Den of Wolves understands what made the Payday series special

Few co-op games have been able to recapture the magic of Payday and Payday 2.

Even the third game in that series developed by Starbreeze was met with negative responses, and Payday 2 currently sees significantly higher player counts than its sequel on Steam. That may be because some of the key talent that created those original Payday titles at Overkill Software and Starbreeze left to form 10 Chambers. That small team of 10 developers created GTFO, a sleeper hit co-op horror shooter, and is now returning to the Payday concept with Den of Wolves.

While it’s now in a dystopic, futuristic sci-fi setting, Den of Wolves is a co-op game where crews of four players have to work together to pull off heists and escape with as much loot as possible. At GDC 2025, I went hands-on with Den of Wolves for the first time. It’s shaping up to be a true evolution of that Payday formula, one that builds on what works while still experimenting with some more fantastical ideas. Den of Wolves isn’t Payday 4, but it’s a reinterpretation of what made the series so fantastic in the first place.

Simon Viklund is a video game composer best known for his work on the Payday series, and co-founded 10 Chambers with Ulf Andersson in 2016. At the time, the studio was intentionally kept small, and in 2019 they found breakout success with co-op horror game GTFO. The developers I spoke to at 10 Chambers, like Viklund, all seem very proud of GTFO, but admitted eagerness to return to a Payday-style formula to create something that Andersson had wanted to make for years. From the music perspective, Viklund seemed eager to get back to composing what he does best.

“I loved making the music to the Payday games because I really feel like that sort of aggressive, in-your-face, adrenaline pumping music is my wheelhouse,” Viklund tells Digital Trends. “GTFO was a nice challenge and change of pace to do more creepy horror music, but it was not my wheelhouse, to be frank. That’s what I love most about Den of Wolves: getting back to the sort of fantasy power type soundtrack.”

Generally, there’s a sense that leadership at 10 Chambers is delving back into what it knows with Den of Wolves. This is a co-op heist game where a group of four players have to work together to pull off heists; this should be done stealthy at first, but before long it’ll devolve into a massive shootout where players must think on their feet in order to escape. The biggest difference is that this is a futuristic sci-fi world. In this dystopian (but eerily recognizable) future, corporations have gotten permission to operate outside the law and have created a giant city on the Midway atoll.

Players control the criminals performing subterfuge, stealing from these megacorporations and killing anyone who gets in their way. Instead of robbing banks, you’re robbing the rich, and that inherently feels a little more satisfying to do. The stealth and gunplay feel as good as they do in Payday 2 and GTFO, but the sci-fi elements of Den of Wolves add on unique twists. For example, this game features one of the most sturdy deployable energy shields I’ve ever used in a shooter.

To succeed at a heist, teams of four players need to work together to find the loot, complete objectives, and escape alive. The first Den of Wolves mission I played was a shorter one that hit that bite-sized loot grab-and-go gameplay loop Payday established, while the second was a large-scale heist that was thrilling to pull off. Viklund mentioned how his Den of Wolves music feels more “sophisticated” than Payday 2’s due to his increased experience working on games. That same mantra can be applied to the scaled-up studio at large.

The first mission I played was a bite-sized, grab-and-go loot heist. Another journalist, two developers, and I slowly snuck our way to a vault, but before we could get there I was spotted and a shootout began. We actually did a good job properly placing shields and defending our position long enough to break into the vault and steal the money, but things got dicey as we tried to escape.

One of my teammates lagged behind, so while three of us got to the extraction point, the other was downed before they could get there. All four players must be together to finish a mission, and unfortunately our downed ally was behind too many enemies. We all died trying to fight our way through to him and failed the mission. While our mission did not work, I still had a ton of fun doing that with others. Then, it was time for a bigger heist.

The developers at 10 Chambers actually laid out a physical map of a complex we had to break into in front of me. To complete the mission, we had to find key cards in vaults so we could access a control room, get the ability to “dive” into the mind of an executive seen in the game’s reveal trailer, Mr. Bowman, and then escape. By properly communicating, my team pulled off the first half of this heist with few roadblocks. Once we started activating the vault, though, all hell broke loose and the mission took a combat-heavy shift.

My team had to hunker down to hack certain points and then do “dives” in the mind of Mr. Bowman multiple times in order to get what we needed. This took the form of a psychedelic platforming challenge where the laws of physics did not apply. It was absolutely wild and not like anything I’ve seen in a game like this before. Viklund seemed quite proud of all the different kinds of dive included in Den of Wolves, which will also encompass everything from platforming gauntlets to shooting challenges to escaping a monster chasing you in a maze.

I had a blast playing these two Den of Wolves missions, although it’s worth noting that I did preview this in a tightly controlled environment while playing with developers who knew what they were doing. If I was playing by myself or without my plan, I’d expect the result of my first Den of Wolves mission to be a more common one. Still, I didn’t see that many co-op game red flags while playing Den of Wolves, and found it quite obvious that 10 Chambers has really scaled up its capabilities in order to pull something like this off.

While GTFO was made with just 10 people initially, Den of Wolves’ development team is closer to 100 thanks to an investment 10 Chambers got from Tencent to make this game. As a result, Den of Wolves already feels like a AAA game, unlike GTFO. For a co-founder like Viklund, that also means a lot more responsibility needs to be taken on, as he’s now managing a whole team of sound designers and collaborating with Jamie Christopherson on music for Den of Wolves rather than doing it all himself.

10 Chambers filmed a reality-documentary throughout the development of Den of Wolves, and is now pitching it around to potential partners for distribution. You don’t have to wait until that comes out to learn about some of the struggles that come with scaling up, though, as Viklund was honest about how tough scaling up 10 Chambers has been.

“Growing the studio has been rough,” Viklund says. “I need to be honest, retaining the culture and the way you work and things, you want to do it, but at the same time it’s impossible because it’s a new organization with hierarchy. It’s a different company entirely because, even though you want to, it’s hard to keep doing things the same way and having the same approach to things when you’re with so many people. It’s tough, you move away from hands-on development; as a founder, you go from making games to telling other people how to make games. I’m holding on to the responsibility for the music for dear life.”

Viklund did go on to repeatedly compliment the other sound designers and developers he works with at 10 Chambers, and admitted that “we couldn’t make a game like Den of Wolves unless we had a studio like this and investment from Tencent, so I don’t want to sound like I’m ungrateful.” My preview of Den of Wolves at GDC 2025 and this interview affirmed to me just how much of an evolution this game is for the developers working on it.

Ulf Andersson, Simon Viklund, and company all proved themselves and trailblazer a new kind of co-op game with the first two Payday titles. Then, they proved they could create a small-scale indie horror hit with GTFO. Now, they’re combining their capabilities at both to take the core of Payday and reimagine it as a wild AAA dystopian sci-fi co-op shooter. Den of Wolves is different from classic Payday in quite a few ways; the developers making it have changed too. Despite all of that, I’d still say that Den of Wolves is looking like the evolution of the Payday formula that we’ve been waiting for.

Den of Wolves is in development for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S and will initially launch into early access. When asked for a more specific window, 10 Chambers representatives simply told me “when it’s ready.”

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