Gunfire Games' Remnant: From the Ashes has been a resounding success for the studio, selling over 1.6 million copies as of July. Remnant's high sales were a surprise for the development team, but not an unwelcome one. According to Design Director John Pearl, Remnant has been a passion project for Gunfire Games, building off multiple previous titles it put out. Today, on the first anniversary of Remnant releasing for PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One, the developer has launched the game's second — and final — major DLC.
Subject 2923 was revealed during the 2020 PC Gaming Show, and it is the "most expansive" addition to the third-person survival action game, according to Gunfire. For $9.99, players can access a new story campaign, unique monsters and bosses in different environments, and lore that may provide closure for questions from the base game. Game Rant sat down with Pearl to talk about Subject 2923, how it fits into Remnant's overall development cycle, and how Gunfire Games feels its successful title fits into the studio's design philosophy. Interview has been edited for clarity.
Q: Subject 2923 is the second major DLC for Remnant: From the Ashes. I understand it carries on the main story, correct?
A: It takes place one year after the events of the base campaign, which is kind of fun because it's coming out exactly a year after Remnant. Subject 2923 picks up after defeating the last enemy, when everyone thought the Root was defeated on Earth. It reduced the power of the Root and their influence, but they are still connected by a tether. The leader of the Ward sends you out to find a place called Ward Prime, which was where all the Dreamer experiments started. He thinks there's something there.
You start out in an all-new area, traveling through a rural farmland. It's a different look at what happened to Earth after the apocalypse, and you'll find a lot of enemies along the way. Eventually, you'll make your way to Ward Prime with hopes of finding an answer there on how to stop the Root.
Q: How does this build off Swamps of Corsus?
A: The first DLC was a little different. Remnant had three full biomes: Earth, Yaesha, and the swamps. The swamps weren't a full biome and they were never meant to be, because when you go through Rhom, the wasteland, you're trying to see Ezlan the Undying King. He asks you to go to this other world and kill their guardian, to bring his heart back to him. But you don't have to do that, which a lot of people didn't realize. You can fight him, and we designed it to be the hardest fight in the game. It's doable, but it's not the optimal way: going to Corsus and trying to track down the guardian.
Because of that narrative, Corsus was a smaller biome. But people really liked Corsus, so we figured if we had time we'd come back. The Swamps of Corsus DLC made it a fleshed-out biome, as there are certain things that need to happen for it to be rolled in Adventure Mode. The big thing Swamps of Corsus added was enough content to make it playable in Adventure Mode, which is how a lot of people play after the campaign.
That was the big thing with that DLC, fleshing out a partially-developed zone. Its timeline is a little weird, because if you follow the lore it takes place after the base campaign, but we don't specify time so it could be considered at any point before Subject 2923 takes place. This DLC is very different: It's a complete new campaign and you'll get access to Reisum, the frozen world we've shown off, in the Adventure Mode. If you have the Swamps of Corsus DLC, you'll also get access to the enemies and levels in Survival Mode.
Swamps of Corsus added Survival Mode, which basically starts you in your underwear with a set amount of scrap to spend on upgrades and weapons. You get shot into a random world and try to make it to the end of that portion, fighting bosses and mini-bosses. Everything is mixed up with new item drops. It's a different take on Remnant with no lore, no story, and a timer ticking against you; enemies getting harder as you progress.
There's no alternate game mode in Subject 2923, we really focused on a fresh campaign with lore and creatures in a whole new world. There's technically two-and-a-half biomes: We've got the rural area on Earth, the world of Reisum, and Ward Prime. That last one is interesting because we've never done anything like it. Wards are the home base of the player, at least Ward 13 is, and you fight the last enemy of the game in Ward 17. They are big industrial complexes with puzzles and lore, and new creatures to fight. Ward Prime is a cool area because it feels different than riding through the streets, it's a unique experience.
We really focused on making this a standalone story. It helps if you play the base game, but it's a completely different campaign you can select at any point, just to focus on the Subject 2923 stuff.
Q: How much time and effort was put into designing these new areas, and showing how they have been affected?
A: We spent a lot of time thinking about the lore and what that means for these different worlds. I think that's what our main intent was when we started Remnant: We wanted to create multiple worlds with their own unique histories, evolutionary tracts, politics, and catastrophes. Everyone's coming in with a different perspective. For instance, the humans on Earth in the 1960s were doing experiments with Dreamers, and one went really bad. They connected one to a Root entity and the Root used that as a conduit into Earth. That's when the world ended.
In the case of Rhom, it's an ancient world that was highly advanced technologically, and you can see that in some of the pyramids — not sure if that's the best way to describe the structures there. They used basically magic tech, but Ezlan the Undying King started siphoning power from their guardian, and in doing so he let the Root into his world unknowingly. His only recourse was to nuke the entire planet, and that's why it's a wasteland. So you have two planets which have encountered the Root, but they were very different encounters.
