As Den of Wolves continues to move towards its early access release, we were able to get a fresh look at where it’s at with a meaty hands-on preview. We were also lucky enough to sit down with Ulf Andersson, CEO and creative director over at 10 Chambers, and one of the masterminds before PAYDAY: The Heist and PAYDAY 2. He weighed in on inspirations, the challenges of game development, and what it’s like to come back to heisting after spending so long with GTFO.
Did the idea for Den of Wolves start forming as soon as you finished working on Payday 2
With a game like PADAY, usually you are limited to your experience or your team or your budgets or time. There’s a lot of things limiting you. You have to take a slice out of something and then think, okay, we’re making that not or focusing on this thing.
Even with PAYDAY for me, I had a lot more going in my head in terms of what I envisioned PAYDAY 2 to be. In my head I think of mechanics, ideas, and systems and think that’s probably the the third game, that’s the fourth and fifth games. It’s all in my head, I never document anything, I don’t even really do game design documents.
So it’s more thinking about how that’s the full scope. What can we make with this slice or idea with this team. For me, Den of Wolves is not PAYDAY in any shape or form, it’s just how I make my stuff. From Ghost Recon, to PAYDAY, even through to Bionic Commando.
You end up picking up stuff on your journey to try and find your creative voice. As I’m getting older, it’s almost like the voice is telling me I would love to make this game, of this is the type of game I want to contribute to. Now that voice is telling me I have to make another cooperative game after GTFO.
The studio often talks about GTFO as a game that you had to make. Is that in reference to having a creative break from heist games and exploring other ideas?
When you think about GTFO, it’s entering a place that you’re not supposed to be in. Opening a bunch of vault doors, taking the loot and getting the fuck out. It’s a heist game, right? Yeah. It’s thematically not a heist game but it is mechanically.
It’s just a slightly different thing. It has more exploration than the other games I’ve made. Definitely more than Den of Wolves which is back to that sort of closed format you saw in PAYDAY. It’s a bit more linear than GTFO is, a bit more aggressive. Den of Wolves is trying to put the non-linearity and the flexibility outside of gameplay and the presentation of the storyline presentation which we’re really excited about.
How is narrative more entwined with that non-linearity and flexibility in Den of Wolves?
It’s driven by Player choice in a lot of ways. It’s using a bit of rogue-lite stuff, I think people would say. I personally don’t think it does, but I think people will draw that conclusion. We’re trying to put some of the storytelling in the narrative into a different format instead of trying to force it into a cooperative game. That way we can keep it very fast-paced, you can replay it, and you can do all kinds of things and it still has a good tempo to it without harming the narrative as much.
I think GTFO is telling story in a various and sluggish ways sometimes. I think like a worst case is probably the extraction map and with the slow walking, but you have to consider that it’s something we build towards in the gameplay and in GTFO’s other missions.
Internally everybody was thinking it’s so slow. But a lot of how that pacing plays out comes down to where it’s placed in the story. You have a lot of hours before you get to that point, and a lot of choices that will affect the outcome of that and how it looks, you know?
Are there any heists or ideas that you couldn’t fully realize in PAYDAY that you can do in Den of Wolves?
I wouldn’t say like any of them are taken from PAYDAY in any shape or form. The PAYDAY game’s I worked on were released so long ago now. When PAYDAY 2 was released or PAYDAY: The Heist released, I was much younger. I was way different in how I approached game design and the kinds of ideas I came up with during those processes.
For me, that’s really old stuff by now. In terms of Den of Wolves, we purposely picked the sci-fi/cyberpunk setting. It gives us a lot of leeway on how we realise mechanics and ideas inside the game world. The Shield Drop is a good example. Not only is it fun but it’s not contemporary. It doesn’t make sense but we have to find ways to explain it in the context of the world. It’s more of a creative challenge that way because contemporary settings have these problems already solved.
Is the environmental storytelling and worldbuilding something you’ve focused on a lot during development?
