AI is for sure the trendiest term in 2024 and with that in mind we discussed the buzzword with 10 Chambers' chief development officer Hjalmar Vikstr when we caught up in Barcelona the other day. Being a sci-fi, corporate, co-op heist shooter, Den of Wolves will naturally have artificial intelligence as part of its lore and plot, but we also wondered about the stance of the devs regarding AI in real world, or AI for artist and developers.
"You should always be a bit skeptical and scared of buzzwords because they come and go and you still need to continue to do your thing", Vikstr warns first in the exclusive video interview below. "There are two quite different things. I would say in (game) world AI has gone crazy to the point of hacking, exposing everyone in Midway you have to lock everything down using more of a biological encryption that kind of thing, we're trying to talk about that a little bit we're hiding the secrets in places where AI can't find it basically, so it's still a tool in our world, it's still the corporations running the show we're not fighting crazy AI monsters or anything like that but it's used in a very weaponised way so it's taken to the extreme".
"I would say in reality", the CDO continues talking about nowadays applications, "we are of course like most tech companies, cautiously optimistic. We're not going full ham on using AI for everything because we feel there's still a lot of grey areas where it works, where it doesn't work", he adds while mentioning "writing a boring tool" initially for coders or "using it in an early conceptual stage" for artists as two examples of good usage.
Another not-so-recent buzzword is microtransactions, and as the game was confirmed to have them from its initial announcement last year (read our first Den of Wolves preview here), we also asked Vikstr about MTX implementation.
"To be very blunt, it's not the first thing we think about because we're kind of old school in terms of how we think about games", the 10Chambers man explains. "We're making a premium game now, we're not doing a free to play so our focus on Micros is not first priority at all, but we still see a place for it. But it has to be done very delicately and in a nice way because we have no interest in doing predatory Micros or anything like that, or pay to win, of course not", he promises while also admitting that "just cosmetics is the safer way to go, so you can at least expect that".
However, the futuristic idea of artificial intelligence brought the conversation back to the topics of lore and inspirations.
"I'm very excited about the things we mentioned [in the interview]", he concludes. "Midway being a place that can serve quite a lot of different stories; we're taking a lot of movie inspiration throwing a lot of Blade Runner, Black Mirror, Ghost in the Shell, Akira we're looking at all these sci-fi classics (...) The Matrix as well and Inception, why not?"
"We've spent a lot of energy in trying to create a game where we as a team can thrive and support and actually have fun for a long time, because that's also a bit of the secret for us we don't want to set up our studio to, for example, create hats. Hats would be the best, speaking of micros and all that - we want to tell stories and create exciting co-op gameplay, so I think that's what I'm most excited about".
But how crazy can Den of Wolves go story-wise then, will it transcend sci-fi to flirt more with pure fantasy?
"I think we want to stay grounded for the players to feel the impact of things - we're not doing laser guns and things like that. We also love Heat, the old bank robber movie that's always our reference to all our games. We are grounded, but we are using sci-fi in a way for us to be able to tell different stories and we're not afraid of doing crazy stuff. I think you can see in the trailer there is some artistic choices being made and we want to lean into that thing, so even if we're not doing high sci-fi, we're not doing Star Wars, right?"
We still don't know when Den of Wolves will be ready to be played or to see it being played, but Vikstr told us more about status, Early Access, and consoles here.