Remnant 2 is one of the best games I've played this year. Cleverly taking the Soulslike genre in a unique direction that features guns, Gunfire Games has added to the world of Remnant 2 by releasing its first DLC, The Awakened King. Gearbox and Gunfire contacted me to set up an interview and live demo, which I excitedly agreed to, especially after falling in love with the title during my review of Remnant 2 earlier this summer.
I met with Brad Crespo, Public Relations Manager with Gearbox, and Ben "Tragic" Cureton, Principal Designer for Remnant II. We met in a Discord call for a live demo of the Awakened King DLC roughly 2 weeks before launch. Kicking things off, we introduced ourselves and then dove straight into it.
Disclaimer: This interview has been edited for grammar and clarity.
The Sparkfire
Brad
"Just to kind of kick things off, we would love to give you and Windows Central the opportunity to reveal the spark fire shotguns. So, it's gonna be one of the new shotguns in the DLC. Ben here, he's got the shotgun equipped, and he's ready to blow some things up and use that shotgun. So, we're... just gonna do a little casual demo showcasing the shotgun here."
Michael
"I see right off the bat it doesn't actually come with its own mutator, so you can customize it yourself."
Ben
"No. In fact, that's interesting. You can customize it, right? It comes with its own [ability]. It still has a slot. It's what we consider a standard weapon: it can get its modifier/mutator. However, one special thing about this gun is that it's one of the only guns that can apply a status as a standard gun. So if you know Enigma, somebody played 300 hours, you know of Enigma, right? It's a special gun that applies Overload, shock, and things like that. So, this is actually a standard gun. And so I don't know if you have seen John Wick before?"
Michael
"Of course!"
Ben
"You've seen John Wick 4, you know the Dragon's breath. This is inspired by that. This is our old-timey Dragon's breath... The idea is it's a shotgun — extremely, extremely short range like the fall-off range. If you look down here, the ideal range is 12 meters, but the fall-off is only another 18 meters. It's really nothing, right? It packs a huge punch of hunter damage, but because it's shooting these special incendiary shells, it'll light the enemy on fire. It's kind of like that John Wick gun. Like I said, it's basically a John Wick gun in our old-timey setting here. Of course, it's Dran-themed. It's lever action. Instead of, you know, pump or anything. Like that or automatic.
"The burning that it applies is actually very small. The burning is not meant to be some huge damage amount that some other weapons do. It's really just to apply a status to an enemy and represent that the bullets are super hot. So you get that really short 3-second burn. You can increase that, you can increase the damage. But with this DLC, it's also coming. You know, we've already announced it as the Ritualist archetype who is very status-oriented. So it all starts to make sense when you see the larger picture, 'Oh, that archetype is going to be based on putting statuses on and leveraging them and doing cool things like that.' What better way than to have a gun that shoots these incendiary bullets like the John Wick Dragon's Breath gun?"
Michael
"I made the connection with the status effect. I'm like, 'Oh, yeah, that will be awesome for the Ritualist.'"
Ben
"That's the whole theme of this, in fact, the whole theme of this DLC, especially on the progression side, but also story-wise, is redemption or vengeance and punishment and pain and suffering. As we talk in some of our previews, that the One True King is awake, and he's mad, and he's coming back, and he's like, 'Look, everybody that conspired against me, everybody that looked at me the wrong way is getting some pain.' And so, like all of the items, the trinkets, the weapons, the skills, they're all based on that theme of punishment and vengeance and retribution and stuff like that. And so status really played into that because you put a status on somebody, and they're suffering for a while. They're in pain for a while. And we thought, OK, well, what about a shotgun that can kind of lean into that without being a little bit too strong, because it's still one of the only standard guns in the entire game that can apply a status. In fact, it might be the only one."
The Power of the Ritualist
[Ben then approached the opening area of the DLC, where a group of onlookers were listening to a madman preaching to them.]
