Gunfire Games’Remnant 2is coming full circle just over a year since its release with the launch of the game’s third and final promised DLC, The Dark Horizon. Following a trio of successful DLC expansions toRemnant 2’s base game, the title now finds itself in a position where the developers can keep supporting the game through balance tweaks and updates to the existing meta. As one might expect, fan feedback and community perception towardRemnant 2factor heavily into how Gunfire’s gameplay team handles tweaking the title’s meta, including how they approach the design and implementation of new powers, gear, and abilities with new Archetypes.
Game Rant recently had the chance to sit down and discuss the process of designing new Archetypes with two ofRemnant 2’s lead designers, both of whom have thousands of organic hours in the game outside time spent in development. Principal designer Ben Cureton and senior designer Steve Bednarz each acknowledged that fan feedback is vital in a community-driven game likeRemnant 2. Accordingly, the team will regularly look for and listen to player feedback as a starting point for how to improve andupdateRemnant 2through additional classes or tweaks to the existing toolkit.
Remnant 2’s Gameplay Team Is Always Looking For Ways to Improve the Experience
Outside delivering a sizable amount of new story content, a new Archetype, and a brand-new Boss Rush mode,The Dark Horizon DLCforRemnant 2is also making good on the most fan-requested feature for the game: an item filter. Additionally, the free update that is launching alongside the DLC brings with it a whole host of updates and changes to the game’s UI and item economy, including the new Prism system and a completely overhauled Relic Fragment system and menus.
Each of these changes is something requested by theRemnant 2community, which the game’s developers pay close attention to as a means to help drive continual improvement.
This includes the ways that the team eitherbuffs or nerfscertain abilities and perks, as well as how they go about the process of designing new Archetypes for the game. Speaking on the value of fan feedback in driving the design process, principal gameplay designer Ben Cureton pointed out that, in many cases, feedback from the community touches on a long list of ideas that the team already had, allowing them to prioritize some changes over others in an effort to appease the player base.
“We take that into consideration. We often weigh that against stuff we’ve thought about because, while the players may play the game for three or four hundred hours, however much they play… we think about it for 10,000 hours. That doesn’t make us right. That just means we have thought about some of those situations also.”
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“Maybe that feedback shifts things around. Maybe it moves something up or pushes something back or whatever.”
Senior designer Steve Bednarz points out that this is somewhat howthe Ritualist Archetypecame about inRemnant 2’s first major content update, noting that a major complaint of the vanilla version of the game was “a lot about status effects not being very strong back then.” As a result, the team worked on delivering a new class built entirely around delivering negative status effects and strengthening other classes' debuff abilities: the Ritualist. Bednarz also acknowledged that player feedback and sentiment around favorite builds or team compositions play an important role in how the gameplay team approaches making changes.
“We definitely do listen to things and pay attention to what people think is lacking or could use some, you know, dials tuned up a bit. We do attempt to listen to feedback and fill those voids that people think are missing from the game.”