Not intentionally, actually. Yeah. We kept messing up on the narrative. Currently, it’s mostly me writing stuff. We have some outsourcing teams and some internal guys who love coming up with maniacal ideas you can only really do in this kind of setting.
I try to hold this like narrative together and then I’ll outsource to other people to create really detailed ideas and chunks that fit into the broader world and story. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. It’s been a lot of fun to dive into that. I’ve done it before but I never really have time to do it normally. So it’s been fun to have some time at least to do something a little bit different. Having a good narrative and tone is key for this kind of game.
GTFO was different in its horror focus with stealth and exploration. Were there any lessons that you or the team learnt when you were developing GTFO that you brought over into Den of Wolves?
Yeah, there’s a lot of mechanical refinement. Yeah. On things that were theoretical ideas, I knew how certain ideas or mechanics would fit because it solves a thing that I struggled with in PAYDAY design wise. I knew like how certain things were going to work and take shape.
When you execute on it and then you learn how to execute that thing, you also learn how you can modify it to go from something you can only play with my friends to something I can play with solo. With GTFO stuff we tried a bunch of stuff in that we thought was so cool, but ultimately didn’t work in GTFO. It could be because it’s hard to communicate or hard to play together, but it’s never going to work within the kinds of cooperative experiences we create.
You’re so tightly knit in GTFO. If an idea doesn’t work there, it’s not going to work in our other cooperative ideas. So it was a lot of that, you know, just figuring out where to place things or what to avoid when developing other coop experiences.
How did you adjust coming from designing something as intense as GTFO back to heisting?
I’m such a design nerd. I just love doing new stuff. It’s definitely challenging to design new stuff but it’s more fun to be able to execute on. I have so many games in my head at any one time that I know exactly how to do. The problem is having the time, money, and team to be able to realise them all.
The biggest problem is usually explaining to people how and what we’re making, yeah. Trying to take what’s in your head and put it to paper in front of the team is really difficult. Trying to get people to understand and see the vision you have. Yeah. And also not running out of time, so you have to make it something that isn’t what you had initially envisioned. That always happens, you have to think about what’s the thing you need to focus on first so you get it across?
It all comes down to scoping, you know? Like with PAYDAY 2, how do you end up with that game? It’s what you ended up with before you ran out of time, you probably had a bigger idea and PAYDAY 2 is just a part of it.
It’s been said before that Den of Wolves is an idea that you conceived when you were much younger. How is this game different to PAYDAY when it comes to realising that original vision you had?
I don’t know if PAYDAY was trying to realise it as much as it is just trying to do something within the constraints of what we had at the time. PAYDAY sort of came out of working on Ghost Recon and having the assets. The guns, the streets, everything. Then Ghost Recon came out and we had the cooperative mechanics already. So we decided to make that heist thing. We tried to do that, pitched it, nobody wanted it because who wants to play cooperative?
With Den of Wolves, we started to make a sci-fi thing and it felt like nobody understood what I wanted to do again. I didn’t have any energy to do it and there was only a small group of people working on it at that point. We were directionless and one day I was in the bathroom when I realised it had to be another heist game. We had to go back to it.
That was when everyone rallied behind the project and decided to go all in on it. Explaining it that way meant that everybody gets it. It’s like how with movies you can say, oh it’s like this movie and everybody gets it. It was the same thing with Den of Wolves, as soon as we started pitching it as a heist game, it got more traction. It’s a bit redundant but a good way to get it across as a sort of elevator pitch.
Then people have an idea of what it is, or at least know what kind of realm the project is in. Mechanically, though, it’s a new thing, People are secure in saying it’s like PAYDAY but I was imagining something different. Once they had a point of comparison it all fell into place. And we have to give some props to Tencent in this regard, they’ve been great. We’ve never been in a situation where they haven’t been lenient or confident in us. It does create pressure and expectations but we had that with GTFO as well.
Den of Wolves is releasing into early access when it’s ready. For more on Den of Wolves, check out our hands-on preview of the game.
Harry was a guest of 10 Chambers with travel and accommodation covered for the purpose of this preview.