Ben
"We'll come in here. We'll check this out. We have a little event popping off here. And this is just a drama preacher, and he's spouting nonsense. He knows that I am not a Dran. So he sets all these people against me here. We're just going to start blowing these guys up. So it puts them on fire so that little bit will kill them. It's not a huge amount, but this thing hits really hard, right? Yeah, it's just blasting the hell out of them, but it does 100 to these guys for it's base damage. OK, let me let me get these guys out of the way here cause it gets dangerous. This thing hits like a truck, but as I get farther and farther away here, it does nothing. It did like 2 pixels of damage to that guy. But out here, let's go. Up here."
[Ben proceeds up toward more enemies, demonstrating the effects of the shotgun and Ritualist working in tandem with status effects.]
"When you have stuff to leverage [status effect items], because we have a million items in the game, it's going to start to really come together, and you're like, 'Oh, I see how I can really punish this guy for having a status on him.' I'll show you one of the items that can kind of work with that as well because some people may look at it and go, 'It's only a three-second fire, and it's only 30 fire damage. It's nothing; I can just breathe on the guy to do that 30 damage.' Like, that's very true, but, as you know, we have dozens and dozens, well, hundreds of items, right? And many of them lean into that status-type stuff. And, of course, it's no different with this DLC because it's all status items, so we added even more."
[Ben then approaches a large weapon-wielding maniac.]
"This guy's mad that he got kicked out of Resident Evil 4. But that's OK; we wear inspiration on our sleeve. I'm just saying... Like for example, one of the popular trinkets is Neck Coil, which says, 'Hey, when you apply a status, do 20% of the damage that it would have done as an explosion.' So you know it's only doing 30 damage by itself, and you're gonna get another 20% of that as an explosion. But it's also going to hit everybody around them. You can also level up the gun, which is going to increase said damage. The DoT that it puts on them, you can see how that all starts to get out of hand, and then, of course, there's plenty of status rings and stuff."
[Turning the camera, we're met with the Awakened King's castle sitting on the coastline.]
"Pretty cool view here. Yeah, this guy just decided to warp his whole castle on top of a grand village and say, 'Hey, look, I'm here. Anybody that's in my way is getting taken out.'"
[We then proceed off into the distance, whisking away to the castle to face more enemies and a boss toward the end.]
Ben
"It's a really fun gun to play. It's funny because it turned into a dev favorite almost immediately. It's like everybody likes shotguns. Like, I think people either like shotguns or hate shotguns, and we have a very shotgun-friendly dev team!"
Michael
"I ran the double barrel as my secondary for a long time. So, agreed!"
[Ben then approaches a bare-chested man, standing a few feet taller than the player. Fashioning two long spears in either hand.]
Ben
"Oh, man. Awesome gun. It's a really awesome gun. So yeah, I mean typical remnant fashion. You can go many different ways, right? So we're just gonna go to the top of the castle and see what kind of rewards await us. Maybe pain, that might be a reward, but we'll see. So this is one of our new elites here. He's just an Impaler by himself. He's not all that scary, right? He's just a melee-based guy. He's kind of aggressive, and he hops around. He just does melee stuff by himself. Not too scary, but when you start getting shooters in there with him, and you get some of the mage casters, he starts to be annoying."
"The Hand of the One True King"
[Proceeding on, we head through a grey fog wall. A boss of larger stature, somewhat mimicking the angelic beings around us and the Elite Impaler we had just dealt with, comes into view. Splashing in fashion to the ground in front of the player.]
Ben
"Mini bosses are based on the elites, and then the world bosses are their own thing. So this is the elite or the mini boss based on him is here. The Hand of the One True King. It's kind of like Braun in Game of Thrones, and he doesn't trust anybody, even his own people. He only trusts the king, or the king trusts him. So he's like. The more aggro version of this."
[Distancing himself, Ben goes on to talk more about interactions with items and the shotgun at hand, interactions that I'll save for users to discover, but he does pose a rather serious question.]
"Who doesn't like an incendiary shotgun that causes explosions?"
Michael
"Somebody that doesn't deserve to play Remnant 2."
Ben
"There you go. See, same team. I love it! So this guy doesn't trust anybody. Like I said, this is kind of like our little play on adding ads in the fight, but then this guy goes, well, I hate everybody, so he'll kill them for you. He doesn't care."
