What if the real Payday 3 was he? [Preview]

Den of Wolves is simply the new game of the studio 10 Chambers, founded in 2015 by Ulf Andersson, former founder of Overkill Software, but above all creator of the Payday franchise. We owe him Payday 1 and Payday 2, two titles that have been so cardboard that Payday 3, released in 2023 and taken up by Starbreze Entertainment, was completely viandé, with a business model badly adapted to the needs of the community. As a result, the game sold badly, the players deserted the servers and despite numerous attempts to revive him, the soldier Payday 3 is officially dead today, also causing the dismissal of the CEO of Starbreeze in the process. Payday 3 is today considered an industrial disaster and an example not to follow, something that 10 chambers has perfectly assimilated. It is also a question of launching Den of Wolves in early access at first, in order to measure the expectations of the players and to readjust what it takes to launch as pleasant as possible. It must be said that the experience acquired with GTFO in 2019 allowed the studio to get their hands on for almost 4 years and to gain the confidence of their community. However, for the time being, no release date on planned and when I mentioned the year 2025, I was almost laughed at. But who knows, it may be a way of diverting attention …

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVHDDL5CTBE

Deep Dive

The first peculiarity of Den of Wolves is his universe that developers qualify as techno-thriller in a fully assumed sci-fi atmosphere. The game takes place in Midway City, a fictitious city where the storage of biological data emerged following devastating cyber attacks carried out by the AI ​​in the 2030s, which almost caused the global economy. In response, companies have developed revolutionary “bio-stashes”, namely data storage systems based on human neural schemes, fundamentally different from traditional networks, making them completely inaccessible to AI. This is what will be the keystone of the war of artificial intelligence between neighboring countries. Spying, assassinations and sabotage are therefore on the Den of Wolves program, but if science fiction has been chosen, it is not just to avoid comparison with Payday (well if a little, but not only), but also to allow things to do with a deeply realistic game cannot even try.

And this is where the comparison with Split Fiction takes on its full meaning, not because of the fairly lambda story of the game, but by the variety of gameplay which will be proposed as soon as we rush into the dive. What 10 chambers calls “Dive” is the fact of hacking one of these neural networks, which will propel the days into another dimension, like a wake -up dream where the rules can be bypass at will, just like the place and the environment also elsewhere. In the dive that we were able to experiment during our game session, it was Parkour phase in a space setting, a platform side that radically contrasts with the robbery that was in progress. But that was clearly the goal, because a dive can take place anywhere. It may be platform, it can be a horror game, it can be a man hunting like “One Shot One Kill”, all with a radically different type of gameplay. We must take these moments of “dive” as dynamic parentheses which have almost nothing to do with the mission which is underway. And going from the rooster to the donkey in a snap of the fingers, the dive will allow developers to have fun, like this dive taking place in a horror setting, in a Norwegian forest, and monsters are pursuing us. It’s part of the things planned by 10 chambers, knowing that players’ feedback will be taken into account, and that these kinds of mini-games have been designed to be easily put in place by the developers, since we are talking about a few months of development barely for the simplest dive. There is therefore a certain flexibility and a certain desire to listen to the community to adapt to needs.

“Cry Wolf Woo Hou!”

In his approach otherwise, Den of Wolves is more classic, of course, but no less effective, with a structure and a level design that have really been thought of to play in cooperation, with 4 players preferably. During my stay with Unity in Denmark, I was able to test a complete mission, with another journalist and two other developers. Before getting to the heart of the action, we have already set up strategic planning, with a real staging where we went to another room, map on the table in order to discuss the approach to adopt, to talk about the weapons we will use, also to use equipment to barricade or unravel the fortunes and obviously deploy in the game area. Once we were thrown in the mouth of the mouth Talking, since it was necessary to enter a huge building, a data center jealously guarded by mercenaries. It was initially to be found 3 keys distributed in safes and whose location systematically changes that you launch the mission, it is randomly generated. Keys that can open the main dome where the neurological guinea pig is listed which holds the crucial information that we are looking for. But of course, the enemy cavalry will land, with weapons of mass destruction, knowing that it was often necessary to defend yourself, defend its partners too, revive them if necessary, defend its position and relaunch among its drilling gadgets when they were damaged. Not to mention that it was also necessary to plan our extraction which was done by exploding a whole bay window before jumping in the parachute vacuum. All this therefore requires real teamwork, understanding and especially communication, because the enemy opposite does not go with the back of the spoon. There was therefore a real tension not to finish the four irons in the air, since the situations changed in real time, and that in front, one could very well face private security forces than transhuman mercenaries or downright servile mechanics.

The developers of 10 chambers assured us that they also shaped Den of Wolves so that the missions can be done in a more subtle way, with stealth, but very sincerely, I did not feel the level design as being adapted to the assassination in silence, especially since the weapons and the gadgts that we were not very conducive to killing with discretion. Ok, we have a knife, but nothing more. This is obviously a point on which 10 chambers will have to work to be more convincing. Similarly, the graphic aspect is currently correct without more. The game runs under Unity 6, the most advanced version of the engine, but we are not going to lie, there was nothing very stunning, and we will have to work the visual rendering, especially if the game comes out in 2026, because with what is done in competition, it will be necessary to be a little more up-to-date, even if I realize that Den of Wolves is not intended to be a technological. Although the goal of the game is also to show that Unity is capable of supporting headlines too. That said, the pleasure was present during this preview session, the challenge also, with many situations that changed over the robbery. There is a real good tension that emerged from our demo and it is above all this kind of sensations that we are going to seek, and which will above all allow us to retain a community. It remains to be seen when the game will be released, but given the remarks made during my interview, it is better to count on 2026.