There’s all the time one thing satisfying about teaming up with others to attain a typical objective. That stated, I don’t have many pals who play the identical issues I do, discovering a squad to group up with is hard, and too many video games aren’t optimized for solo-queue co-op. Payday 3 is an instance of this, with matches usually falling into chaos as newcomers be a part of lobbies halfway by means of whereas others argue over what the plan ought to be. A brand new Payday rival, nonetheless, might be the reply. PCGamesN lately chatted with the ex-Starbreeze devs at 10 Chambers, who’re at present engaged on the upcoming heist sport Den of Wolves.
Den of Wolves is a brand new evolution of the normal FPS heist formulation. Talking to me at The Sport Awards, 10 Chambers co-founder and narrative director Simon Viklund notes that once you boot up Starbreeze’s multiplayer sport, you’re met with indecision and generally battle, slowing every little thing down and making start-up comparatively messy.
“One of those things that we think is wrong – and I feel I can say that because I’ve worked on the game and I know Ulf [Andersson, 10 Chambers CEO, ex-Starbreeze] thinks this way as well – is that you spawn in front of a bank and then you’re supposed to decide, ‘okay, so how do we approach this?’ There’s so many ways you can do it and, as you’re trying to convince everyone in the group to do it the way you want to, someone else is already starting their plan. It’s like, ‘fuck.’ Someone joins in the middle of the mission and then you have to explain to them, too – it’s a bit too complex.”
So how is the group planning to vary this for its personal sport? “In Den of Wolves, you have these different options, but you decide what [you’re doing] before you launch the mission or the map,” Viklund tells me. “The choices are there, however you’ll be able to’t select when you’ve began the map. Somebody can drop in and so they’ll fall in line – the sport will inform them [what to do] with waypoints and goals… in keeping with the plan that was determined upon.
“[It] makes everything more streamlined and easy,” Viklund continues. “There’s no discussion, like, ‘do it this way.’ ‘No, let’s do it that way.’ It’s a game that’s supposed to shave down all of the barriers to make it easy for people to just sort of play it together. There’s no friendly fire. It’s not easy to jump into a server and mess up other peoples’ games just for the heck of it.”
Voice chat is one other important side of co-op play, and Viklund and 10 Chambers are properly conscious not everyone desires to talk on a mic. “We’re trying to make it so that you don’t even have to use voice chat,” he says. “In the event you don’t need to, otherwise you don’t have a microphone, or there’s an toddler sleeping within the room with you – no matter purpose you haven’t to make use of voice chat – you’ll be able to simply ping issues and use in-game voice strains to point what you need the group to do.
“It’s more accessible in that regard, and we really want the game to be that. Yes, it’s a love letter to people who like to play co-op games and already have a team that they usually play co-op first-person shooters with, but it’s a good introduction for people who like to get into it as well.”
Constructing a greater co-op expertise as in comparison with Payday 3 is likely one of the priorities for 10 Chambers and Den of Wolves, however the studio additionally desires to hone in on what makes heist video games so compelling. Even Payday 2, one of the best of the trilogy, struggles often due to all of the menus, lore, and the sheer quantity of ‘stuff’ – it’s meant to be a giant sport, however the fundamentals of the expertise are generally misplaced within the noise. Den of Wolves sounds extra stripped-back and streamlined.
“We’re not doing the Payday thing where it’s a set of characters with written backstories,” Viklund says. “It’s more of an avatar that you customize as a player to create your own alter ego in the story. We focus more on the characters you see, so you get front-row seats to this Succession-type Greek tragedy. It’s great escapism because you get to do something that feels forbidden and that you – hopefully – wouldn’t do!”
Viklund refers to a joke by the comic Dane Cook dinner, who says that males, particularly, fantasize about being a part of a trendy financial institution theft. “We all want to be like Neil McCauley in Heat,” the developer concludes, “in a suit with a duffel bag over your shoulder and an assault rifle in your hand like ‘everybody get down!’ It’s cool.”
A brand new trailer for Den of Wolves dropped throughout The Sport Awards, providing our greatest look but on the futuristic FPS sport. The sport doesn’t have a agency launch date but, however there are many different upcoming PC video games to get your palms on when you anticipate the arrival of 10 Chambers’ newest.
