Stockholm, Sweden—0 Chambers—a Swedish game development studio composed of industry veterans known for PAYDAY: The Heist and PAYDAY 2—revealed their new co-op heist today. While the studio has been teasing that they’re “back on that heist shit” for a while – few details or even a name has been shared. With a mind-twisting trailer aired at the Game Awards, the name Den of Wolves was revealed – with the game director Ulf Andersson live on stage.
“Coming from having worked on heist games in the past, much focusing on the classic bank robbery themes, the sci-fi aspect will let us elevate what a heist can be,” says Ulf Andersson, founder and game director. “You can only rob so many banks. Den of Wolves will have a wider range of heisting—corporate espionage, sabotage, assassinations—really, the sci-fi theme lets us try many things.”
The game has been in pre-production for over two years, and much time has been spent building the world and the narrative surrounding it.
Midway City is an unregulated innovation metropolis in the North Pacific Ocean – founded by big corporations in the wake of deep learning AI that became an unstoppable hacking tool, collapsing global economies and putting the dollar into free fall. With the world in desperate need of a revolution in the field of network security, powerful investment firms backed by Big Pharma and the oil industry developed an entirely new data transmission and storage concept: biological systems based on the human brain, so fundamentally different from traditional network architecture they were completely inaccessible to AI.
“The game isn’t open-world, but we still value worldbuilding enormously, and the narrative we’ve built around the island is vast. We want Midway City to feel like a believable city of the near future, where late-stage capitalism has gone rampant and corporations set the rules,” says Simon Viklund, co-founder, and Narrative and Audio Director. “As a player, you reside in the city’s underground domains without any real identity or papers, building your allegiances to become a criminal entrepreneur on Midway City’s black market of gig jobs.”
While the game will be released first on PC, on Steam as Early Access, it’s already being designed and developed to also work on console. No release window is being shared yet.
