Ulf Andersson on Den of Wolves: “The game we must make”

And how a creative can protect their own mental health.

Ulf Andersson has always been connected with the coop heist. The creator of the Payday series, Andersson left Overkill in 2015 to form a new studio that same year — 10 Chambers — and quickly set off to work on a coop shooter called GTFO.

10 Chambers — named because the studio only had 10 employees at its launch — found great success in the space, and quickly. GTFO broke even in 9 days, 10 employees quickly became more than 100, and 10 Chambers itself soon acquired the backing of the behemoth that is Tencent.

As part of a larger preview of its upcoming Den of Wolves, 10 Chambers called GTFO “the game we had to make” and Den of Wolves “the game we must make”. I was fortunate enough to sit down with Andersson to discuss what that actually meant to him.

“GTFO, for us, is partly a rehabilitation thing,” Andersson told me. “It’s a small group of people getting together and just saying, you know, “f*ck it’.

“Most of us, at least the development people, had worked together before, and sort of split out and did other things. Then, GTFO was a game to pull it back together and do something again.

“For me, it was getting out of psychosis. I had a psychosis a bit earlier, in like 2014 or something — after Payday 2,” Andersson explained. “So, it was a deep rehabilitation for me, trying to decide if I could still do this kind of thing. If I still had the mental capacity. If I could find myself, and what my strong points were now in comparison to then, because I lost capacity between. I had too much capacity before; now I’m more normal. I’m fine.

“Then, I got to try a bunch of things because we had our own funding and we didn’t and care about anything, really,” Andersson said of Tencent’s involvement. “We just set out to do this like ultimate cooperative thing; this is the place we were in.”

“Den of Wolves is more of a game that we want to play — that we want to make. It’s such a cool game. GTFO was like, ‘can we make that?’

“This, like any great creative project, starts more from that place of, “oh, it’s going to be so f*cking great!’,” Andersson said. “And we’re getting there now — the combat and gunplay are getting to a nice place. I think, from now on, things are going to click into place pretty quickly.”

I also took the time to ask Andersson how he was feeling, especially as 10 Chambers’ employee count continues to rise as the studio gets more ambitious. Was he worried that he’ll soon find things going the way of Overkill?

“I’ve been up to 270 [employees] before,” Andersson said of his time at Overkill. “I’ve done the big thing before; I know that I hate it. I hate it so passionately.

“But also, I don’t think we could really make this game [with an employee count] that small,” he continued. “I don’t think we would have made it if Tencent hadn’t approached us to say, ‘what do you want to make? We’ll leave you be so you can make that thing.’ It’s those circumstances that enable us to make something like this.

“Also, we’re all at the stage where we’re getting older; we can’t do everything ourselves anymore.”

Den of Wolves is planned for (an undated) release on Windows PC via Steam, and will head to PS5 and Xbox Series S & X following that.

Steve Wright of Stevivor was flown to Tokyo, Japan for the purposes of this hands-on preview. Flights, accommodation, and two nights’ worth of dinners were paid for by 10 Chambers.