One of the main reasons Wccftech was on-site for GDC 2025 this year was to take part in the first hands-on play sessions for 10 Chambers' upcoming cooperative cyberpunk heist title, Den of Wolves. First revealed at The Game Awards 2023, Ulf Andersson made his directorial debut with the new studio founded from the ashes of his days designing PAYDAY and PAYDAY 2.
Den of Wolves takes the neo-futuristic approach where corporations are more than people and instead run the world. While you won't see Weyland-Yutani or Arasaka Corp logos on city streets, the sentiment is still very much the same with the megacorps that make up Den of Wolves' setting. As mentioned in my first impressions piece on Den of Wolves, the setting 10 Chambers is working with is a corporate haven known as Midway City, sheltered out in the mid-Pacific that operates outside jurisdictional waters or AI intranets. It's here that a new form of data transmission emerges right out of Johnny Mneumonic's playbook: human brains as cold storage.
Of course, it's quite difficult to convey the concept of brain-jacking and stealing secrets from someone's mind in a two-mission preview, but 10 Chambers gave a decent amount of onboarding to get into the flow of the heists. The first mission began with a smaller prep mission to get in and extract some key items for the larger heist. This played out across a small cluster of individual rooms linked together by closed vault doors where teammates need to regroup back before jumping into the next segmented room. It's a formulaic approach that 10 Chambers designed into the core gameplay loop of the studio's previous game (GTFO) that may feel like more of an homage to their previous title than something necessary to crack open some vaults. On the bright side, these discrete rooms do reset the enemy alarms, so players can attempt once more to go for a stealthy approach after getting into an accidental gunfight.
This mini-mission in Den of Wolves resulted in some half-dozen rooms with shorter encounters with a handful of guards and armed combatants on our way to gather some loot bags and head to an elevator for extraction under a constant stream of ever-respawning enemies. It's here that I learned the hard way that these prep missions are an all-or-nothing solution, and all four team members needed to walk out alive for the mission progress to count and what we've picked up to carry over. Sadly, I was the first to go down after foolishly trying to make a break for it and grabbing another loot bag on the way out. I had to lie idly by and watch as groups of five or more guards would spawn one at a time and fill the hallway with bullets, thus preventing my team from making a safe extraction, even if down a member.
Our second mission in Den of Wolves certainly went smoothly by comparison. It was a by-the-numbers vault-busting mission to start with the prep phase letting us swap out our primary and secondary weapons as well as choose an additional equipment tool, like a turret or deployable shield. No glimpse at the character or deeper customization options, so I was limited to the one mask and outfit on hand that were pre-selected for me. Given the sheer number of mask options in the first two PAYDAY titles, I do expect Den of Wolves to bring in a wide range of customization options to incentivize players to keep coming back for heists.
Our team split up into groups of two, each taking one-half of the bank vaults on each side, drilling through a number of vaults to find the sacks of loot we'd then pile up at a massive glass window that would prove to be our one way out. There were a few security guards throughout with more coming in at a drip feed as we made our way to the second part of the mission: diving into our target's brain to gather some crucial data stored in their human brain.
This segment is where Den of Wolves morphs into something I wasn't expecting. In the middle of gunfights, suddenly, our team would be pulled into the mind of the target and forced to run through a 3D parkour gauntlet where reality would rotate on a whim and force our entire squad to endure a running challenge to jump and scramble all the way to an exit point. In those moments, only one of the squad would need to actually be successful, but I wouldn't want to rely on just one person to clear it every time. After a successful dive, we'd be pulled right back into the firefight as if nothing had happened and proceed on as normal with the heist before getting pulled back in another one or two times before extracting all the information we needed from the target's brain.
Coming from GTFO, Den of Wolves feels much more in line with the difficulty curve that heist enjoyers would come to expect from the genre. There are still some obvious growing pains for 10 Chambers to overcome, from creating an enemy AI that's more responsive to flanking maneuvers to gunplay that feels more impactful in each shot. But for those looking for their next heist fix to play with friends online, Ulf Andersson and his team already have a good feel for what their next big move will be. Den of Wolves is currently slated as a PC exclusive without a release date in sight.
[Editor's Note: 10 Chambers and their PR agency invited Wccftech out to preview Den of Wolves during GDC 2025. Hotel and travel accommodations were provided by the publisher.]
