Swedish studio 10 Chambers is moving on from GTFO (albeit with the release of a major update) towards Den of Wolves, a newly announced corporate espionage sci-fi heist shooter game.

　　The game's lore is quite interesting. In the mid-21st century, deep learning AI becomes an unstoppable hacking tool exploited by thieves, terrorists, and anarchists, bringing down entire economies. With the world desperate for network security, powerful corporations stepped in to offer salvation in exchange for no longer being bound by laws or ethics. They won and founded Midway City, the new capital of capitalism.

　　With free rein in Midway City, they invested heavily in unregulated technological development to protect their capital. A brand new concept in data transmission and storage was born, based on the biological intricacies of the human brain. So-called neurological data security became a dominant technology that stabilized the world economy by being impervious to AI. With these new security measures in place, corporations turned to a society of outcasts in the city's underbelly to infiltrate their rivals' minds and extract high-value data, redefining corporate warfare.

　　It is against this backdrop that players will rise as professional criminals hired to execute what 10 Chambers is calling 'futuristic, mind-bending heists'. Den of Wolves features dynamic moment-to-moment gameplay to challenge players to adapt from stealth to full-on action shootouts (and back again) in thrilling scenarios. They'll face private security forces ranging from augmented trans-human elite mercs to torrents of servile mechanoids.

　　Wccftech was recently invited to a press tour to discuss the new game with Simon Viklund, co-founder of 10 Chambers as well as audio and narrative director on Den of Wolves. The long conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

　　You guys have already signed up Jamie Christopherson to help out with the soundtrack of Den of Wolves. Do you have any other composers already on board that you can mention?

　　No, not at the moment. I mean, Jamie is doing a lot of helping out, but we are hoping that the game becomes successful enough to be a live service type game and then I'm really looking forward to, like, if we make an expansion where you're going to Little Tokyo (the district within Midway City) and going up against some Japanese companies, to be able to sprinkle some authentic Japanese elements and instruments into the music and make that sort of a reason to collaborate with real composers from Japan. That would be really cool, though it's more of a concept that I want to go with rather than having a specific artist that I'd like to collaborate with.

　　That goes in line with our approach of trying to make a game in a way that's exciting to us and enjoying the journey. We could get away with with making it not as authentic or not collaborating with composers but that wouldn't be as fun for us as developers. That's a big part of why we think Den of Wolves will be good when it comes out. We have enjoyed making it.

　　As a follow-up to that, should we expect any vocal tracks similar to his work with Metal Gear Rising?

　　We haven't discussed that, no. I don't know, maybe. We're going to need a lot of diegetic music the music you'd hear in the world of the game, not the music that the soundtrack to you playing the game. When you walk by a nightclub or something in the city, you'd have to have some vocal tracks I guess not have to but that's an opportunity to have it you know uh so maybe uh i haven't decided to

　　we'll see. Especially for marketing purposes, I made a lot of vocal tracks for Payday 2. 50's pop and power ballad and 80's hair metal type music. It was a lot of fun to make proper tracks that weren't just game or movie instrumental-type music, but actually had verses and choruses and actual lyrics and vocals. That's a lot of fun and I think it would be really fun to collaborate with Jamie to do that, but so far we're just working on whatever is the soundtrack for the game to capture the tension of a heist and the action and everything.

　　To match that tension, do you have any systems in place to make the music a little bit more dynamic to adapt to the intensity of what's going on?

　　Yeah, for sure, that's really important. It needs to be adaptive and go in line with what the player is experiencing at the moment, so if it's a stressful situation, yes, the music should pick up the pace. The system I created for GTFO was sort of a failed experiment in that it required me to write a lot of like little bits and pieces that them were pieced together at run time and it wasn't fun to produce that music because I never got to produce a track. It was just these short loops with the drums in a separate layer from the baselines or whatever and the strings in a separate layer from that.

　　The game was the entity that got to put it all together and try to make it work and there were a lot of stingers and random little elements that just sort of sprinkled throughout to make it unpredictable. The idea was good but in practice, it's not a good way to produce music because the creative process of making those little loops is just so crushingly boring, it's like sweat job work.

　　You want to make a track that has a beginning and an end, a little bit more like something that is where there's arrangement in it. That's something we're really conscious about for Den of Wolves, making a music system that allows other artists, even ones who are not used to making game music, to contribute and they can put something in that is more of a track produced in a way that they're familiar with.

　　Looking at the worldbuilding, with the way the maps are going to be presented in Den of Wolves, your team is shifting from much more confined and dimly lit corridors to much more vibrant and open environments. How's that design philosophy changed in what looks like a complete 180° as far as level design goes?

