping their toes into the realm of horror with 2019’s well-liked GTFO, 10 Chambers decided it was time to return to heist-based gameplay with the futuristic co-op shooter Den Of Wolves, which just showed off some impressive high-octane gameplay for the first time at The Game Awards. If Cyberpunk 2077 had a baby with Payday 2, I imagine it would look a lot like Den Of Wolves. Reader, I am here for that.

“Heists are just such a fantastic concept to make a game out of,” 10 Chambers co-founder, narrative director, and Payday alum Simon Viklund tells me.”Specifically co-op games, because there's a plan you all need to follow, and you all need to do your part. We're super excited to get back into the’ heist shit’, because it's still such a great concept.”

Given Payday 3 wasn’t quite what many fans of the first two games were after (for a variety of reasons), it’s only natural that Payday enthusiasts would sit up and take notice of what Den Of Wolves is offering. It should be stressed, however, that this is a brand-new IP with ideas and mechanics all of its own.

The biggest immediate difference between Den Of Wolves and Payday is its sci-fi setting. There are shades of Cyberpunk 2077 or Blade Runner in the game’s dystopian world, a gritty and grimy megacity in the middle of the Pacific Ocean that’s effectively controlled by corporations

Den Of Wolves takes place in the twilight of the 21st century, and Midway City is a wretched hive of warring businesses and all powerful AI. It’s our job to team up with friends and make the most of a bad situation by working for various corporations to hijack, steal from, and genuinely screw with their rivals.

“It's really not sci-fi for the sake of sci-fi,” Viklund stresses. “It's sci-fi to open up the lid and make it possible for us to go anywhere, and do things that we wouldn't be able to do if it was a contemporary setting. We can have sci-fi gadgets and weapons, and law enforcement. We can have specific types of enemies and robots that can crawl on the wall. The gameplay can be updated on every level, really.”

Another area Viklund and the team were keen to improve on from Payday was the pacing and variety of heists. As he puts it, once your cover is blown in a Payday game, you can never go back to stealth again. The guns come out, and everyone knows where you are all the time. While Den Of Wolves will, of course, let you and your friends collect a large variety of weapons and shoot lots of different things, the aim is to offer a little more variety in how you tackle scenarios.

“It's designed to allow the game to shift and have different types of play. Different pacing throughout one single mission,” Viklund says. “So that you don't feel like, ‘oh, we failed stealth so now we have to restart’. You can actually claw back control yourself, do the heist the way you want to. And then we can shock the player too, with the sci-fi concept, which allows us to throw the player into different environments and locations.”

10 Chambers

One of the most striking new abilities in Den Of Wolves afforded by the sci-fi setting was teased at the very end of The Game Awards trailer. For the briefest of moments, we see a horrifying semi-organic robot that wouldn’t look out of place in System Shock, before a team of players descend an unnatural spiral corridor bathed in red light.

This, Viklund explains, is called Diving. And it’s where Den Of Wolves can get really freaky.

“So a Dive is when you go into these neural networks that AI cannot navigate,” says Viklund. “You connect to these things as a merc, and you have the technology to inject your own consciousness into these things, so you can navigate it. It's like a blend of someone's memories - so you would hear echoes of things that they've experienced - and a neural security system that has created some sort of a challenge that you need to complete in order to get access to whatever information you're seeking in that network.

“That environment can be very different from the real world, and that's a place where we, as game designers, can throw weird challenges at the player.”

During the brief presentation I was shown before my interview, one thing really struck me. Okay, one thing besides 10 Chambers announcing they were “back on that heist shit”. The developer said that Den Of Wolves was “the game they must make”. What does this mean to Viklund, specifically?

“To me, personally? I'm so happy that we're going back to something that is a power fantasy,” he tells me. “I enjoyed the challenge of making the music and the sound design for GTFO, but it was a challenge. It's not really my wheelhouse to make that sort of, you know: music that gets under your skin and is more atmospheric.I enjoy making EDM. High-intensity, adrenaline fueled music. I'm really excited to be able to get back into that, you know.”

Evidently 10 Chambers has returned to the world of heists and shootouts because it’s familiar territory for many of the team. But it’s more than that. It’s clear Den Of Wolves actually has something new to offer, with a fresh set of ideas that will echo the best of Payday 2 while delivering something truly original. Personally, I can’t wait to head to Midway City and see what the team has come up with.