[Ben is currently using the angelic enemies as cover while the boss targets the player. The boss uncaringly hurtling strikes toward Ben but only hits his own underlings.]
"He just killed all the ads. I didn't shoot a single one. Which you think is kind of funny. You can kill him. And also, if you shortcut this section here, you know you'll have to deal with him. So let me come here, get him to jump down. And heal up. Let's go over here."
[Ben then moves to show off what happens when a player is low on health and faces a full boss attack. Telegraphing in true Soulslike style, the boss charges toward the player, both spears aimed at chest height. When struck, the player is lifted before being pelted to the ground, sticking to the spears. It's an ultimate death scene built specifically for the DLC.]
Michael
"To what extent can you talk about other weapons? Can you just say that there are other weapons that will have status effects like that potentially?"
Ben
"Well, we can say that there are obviously other weapons in the game for the DLC. The main thing I could say when designing the weapons for the DLC is that they're themed around the stuff I was talking about before, like vengeance and punishment and retribution and suffering, right? So there's a lot of evil in the weapon designs, and this is one of the more tame ones because it's a standard gun, and you can put your own mod in there. You could put a hotshot in this gun, and it would still do fire damage, but it would do more fire damage. But you could put Overload in there, which does electric, and it's still going to do fire. So now it's one of the only standard guns that will allow you to do two statuses at once, for example. But when we get into the other guns, right, and you'll see what comes out there. They're definitely some status effects there. There's definitely a theme of suffering, and the goal was to tie it all into the lore, the story, and the stuff that's happening in this DLC. And that comes across in everything from the weapons to the firearms or melee. And then, of course, the traits and things like that. It's all about evilness and pain and all that suffering."
Michael
"So you know, you brought up the medic earlier. [He had mentioned it being his favorite class] I loved using the medic. I used it a ton because even if I made a mistake, the medic would bail me out. It didn't give me the most damage, but because of that, I eventually switched over. But I would consider that more of an easier class to play. Where would you put Ritualist on that scale?"
Ben
"It's very interesting. I will say that's a good question. In terms of difficulty, I would say it's actually not a super hard class to play, but it's a class that will take some builds to really get the maximum amount out of it, just like the medic, though. Like, you're right. The medic is an easier class to play, and when designing the medic, for example, just to give you some initial insight, we wanted to make a class that said, 'OK, it's a support class, but it can be great on its own, and it can be strong on its own.' It's a very front-loaded class in terms of how easy it is to use, right? You know, I can put my heel down. I can put my shield up; I get extra relics back. I mean, even at end game, people are saying medic is one of the strongest archetypes in the game. That's not because I like it. I do like it, but it just happened to be that way cause you can get extra relics and relic charges, and there are relic Perks that everybody has when you use your relics; you get buffs, damage buffs, defense buffs, etc. The medic always has relics, which in turn makes them really strong at the end.
"So now moving into the ritualists, when we talk about that, the Ritualist is about more ease of access to killing Scrubs, right? I'm really strong at just getting rid of some of the annoyances that, you know, you may come across in a fight, which is like, 'Hey, I went into this room; there's like 3 or 4 ads. Well, I'm going to get rid of these really quickly, and again, the theme of suffering and pain. Let's make all of these suffer at once.' It's very easy to do upfront but to really get the best out of it; you're gonna have to look at some of the previous items that are based on status effects. The new items are based on status effects, traits, builds, and all that stuff, and you can really lean into that. I mean, that's pretty much all I can say. I probably said too much!"
"In the end, that was the concept of the Ritualist when we made it. [We] said, 'What do the players not have access to?' And I'll be honest, that's how we do every item and every trinket and every gun, everything. What do they not have access to? What would be an interesting gameplay element or theme that we could just base this entire archetype around? And is it fun? And when we made the Ritualist... we knew right away. We were like, 'OK, this is super fun.' So we just knew... And it's the same thing with medic.
"When we made medic, we said, 'OK, well, what is the interesting thing about medic? Well, medics can support themselves. Medic can support the team. Medic has a shield that seems really strong. OK, the medic can get their relics back. Wow, that actually seems really strong when we have dozens of items that work on relic use or when you have low relics.'"