　　It's more of a question for the level designers. Our co-founder Henrik Anréus is the level design director, but I don't think it's too different. It's still a map where you're walking around the ledge of a building and you can see the city outside. If you can't jump over the ledge and reach anything else, it's still a corridor. It's just that the backdrop is different, so you have a wall on one side, and then you have the cityscape and the view on the other side. So I don't think it's a 180° change, but it's opening it up so that we can have more vertical gameplay. We can have exciting changes in the map thanks to the science fiction concepts that we'll introduce and talk more about in the future, allowing players to for the scenario go from one type of scenario and one type of tension or action into a completely different one from one second to the next. It allowed us to go to different locations quickly and create sort of snack-size experiences of somewhere that isn't necessarily Midway City so that we can keep it exciting for the players but also for us as developers to create these little environments.

　　You touched on that part of the preparation phase for Den of Wolves is being able to choose where you are going to start but also where the mission wraps up. How dynamic is that going to change wherever your ending point is going to be for a particular level?

　　Well, we design those. It's not like we're creating a destructible environment map where you can just break through any window and run out anywhere into the streets. It needs to be designed into the map so that it becomes a curated option for the players, but it is part of the bigger heists, the ability to choose these different approaches. That could be like going to the roof and extracting with some sort of a drone carrier or it could be going down to the bottom of the building standing on pylons on top of the water surface and jumping into a boat and going away.

　　What I think is important to point out is that we're not creating an experience where now you're controlling the boat and you can go anywhere, or part of the mission is driving that vehicle. That would be the end of the mission where you see the characters flying off into the distance and then you go into some sort of a result screen to find out how much cash you made.

　　In GTFO, despite being random in every expedition, there was some structure to what players could expect. For example, if you came across a class one security gate, you would understand there would be one wave of enemies coming your way. Will there be a similar philosophy to Den of Wolves?

　　I think so. It's an interesting question and very detailed about a specific sort of aspect of the design, so I can't say for sure how we'll use that from GTFO and if that's a particular thing we pick out. But yes, I think that goes into our design philosophy of giving the players enough information to make informed decision decisions. I think that's important especially when you're making something as challenging as GTFO. Den of Wolves is not going to be that thing, but it's important if you want to create an experience where players feel like it's fair and you're not being cheated.

　　One design idea that is guiding the game is having intel and information as a commodity. That goes for the storytelling, of course, but also for gameplay and finding stuff out about whatever place you're breaking into. That could be information about when the changing of the guard happens or the password for the alarm so that you can go in silently without raising the alarm. It's about giving the players the information needed to make a decision and allowing them to decide for themselves how to approach it. You can trigger the alarm and do it the fast and ugly way, or you can be a criminal that has more finesse I guess, but then you might have to go to another map entirely, another part of the storyline, to find out how to bypass that alarm. Like going to the office of the manufacturer of that alarm system and finding out how to crack that alarm or whatever it might be.

　　Is that something that would be a persistent progression item? Like, once your character learns that information, would that carry over to future missions or would you be learning that information during the specific mission?

　　No, that's specific. It's essentially like getting a key card or whatever. You can use just that one. All of these things that happen are self-contained or isolated to the storyline that you're playing, so if you're playing the same storyline again, it's not like you know all these things and now suddenly you can take shortcuts to the storyline. We want the storyline to be an X amount of hours of fun and not allow the players to start taking shortcuts because they know things from previous playthroughs. The same goes for different instances of the same storyline: if you find out information in one version of the storyline, it's not like your character automatically knows that stuff for another instance of that same storyline, because that really wouldn't make sense.

　　The cyberpunk genre as a whole has been largely about runners and freelancers who are more in it for the money rather than allegiance to any one specific corporation. Would players be able to group together on the same storyline but perform tasks for different corporations or will the mission be focused more on whoever is writing that paycheck for your team?

　　We're not going that far into allegiances or standings with different corporations because we figured it would be problematic. In order for that to matter you have to have some sort of a punishment, like if you backstab this corporation and now you can't work for them, or there's some sort of a drawback to that. But that would be a problem if you have randoms joining a match and you start kickbanning people because they don't have the standing that you think is needed in order to play the mission that you're playing.

　　We want to create a game where it's just easier for people to get along. Having those drawbacks or disadvantages, having people suffer because of the way they played previous missions would be not conducive to that. Within a storyline, you can have something happening in your relationship with a certain corporation and the standing with that corporation can change, but that's part of the storytelling then, it's not a system outside of the story itself.

　　Den of Wolves is certainly intended to be a lot more accessible than GTFO. Are you planning to have any difficulty options for those hardcore fans who are moving from that game to the new one?

　　Yeah, we have to somehow cater to people who like something hardcore obviously because we do hope that people who enjoyed GTFO will at least check out Den of Wolves. That being said, it's not going to be as hardcore and I don't think that people who play GTFO can settle only for games that are as hard as GTFO because then they have pretty much no games to choose.

