NEW HORIZONS

Building up REMNANT 2 outside the live service game grinder

- Harvey Randall

Remnant 2’s third DLC, The Dark Horizon, released earlier this year—and it represents a victory lap for Gunfire Games, a dev that has made a game I’ve been a pretty large advocate for. It’s felt like a bit of an oasis in a sea of live service speculative tailspins—Gunfire decided to simply release three quite-good DLCs in the span of a year at a reasonable price point, with nary a battle pass in sight.

In addition to getting an early peek at The Dark Horizon, I also got to sit down with CEO and game director David Adams, as well as co-founder and development director Ben Gabbard, to talk about the history of the game and its design philosophies for its first anniversary.

Initially, Remnant: From the Ashes spawned from a game called Chronos: From the Ashes, a humble launch title for the Oculus Rift, “Very early on in Gunfire we got a contract with Oculus, and they’re like, ‘Hey, can you make a launch game for the Oculus Rift?’” Adams tells me. “Originally, you went into this tower, which ended up becoming Ward 16 … you could go through this crystal to go to these other worlds.

“We had a bunch of concepts for, like, the original Remnant pitch at the time, but we just said, ‘Hey, we’ll put it in the Chronos universe’. There wasn’t really a strategic decision, Chronos wasn’t a well-known IP, we just liked the world we created.”

That phrasing—“we just liked”—seems to be a common throughline the more I talk to Gabbard and Adams. Remnant 2 had a very solid launch, grabbing over 100,000 concurrents on Steam, and while that number’s now a steady, humble tick between 3,000 and 10,000 players, I’d wager that’s mostly down to it being a game you can reasonably finish and be done with.

CONTINUALLY REFRESHING