"But another thing we worked on again with the pain and suffering theme is, you know, the mechanic that we have, grey health. It's [health that] comes back over time. With the Ritualist as well, I don't even know if it's just rituals. I think it's more some of the items that we created; we're trying to lean into that even more because that's very pain and suffering themed if I have suffered a little bit. If I have grey health. If I have been recently taking damage, then I want to pay back. I want vengeance. I want retribution, right? And so that's another thing that gave us some insight on how to create the items. So when we made the gun, we're like, OK, what does the gun do? Oh, it makes them suffer a little bit. After already doing big damage, OK, what does the archetype do? Oh well, it does... XYZ. It also leaves a little bit of suffering there, and it's like, well if the player is suffering, what does it do? It's like, oh, well, the player can get stronger. You know, kind of like that. That's the thinking behind it, at least.
"But that's the thing. You know we worked on the items and trinkets and the classes for years, right? And when you look at an archetype or a gun or whatever, I think it's easy for people to say, 'Oh, they made a shotgun that just does this, or they made a necklace that does that,' but we're looking at it as a whole, and we already have 200 trinkets in the game and we already 45 guns. So when we're making stuff, we're like, OK, well, we need to make the 46th gun. We don't want to make the 17th gun again. We don't want to make the 6th gun again, so it gets harder and harder each time to make stuff. It's very hard with trinkets and stuff cause there are already 200 of them, but that's kind of how we theme it. And so we look for opportunities to lean into that, like the grey health. We didn't do all that much with grey health in the base game; there are maybe five or six or seven items. Let's kind of make a suite for that. There were a few holes in status effects. People wanted more status stuff. All right, let's theme things around status. And sometimes, it just comes together organically because we realize where we could fill in some gaps. Wow, that's a lot."
Michael
"Don't worry, I probably won't write the whole answer down."
I did.
Michael
"Yeah, I kept stacking items toward the end of the game. I kept stacking items that would allow me to just bolster damage. So, I found an item that halved my health, and if I had half health or less, I was doing so much more damage."
Ben
"The restriction cord, probably."
Michael
"Yeah! So I was just walking around using that, but if I got hit, I was dead."
Ben
"That's an example of us looking into something going, 'Where's an opportunity to make elements that work together?" and we thought, well, what if we had a ring that could halve your health and we had that in Remnant From the Ashes and then said, 'OK, let's make a bunch of trinkets and things that say when you have half health gain, XY or Z,' and we're like, 'Hey, that's a perfect opportunity,' and that's how grey health works. That's how a shield works, right? That's how relics work. It's just mechanics for us to lean on and build stuff around, and sometimes you don't see it when you're making the 1st 100 or so items, and then you're like, you know what, we could have done more on grey health. You know what? We could have done more on low-health builds. We could have done, you know, high Relic or low Relic builds. Oh cool. Let's make a whole class around that. Can we make weapons or mods around that? That's how it all comes about."
Balancing a PvE Game
Michael
"Watching the Ritualist, I obviously haven't seen it in full yet, but you know, I see it working with the Spitfire, shocking and stuff, and all the items you have in the game. Players will always find the most broken builds within a few days of the game coming out or DLC that you never even thought of. How do you go about balancing those types of things?"
Ben
"Well, we really don't care if things are strong. We just care if things are relegating all the other stuff to obscurity, right? So, like, if we have something that's strong and we had some builds, we still have some builds that are specifically medic-related, funnily enough. You're very hard to kill on even Apocalypse, right? You put on the best armor, and then you use a resonating heart, which if it overheals you, all of the overheal health is healed to you a double amount over the next 20 seconds. So you're just constantly getting health regen, and you play that with engineer or challenger or whatever. And we look at that, and we go, that's OK, nobody ever healed the boss to death, right? So if you need to stay alive more and you build into healing, that's totally fine. If you sacrifice everything to build damage, and you're a true glass cannon, we're OK with that, too. As long as the numbers aren't absurd.