　　They have to accept games that are not as hardcore and then all's going to be right up their alley. They're going to be able to change things, to permutate a storyline or certain maps into something that's more challenging. The idea is that if you approach it in a more challenging way, you will get better drops. It's like a reward for approaching it with a harder difficulty, but it's not going to be like choosing Easy, Medium, or Hard on the menu. It's going to be something that is more thematically woven into the concept of the world rather than being a game option. It's something that happens in the world, but I can't go into detail about how that works. But yes, you would be able to, if you're a hardcore player, play something that is a harder version of a heist.

　　If you're a player who struggles, you can go for certain heists to find tools and resources to mitigate the difficulty in a heist that you find particularly hard. It's sort of an unorthodox way of handling difficulty, and it's not as easy as switching things in the menu, but we'd like to think that it's an exciting concept and makes it easier because people can meet on the same map and still play together.

　　On that note, is crossplay something that you have in mind for Den of Wolves?

　　Well, we're certainly not ruling anything like that out, but it's hard enough just to make a good game on one platform and make it work and have it be successful, so when we get to that point we can maybe start to consider doing that. But it's certainly not something that we're against, because it is a co-op game so it would make more sense and it wouldn't be as controversial as if it was a versus game. We'll see, there's not a definite no on that at least.

　　Has Tencent or Level Infinite been able to provide any additional support to 10 Chambers beyond

　　the initial financial investment?

　　For sure. Tencent is helping us with sort of legally checking all those brands. They're also putting us in contact with other game developers in the Tencent family, so we have support from them and we can share experiences and ideas. From my side, they can help with some marketing data and stuff like that. Now, we're not a super trend-driven company, but they support us with stuff like PR for markets we haven't been in before, especially Asia. They're generally just helpful, but at the same time, if we want to do our own thing (like this press tour, for example) then they're like, okay, do your thing. They're not coming in and controlling our communications.

　　We're very proud of how we managed to market GTFO so well on the very minuscule budget that we had for that game.

　　Was creating a console version of Den of Wolves a requirement for that funding?

　　I don't think so, I didn't hear anything about that. I guess mostly they were like, don't make it as hardcore as GTFO and we were like, yeah, it's not a problem because we didn't found 10 Chambers just to make hardcore games. You could judge the company by the one game we've made so far, and that's GTFO obviously, but as game developers throughout our careers, we've been working on way more approachable games like Payday. Also, it's not like they have to publish it or something. A lot of publishing decisions are still in our power. They're very hands-off in a fantastic way and to an almost unexpectedly great extent.

　　They offer us help when we need it, but for the creative aspect of the game creation, they're very like, we want you to do what you believe in and what you're passionate about.

　　Is 10 Chambers experimenting with machine learning or generative AI content for Den of Wolves?

　　A little bit, yeah. It's a concept that is here today and it's just about sort of embracing it, you can't stop that development. But what I think is important to point out is that it is always AI plus human interaction. The AI can spit something out and then there's a human factor where you are sort of choosing the best bits and curating whatever the AI would spit out, be it a text from ChatGPT or an image from Midjourney. As far as music goes, there's not a lot of tools yet but I'll keep my eyes open to see what development happens in that space because that's exciting.

　　What's also important to point out is that no one's lost their job at 10 Chambers because we've replaced them with AI. That hasn't happened. We still have concept artists and stuff, it's just that their approach and methods have changed a little bit. They're more deliberately working on technical solutions and designs that would be hard to ask an AI to create. They are also doing more specific designs because Midjourney is so good at capturing a movie food or a vista, but then they can bring it closer to what we want for Den of Wolves.

　　Was the underrated Johnny Mnemonic an inspiration for the neural tech?

　　Not so much. Actually, it's more Inception and The Matrix and Ghost in the Shell, but it goes in line with that stuff. Maybe on some subconscious level, it's part of it.

　　Can you discuss your vision for how the retinal HUD will work in Den of Wolves?

　　I just used that mainly as an example of how we can use sci-fi with a purpose and how you can sort of take things that in other games would be a concession or a compromise and have it be like, no, this is actually something that exists in the world. We have a UX expert working full-time within the company now to make sure that the user experience is good and that the HUD doesn't just look cool but is as informative as it can be. The sci-fi with a purpose type approach goes into every decision.

　　How was 10 Chambers able to secure the Den of Wolves web domain?

　　That's just a matter of going through some agency and offering money, really. Anyone who has a domain has the ability to sell you. I think we had like two obstacles getting the domain, one was a furry website and another was a board game. I remember when I checked it. I think I was the first to wonder who has the .com address. I checked it on my own initiative and started going around the other founders about getting that address.

　　Thank you so much for your time.