You probably couldn’t get a better setting for a heist game than Den of Wolves’ Midway City. It’s an unregulated island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean where corporations have all the power. They can run illegal and immoral human experiments, invest funds to avoid taxation, and literally just kill their opposition if they feel like it. But it wasn’t always like this, not before AI got involved.
Terrorist organisations used advanced AI to destabilise world governments and drain them of all their money—the goliaths of big oil and pharma reared their ugly heads to offer help. In exchange for this, they got Midway City, where you work as a gun for hire. It may be a really cool premise, but it’s also kind of uncomfortable.
(Image credit: Larian Studios)
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“We had the idea before ChatGPT was even a thing, before Sam Altman revolutionised this entire space,” 10 Chambers co-founder Simon Viklund told PC Gamer. “When that all exploded, we thought, ‘This is so good’. This just markets itself because people won’t have a hard time imagining this being where we’re heading. I still say in the presentation that it all begins in the 2030s, but really it feels like it’s already begun.”
“The idea essentially is to have a backstory that feels like we’re seeing the proof of it already. We’re not making claims about where it leads, but we’re making claims about things that are possible.”
AI keeps on muscling its way into our personal lives, whether through irritating Google Docs pop-ups or trends that are devoid of any creativity, like the Studio Ghibli AI image converter. But living in a digital age doesn’t just present us with irritating obstacles—there have also been some serious cyber attacks as of late.
(Image credit: 10 Chambers)
(Image credit: 10 Chambers)
“It’s a bit scary, because everything’s digital now,” Viklund says. “We had a huge leak in January in Sweden with all of the sports clubs for kids. All the information about the parents’ names and the children’s names, and sometimes illnesses or diagnoses for the kids. They threatened to leak it, and now they’ve done that.
“I just read an article before this interview, it’s very good information for people who want to phish and contact people, because they know the parents’ names and the children’s names. They can set up social engineering situations, it’s super scary.”
They get a little bit of a life lesson about just how shitty the world is.
Simon Viklund, 10 Chambers co-founder
Den of Wolves is primarily a heist game where you can have fun collecting cool sci-fi gadgets and working together with friends to complete missions, and while you don’t have to pay a ton of attention to the underlying story, it’s still there for people who want to reflect.
“I mean, it’s escapism,” Viklund says. “We don’t want to put too much of a heavy burden on people’s minds by reminding them of how bad the world is. We’re not making satire of late stage capitalism, because you can just look at real world stories of what companies do in the name of corporate greed, and it sort of satirises itself because it’s so freaking evil. But I would like actually to inject a little bit of that in the game.”
Viklund points out how many of the missions that you take on in Den of Wolves have some real inspiration, especially when it comes to infiltrating a company to get some dirt on their CEO. “It could be that they’re leaking some chemicals into a river in South America. We could take something that has actually happened, just changing the names of the corporations, but have it as a nugget in the game for those who want to Google it, and find out more. They get a little bit of a life lesson about just how shitty the world is.”
The horrors of AI are inescapable, even in multiplayer heist games. But that reality check isn’t necessarily a bad thing—I found it to be quite healthy to reflect on the follies of man and the consequences of greed while forcing my team to head back into a firefight to grab the last loot bag for no other reason than I like collecting trinkets.