"There are a few things we fixed recently. We adjusted the bright steel ring, which used to give you infinite encumbrance, and we changed it to move you down one weight, you know, dodge level. People were like, 'Ohh, they ruined the game.' And then, as soon as it came out, they're like, 'Actually, it's fine.' It's still incredibly good because it gives you minus 25 encumbrance on a ring. So we're OK with that stuff. When we find stuff that usually gets out of hand, or there are bugs that we didn't see where we're like, 'Ohh man, that one mod is doing triple damage for some reason.' We fix if we see something that's just tuned a little too high, then we may make a slight adjustment, but we'd rather move a lot of stuff up to the average. Rather than move the top stuff down to the average, but the biggest thing we don't want to do is move everything up to the top because that invalidates the balancing of the entire game, right?"
"So you often hear, 'Just stop nerfing stuff in a PvE game and just make everything as good as the best stuff,' and I'm like, 'OK, well, the best stuff is deleting bosses in three seconds on the hardest difficulty, and that's because there's a bug or that's because there's an interaction we didn't see, so we would like to fix that,' and then we have 20 or 30 items that could use a tune-up. Let's move those 20 or 30 items up. That's a lot easier than going, 'Let's move 199 items up to that one and then invalidate the balance of the entire game.' Now, a lot of people are logical when they see the logic in that. And but some people are like it's a PvE game. Leave it alone."
Michael
"A good reference for me on that is Borderlands 3. I forget what the guy's class was called or archetype, but it was the crit build sniper robot, and he was one-shotting the end-game raid boss, and it all became about who could do the most damage in one shot. And you know, Gearbox came in, 'Hey Brad... Yeah, we can't have that. We can't allow this.' And they nerfed it. And I was sitting there with my soldier build going, 'Can they buff my Agent build?'"
Ben
"Well, that's the thing. So, it's very funny. I'll give you a little story here, but when medic came out. Well, when the game came out, people were like, 'Ohh, medic, medic is cool, and it feels easy to play,' in this and that. And then there'd be posts on Reddit or wherever, and they say, 'Oh, the medic falls off in the end.' Cut to three weeks later. The best builds in the game are medic and engineer, right? Because of the stuff I told you about, like infinite regen and infinite relics and this and that. And so a lot of the times we, I mean almost all the time, we don't need jerk react to anything. We see what people are talking about.
"We tested ourselves, OK, well, we didn't see that interaction. It's fine. No worries. Let's adjust that a little bit, or we look at it like in the medic case and let them build into it. They're not getting the most damage ever. Yes, they're really hard to kill, but they built themselves to be hard to kill. Are we OK with that? We're fine, and on the other hand, you have something like Hunter-Gunslinger, which everybody calls Hugs. And they think it's too good because it does too much damage. I'm like, well, it's two damage classes. It's two damaged archetypes, and they're both focused on damage. They're the main two damage archetypes. So, if you put them together, they're gonna do more damage than everybody else. And the question is, are they doing too much damage over everybody else?
"Like if you played Hunter-Medic, if you played Hunter-Engineer, if you played Hunter-Invader, is it that much worse, or is it just slightly less worse? And then when you combine the two together, it's like, OK, well, it's noticeably better, but how far ahead is it because we don't want a nerf. You pick two damage classes, but we may want to make sure that there are trade-offs for doing that. They're not going to have the maximum number of hit points, or maybe they won't have the best survivability. That's all we really care about in the long run.
"And then again, just looking at the underperforming stuff. For example, in our last patch, we adjusted an armor, but we also buffed 35 items so you don't feel like you're missing out. You feel like there's a choice because if you could just wear armor and ignore everything. OK, that's cool. But we made 100, you know, 200 trinkets, and 45 to 50 of them are survivability. You never have to use them, ever. We're like, OK, well, let's adjust that balance a little bit. A true balance, right? Lower it over here by a few percent and then buff it up over here so it's enticing. Now, all of a sudden, there are real choices. That's all we really try to do. We're not trying to take away any, but there's always someone that goes well, you know, 'infinite encumbrance reduction is fun to me. And you ruined the game.' And I'm like, 'wWll, that's fine. We'll live with that one, I guess.'"
Headed back to Losomn
Michael
"What was your reason for returning... to Losomn?"
