Skip to main content

Den of Wolves is a game about assassinating corporate executives

Den of Wolves Gameplay Trailer The Game Awards 2024
Key art for The Game Awards 2023.
This story is part of our coverage of The Game Awards 2024

Den of Wolves, the latest game from GTFO developer 10 Chambers, got a new trailer at The Game Awards 2024. The new clip gave more details about its cyberpunk, anticapitalist premise, which is a bit timely: It involves assassinating corporate executives.

Recommended Videos

First teased at The Game Awards with a mysterious trailer, 10 Chambers returned to the show this year to fill in some extra details. Ahead of the reveal, Digital Trends attended a press briefing where the developers gave us a deeper dive into its story, heist gameplay, and structure.

The new trailer gives a brief overview of the game’s high-intensity first-person shooting, but doesn’t go into too much depth. What we learned is that Den of Wolves is a four-player co-op heist game — much like Payday, the first two games of which studio CEO Ulf Andersson worked on — set in a dystopian future. The deep backstory revolves around a world that’s been destabilized by hackers utilizing AI to take down the government, destroy the economy, and commit mass identity theft. The world’s biggest corporations offer to step in to fix the problem in exchange for unregulated freedom.

That led to the establishment of Midway City, a trade nerve center where corporations have unrestricted power. In typical cyberpunk fashion, that leads to disaster. In 2097, companies begin hiring desperate mercenaries to career out their dirty jobs. That includes everything from stealing other companies’ prototypes to assassinating executives at rival companies.

That last part is sure to ruffle some feathers. 10 Chambers is announcing its project just a week after the real-life assassination of United HealthCare CEO Brian Thompson. The shooting has sparked intense internet debate about the assassin’s motives, the problems with the American health care industry, and the ethics of political violence. Den of Wolves doesn’t seem shy about engaging with those questions, as Andersson describes the game as one about surviving late-stage capitalism by any means necessary.

A screenshot from Den of Wolves' trailer.
10 Chambers

While the new trailer mostly focuses on story, 10 Chambers revealed a few new details about the project during the press preview. We know that it’s a four-player heist game where players can tackle missions with a mix of stealth and action. The world will be broken up into districts, where players match into missions that can last from 20 minutes to two hours.

10 Chambers plans to launch Den of Wolves as an early-access game, though it has yet to reveal the proper release date. When it does launch, it’ll include access to its first zone, the Promised District.

Den of Wolves is currently in development for PC.

Giovanni Colantonio
As Digital Trends' Senior Gaming Editor, Giovanni Colantonio oversees all things video games at Digital Trends. As a veteran…
The best Xbox games of 2024: Indiana Jones, Hellblade 2, and more
Best XBOX Games of 2024

2024 was a year of metamorphosis for Xbox. The long-gestating acquisition of Activision Blizzard finally finished toward the end of last year, and in 2024, we saw the fallout of the biggest gaming company acquisition of all time. A year of high peaks and low valleys for Microsoft's gaming brand followed.

Microsoft laid off thousands of game developers at different points this year. It shut down studios like Arkane Austin, Mighty Dog, and Roundhouse Studios, and sold off Hi-Fi Rush and its developer, Tango Gameworks, after attempting to shut them down. Xbox Game Pass confusingly split into several tiers, getting more expensive for those who want to play new games on the service day one. Xbox Game Studios Publishing's Ara: History Untold and Towerborne were PC exclusives at launch this year, which alludes to a significant shift in Xbox's strategy.

Read more
The Game Awards finally figured out its formula
game awards 2024 wrap up the changers speech

For the past 10 years, The Game Awards has struggled to perfect its secret formula. Geoff Keighley’s annual gala has always tried to blend a traditional awards show like the Oscars with an E3 press conference. That’s historically led to mixed results. Last year’s show was especially a low point for the experiment, as award recipients were rushed off stage as quickly as possible in order to squeeze in a deluge of exhausting gameplay trailers. As I left Los Angeles’ Peacock Theater last year, I feared that it was all downhill from here.

I walked away from this year’s ceremony singing a very different tune. Keighley delivered what might have been the best stage show he’s organized since he became gaming’s go-to event planner. The show delivered non-truncated speeches, dazzling musical performances, and some genuinely show-stopping game reveals. It was an event constructed to prove that The Game Awards will be here for another 10 years, whether you like it or not.
Don't wrap it up
It was hard to gauge just how successful this year’s ceremony would be heading into it, as the build-up was dotted with pain points. Some were par for the course, like a predictable nominee field that featured puzzling exclusions in categories like Best Mobile Game and Best Sports/Racing Game. Others felt like long-standing problems with the show’s format reaching a boiling point. That could be seen in this year’s Players’ Choice race, the show’s fan-voted category. After a few rounds of elimination-style voting, the final five included three free-to-play gacha titles. That list included Genshin Impact, a game that has a history of incentivizing players to vote by dangling in-game rewards in front of them, something that’s seemingly become standard practice for games like it. It was hard to shake the feeling that the awards part of the show was in some way compromised and that Keighley didn’t see that as much of a concern.

Read more
As more layoffs hit the game industry, ZeniMax Online Studios votes to unionize
the elder scrolls online shadow over morrowind 2023 updates

The gaming industry has faced a tidal wave of difficulties this year, the most pressing of which involved the layoffs of thousands of workers from various positions and multiple companies. Microsoft alone made up 2,000 of the layoffs in January alone. The suffering of the workers in the industry was acknowledged during The Game Awards 2024, but while awards were being passed out, 461 members of ZeniMax Online Studios voted to unionize.

Microsoft has recognized the union, marking a major win for workers' rights, according to a press release from the Communications Workers of America (CWA) Union. “By coming together and forming a union, we’re able to take a powerful step forward in ensuring a better future for ourselves and for our families, to create protections against layoffs and workplace exploitation, and to provide additional layers of support for workers beyond what [Family and Medical Leave Act] and workplace policies already provide,” said senior motion graphics artist and ZOS United-CWA member Alyssa Gobelle. “At ZeniMax, unions belong here.”

Read more