Den of Wolves is a game about assassinating corporate executives

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.

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.

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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.

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.