Ben
"Well, this area is a fan favorite because it has the Bloodborne aesthetic look, right, and that wasn't intentional. It just ended up like that. But it also has the souls look kind of back and forth. You know, especially in this area [the palace area] that we were looking at. Because of the aesthetic of this area, people really liked it, but it also had really interesting stories. We felt like who's Nimue and how does she interact? Who's this big? Who's this king that everybody's talking about? What's going on with the Red Prince? What's up with this Council?"
"We just thought there were so many really interesting stories to tell in this biome that it, I don't want to say it wrote itself, but it made it easy for it to be the first pick. There're a lot of stories in the other biomes too. People really love the Nar'ud lore. And the how there's a black hole here and there's two factions that one wants to go into the black hole and one wants to not do that. Then the Pan has been around a long time and it's where Ford went and the, you know, matriarchs and stuff like that. But this one, I think it just was easy to look at. There's a lot of remaining stories we could tell right off the bat here and people want to know what's going on with this king. And so we just went with it."
Michael
"Do we see Ford return by chance?"
Ben
"I mean, that's something for later. You never know, right? That's the tricky one. Everybody's asking that question. Ford is off doing some stuff. And I think if, and when he comes back, it'll be a moment, right? But we do know that it's a perfect opportunity for a cool moment. You know, we may be building up to that; we'll have to see."
Professional Series S quote and the success of Remnant 2
Michael
"How is optimizing for the Xbox Series S?"
Ben
"I'm not on the tech side, so I don't know much about that, but I will say I know that they're always working on it. They're always looking for better ways to do stuff. I mean, our goal is to make sure everybody can play the game, have a good time, and play it at a decent framerate. I know that sounds really standard, but that is the goal behind the scenes. I don't know how hard it is because that's a whole team working on that. And that has to do with things like the animation budget, memory budget, and VFX budget; like all of those things, there are so many moving parts. But we're not going to get relaxed on it. We're just going to keep working on it the best that we can."
Michael
"Remnant was a big success, but Remnant 2 kind of blew past that. Did you expect to see this much of an increase? I think the first Remnant, like just using Steam as an example, the all-time player count peaked somewhere in the 40 thousand."
Ben
"41,000, I know nothing. I don't track it meticulously. OK. Well, for two, it was 110,000."
Michael
"I was gonna say. And for two, it was 110,000. Did you expect that?"
Ben
"I don't know if we expected 110,000. I would say we didn't. I would say we hoped, and we assumed we would do better than the first one because we had a player base, right? We got a lot of eyes on the game through Game Pass and PlayStation Plus and EGS and all that stuff, even just people who played the game for free. They're like, what's this? Some people loved it. 'The greatest free game I ever played,' and some people hated it. 'This is the worst free game I've ever played,' but we got a lot of eyes on it. So we got the name of Remnant out there. So we did expect that if we made a better game that we feel is a better game, we would hope it does better now in terms of doubling it or going over double. That's just icing on the cake, and it was awesome. I don't know if that increases expectations moving forward, but I would say we definitely expected it to do better. Who knows what the number would have been if we were guessing back then."
Michael
"What's something that you added to this series that maybe you wish you could take back?"
Ben
"Well, it's interesting. I came into my whole situation with the Gunfire. Guys, I worked on Darksiders 2 at Vigil. So I worked with all of these guys at Vigil before, and then I worked with them at Crytek. Then I came back, and I consulted on the first Remnant before I worked full time on it and Darksiders 3, so I was familiar with it. So that's just a lead-in and in terms of adding something that I wouldn't have or wish we didn't. That's a hard question because I think at the time when we're adding the things that we added. They fit with what we're trying to do.
"Like for two, we removed armor set bonuses, and we moved them to mutators so people could have more options. And I don't know if I would take that away, but I know that it's one of those things that we look at in terms of a trade-off of going, 'Hey, well, people want more fashion options. People don't want to be bound to set bonuses,' so we took those away and put those on mutators.
