As live games wobble, 10 Chambers' tight focus is an inspiration
I promise the sock thing in Gibs this week is true
Hello! Outside of this and two more newsletters, I'm just about done with work for the year. Isn't that exciting? Sorry to anyone still attacking a Sisyphean pile of work-related miscellanea, but you have my sympathies.
Last week we had The Game Awards, the final video game announcement beat for 2024. Things are slowing right down, and I've been dividing my time between doing a bunch of chores I promised I'd tackle throughout the year, and playing Dota 2 again, somehow. I've just installed Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, so I'm excited to dig into that when I feel like I've thrown out enough clothes and promotional tat that I can relax a bit.
There was plenty exciting in The Game Awards this year, which felt like a strong showing for an aging nerd: Onimusha made me quite excitable and The Last of Us Part 2 coming to PC means I can play the exceptional No Return roguelike mode without looking for my PS5 controller behind the sofa.
But as a shooter fan, I was left wanting. I'm buzzing for Killing Floor 3, but the only trailers outside of that that sparked my interest were Saber's Turok reboot, Splitgate 2 and Den of Wolves. Why don't you just watch those trailers and then come back for more on Den of Wolves. Or not, I'm not your Dad.
We know very little about Den of Wolves. I've played it but the version I played was quite early so I don't want to unpack it here. Publicly, it’s just shown off gameplay for the first time. I have friends at 10 Chambers and I'm cautiously optimistic about Den of Wolves. I thought GTFO had some interesting ideas but it didn't quite work for me. Den of Wolves is being marketed as more accessible and a return to the heist genre that a lot of the developers at 10 Chambers dominated with Payday and Payday 2. Still, despite the gorgeous world and phenomenal music I don't have much of an idea of what the gunplay is going to feel like. The proof in these things is in the shooting, as I can't speak with any authority, I'll say nothing further.
Also, whisper it— because I'm kind of responsible for the "back on that heist shit" quote that accompanied the game's announcement— but GTFO is already kind of a heist game. You creep around rooms filled with monsters before getting the item you need and scarpering out of there, and is that not what the heist genre is all about?
But I'm mostly excited about the way 10 Chambers makes games. Yes, this is a sneaky part two to last week's dour missive on XDefiant's collapse. But it's more optimistic, I promise.
10 Chambers CEO Ulf Andersson has always struck me as a pragmatist, and it's refreshing discussing games with him. Andersson once explained to me that he hated the idea of the rug physics in The Last of Us Part 1's shiny remaster because it was a lot of money and a lot of work for something that players would barely expect. This, Andersson explained, would lead to a graphical standard that players expect for every game moving forwards. "And for what?" he ended. I've never managed to answer that question and it has fundamentally changed the way I've viewed game development since.
GTFO feels emblematic of that philosophy. GTFO was always designed with the idea of a limited run time: ever since it launched into early access in 2019, and for most of the game's runtime there was only a small amount of content available for it, each episode of content a "Rundown" that meant all of the playerbase was working towards a single goal. For the game's final update 10 Chambers added each Rundown to the game for players that wanted to revisit anything. In several cases these were slightly retweaked versions, but the levels in the game have always felt tightly controlled and purposeful.
Of course, GTFO wasn't a big success. Player numbers haven't changed much and at its absolute peak only 14,151 people were playing, and there's mostly only a thousand or so players have hopped in at any time. But GTFO has always been what it wants to be: an unflinching co-op game that's borderline miserable to play.
I'm reminded of fellow Swedish developer Fatshark's Warhammer-themed co-op games, Vermintide and Darktide. The player numbers are much bigger: here's fantasy shooter Vermintide 2 and 40k shooter Darktide, both with peaks of around 100k players, but an average of under 10k playing on any given day. Ultimately, these games also feel like they're trying to be true to who they are rather than be an all-encompassing live service game: all of the 'Tide games are frenetic co-op blasters where you'll have to work closely to stay alive, but still occasionally murder your friends with a poorly aimed firebomb.
If this is reminding you of something, it's because Helldivers 2 follows the same template. Helldivers 2 was briefly one of the biggest games in the world, but no one thought Helldivers 2 would do that well, not even the developer (and fellow Swedes) Arrowhead Game Studios. Helldivers 2's success is exceptional, but at launch I remember chatting to people in Sony who were worried as the game came in late and way over budget and they weren't sure what to expect. Helldivers 2 started with a keen sense of its own identity and that shift in cadence to throw content at its audience was something that they ramped up to when they saw the demand. If Helldivers 2 had come out to a lukewarm reception? We would have got new content every month or two for a year and Arrowhead would have moved on to something else.
Making a live service game feels like an impossibility right now if you don't have a giant publisher behind you, but making something unique, interesting and cheap and then scaling up when you have a guaranteed audience seems to be a solid option.
This seems to be backed up by what I've heard in response to last week's emails. The dreaded algorithm and the baseline uncertainty around what will land after a couple of tumultuous years is starting to have a real impact on games. But I find it heartening that there's always going to be space for a Lethal Company or Helldivers 2 to land. Good news for the "I want shorter games with worse graphics" crowd, but good news for the developers trying to survive a career in games, too.
This isn't an "if you build it, they will come" post, because no matter what you build in video games there's no guarantee you'll find an audience. Making something cool for a very specific group does seem like it might offer a compelling opportunity for mid-sized developers though, rather than trying to create one product that will work for everyone (as we saw with XDefiant).
10 Chambers will, of course, no doubt be hoping for a hit with Den of Wolves. However, by building with a tight focus on scope (and a couple very cool marketing beats) that bar for success could be much lower. For now, I'd guess that when the game does launch, the post-launch plans will shift in response to how successful it is.
Out this week
Again, a quiet week. I may drop this segment in the new year, if nothing else because I'm tired of spending time spelunking through Steam's upcoming list. There are a lot of porn games on Steam coming out each week and before I was writing this segment I got to live joyfully unaware of that fact.
The highlight is probably the VR game Alien: Rogue Incursion. I'm excited about the idea, specifically because a friend of mine excitedly sat me down at a party this weekend to tell me how much he enjoyed Batman: Arkham Shadow, so I'm quietly excited about licensed games again.
- Alien: Rogue Incursion - December 19
Gibs
- A couple of years ago I went to 10 Chambers and hung out in the office for a couple of days for a profile on Ulf Andersson. The profile is here, but the bonus detail is that game development studios in Sweden often don't wear shoes in the office. The simplest answer I've had for this is that in Sweden you sometimes have to wear chunky snow shoes and don't want to track snow into the office. But several Swedish developers have suggested that because Ulf Andersson's original game development company Grin operated from a family home at its inception, people started taking their shoes off to be polite, which started a cultural thing. Considering most of the Swedish game development scene of a certain age worked at Grin, it's continued onwards. If you're in the industry, this should go some way to explain why Fatshark has handed you a pair of socks at a convention.
- Here's everything announced at The Game Awards 2024 if you haven't watched it yourself. It's an award show too, so here's all the winners.
- Despite my general derision, Marvel Rivals seems to be getting an audience. Elie Gould's review is probably the one that vibes with my feeling the best. I played my first game today and bagged 28 kills with only 2 deaths. Any other shooter, I'd be ecstatic, but Rivals definitely hasn't won me over just yet.
- Winter cold and personal malaise have congealed into musical ennui, so here's some Mazzy Star for music this week. If we're doing other media, I watched and loved Black Doves, a spy thriller that has some decent action scenes. It's also only six episodes, which feels more achievable.