"It's interesting, though, because I think a vast majority of people like that system, and they may even want transmog or something. So it's hard to say, like, I would take that back because I personally like it this way as well, but I could see it being an opportunity to be an area that we improved on more if that makes sense. I don't know if that's a weaselly answer because, like, I'm happy with the way that we did this stuff. I look at it now as the way players look at it and think, well, a small subset of people, let's say 15 percent, miss this element. So what can we do or what could we have done? I guess the word is placate or please both sides, but then you also have to remember you can never please everybody. So, you know, I am pretty happy with everything that we've done and all the stuff that we've added to the game and taken away from the game. We didn't even take away stuff; we kind of moved stuff around, if that makes sense."
Michael
"No, that makes sense. Good answer."
Ben
"It's more about what I'd like to add. I would love to add a great amount of, I don't want to say end game stuff, but just stuff for people that want to keep playing the game like, 'Hey, I want to grind Paragon,' for example, 'I want to do this. I want to do that. I want to set my own challenges;' that would be awesome. We talked about it. We haven't committed to anything, but we talk about it, and we go, 'What would be a really cool thing for us to do?' Because we just want people to be able to play the game more and get more value out of their $50.
"Yeah, but that is limited by time and resources, right? I think the amount of content we put in Remnant 2 in the time that we made it is, I would say, impressive for the small number of people that we had, and we're going to keep doing that. People always ask why there weren't load-outs in the game from the beginning, like we just did not have the time and resources, and the moment we had time and resources, they were in the game. Or why isn't there Storage? Well, with time and resources, we're just making more content for you. Maybe we'll get to it. Maybe we'll get to something else that you want. You know, battle passes. [clearly a joke during the interview]"
Michael
"I heard that there is less procedural generation in this area this time around. Can you comment on why that is for this DLC?"
Ben
"Well, here's the thing. The procedural generation overall is still generally the same amount. If you compare it to the Asylum storyline, which has a more static overworld, it's the same as that. All of the dungeons are procedurally generated, things that can be procedurally generated; what we did do was expand the areas that weren't procedurally generated when compared to something like Asylum. Or when comparing to the Empress throne, or the royal throne, or whatever that area is called. That's a very small area, but that small area of two or three tiles is static. So we wondered, what if we made the whole overworld static? We made it really, really large and static.
"And the reason we did that was like an experiment in storytelling. Can we use the environment to tell more stories or to give opportunities for more stories? Does that make sense? It was like, you can get more backtracking. You can get more points of interest that are framed by, you know, coming out of the slums, or coming up this ladder, or whatever because they're static, so it gives a sense of scale. It makes it feel bigger while still maintaining every yellow door that you go in. Every boss that you fight and every injectable is still procedurally generated. The tile set is randomized."
Michael
"I love the asylum storyline. I love going back and forth and figuring that out, especially when I didn't have the ability to look elsewhere to figure out what I was doing. You know, as someone who had it before guides were out. No matter what, even if I got frustrated and wanted to look, I couldn't. So it was really cool to go out and do stuff like that and know that there are more set pieces like that and this DLC coming up. That's cool to hear."
Ben
"It's just memorable in some places, and I think everybody knows that when you play something like the Last of Us or God of War or something like that, you're like, 'That's the area where the Titan is in the background.' Or that's the area where that skyscraper fell or whatever. That's really cool. So now we're doing our experiment, which is, 'I can see that castle. I wonder if I can work my way over to the castle. It's always in that direction. Let me work.' And then you come in the next time, and you're like, 'Oh, that's where the castle is. I'm gonna work my way. Oh, I didn't know that this side pass was there. I didn't know this dungeon was here. I didn't know this secret was here,' but it still gives you that point of reference."
We said our goodbyes, and that was that! I had a wonderful time talking with Ben, and for our readers, I hope you enjoyed that rather deep dive into the mindset of what made the Awakened King and much of Remnant 2 possible. I'll try and catch up with Ben come the next DLC as well!
Make sure to check out our review of The Awakened King, which launched today. Also, if you don't have the base game yet, it's 30% off through Green Man Gaming, which we'll link below.
The Awakened King DLC is excellent value for money, offering more extra content than most recent expansions for just $10. I still haven’t discovered everything this return to Losomn has to offer after 15 hours.