The base notion is that worlds have guardians — outside of Earth. Those guardians are what keep the Root at bay, they are the protector of the world. In the case of Yaesha, the jungle world with Pan creatures, their guardian was killed in Chronos, a VR game we did that was technically a prequel. The whole world and lore of Remnant was based on what we did in that VR game, because we liked the world so much. On Yaesha, you're starting to see the Root seep into Yaesha because Chronos happened a month before Remnant. It's just starting to take hold there.
On Corsus, the swamp world, their guardian is still alive when you go there. You've been sent to kill their guardian, so you're dooming their planet, but it isn't in a great place anyway because people are turning into the Iskal, a weird bug cult that's taking over. We wanted to create these very different worlds and explore how they interconnect, either directly or through the Root and how they deal with catastrophes.
Q: What was the name of that VR game again?
A: Chronos. The character in Remnant is from the same tribe as the character from Chronos. The brief history of that VR game is a character is sent out to slay a dragon in a tower, and that's all they know. They make their way to where the character in Remnant winds up later, find a world stone, and meet this tree creature. They don't know it's the Root, which asks them to slay the dragon. That's when we first showed Yaesha, and you go to the Labyrinth — also important in Remnant as the way you get between worlds easily, though in Chronos it's occupied by the Krell, creatures in stone armor.
Q: So after Chronos, you decided to create Remnant. Was there a plan to follow-up with this DLC as you were working on the overarching narrative?
A: This is something we've wanted to do. Subject 2923, from a lore perspective, focuses on the guardian/Dreamer connection and how it connects to the Root. It is the story we wanted to tell, and we've dropped a lot of hints about it in the base game. There's a lot of stuff that will be delivered upon based on your experience with the lore, and we're hoping people who really dig the lore are going to find some of the connections we let loose.
Q: On a similar note, you mentioned a secret boss fight earlier. How much of that hidden content has been built into the design of Remnant and its DLC?
A: It's always been something we like to do. Obviously, we're fans of Soulsborne games, and there's a huge group of us into those games not just because of the difficulty, combat, and boss fights.
There was a revelatory moment for us. A lot of us were playing Bloodborne when it first came out, and we all got to the bag man (Snatcher) experience around the same time. If he kills you, it sends you to a weird basement prison, but if he doesn't you just don't know about that. That was such an amazing moment for us, when people were talking about the same thing and our experiences diverted wildly. We played the exact same game, a pretty linear one for the most part, but it was a huge water cooler moment where we were comparing notes. We wanted to have that kind of excitement and community talk — either in person or on Reddit. That's a big part of the design philosophy for Remnant, it being a partially randomly-generated game. We tried to include a lot to keep things interesting.
We wanted to make sure there was stuff you could miss, either because you didn't spawn in the right world or didn't do the right thing. However, it doesn't impact your experience, there's just another experience you didn't see. There's a lot of that in the base game, and we've added some of that in the DLC as well. We want to create moments where people are scratching their heads, wondering how someone else got that. It gives the community and the game legs, with people trying to figure things out.
They will, they always will. Communities are really smart around games if there's something fun for them to sink their teeth into.
Q: Since Remnant came out, have you noticed a lot of that talk online? What has been the general fan reception?
A: It was really positive right out the gate, and that was cool for us. This is a game we're really passionate about. To be honest, we've been trying to get this kind of a randomly-generated shooter off the ground for years.
We did another VR game called From Other Suns. It has nothing to do with Remnant, but it's where we tested and shipped a lot of the tech that would go into Remnant for creating a randomly-generated world using an AI director to control the ebb and flow of combat. For a lot of that stuff, we got our feet wet with From Other Suns and built upon successes there to make what Remnant ended up being.
Q: Are you expecting any kind of specific reaction to this DLC? Do you feel fans will take something away from it?
A: I hope so. I think we've done some things that will feel like a well-resolved thread for the base game, so I hope people really take that in. We like larger-than-life, interesting characters, and I think there's a couple good ones in here. The voice actors completely nailed them, and gave them a lot of great life. I know Mud Tooth was a fan favorite. He's an old guy in a broken-down helicopter who will tell you stories if you let him, and then he'll give you an item if you listen to enough of them. There's a lot of those larger-than-life characters that are fun to interact with.
I think people's reactions to the gameplay and shooting have been positive as well. For me, that's the first thing you have to do. If you're going to make a shooter, there's so many out there, and there are a lot of bad ones. You have to get shooting down. The feel of the moment-to-moment shooting, nothing else matters if that stinks. I think we've hit a sweet spot, and fans seem to appreciate that.
Q: Have those reactions affected the way you've gone about designing Subject 2923 and other additions to Remnant?
A: One thing we have been doing is periodic rebalances. A lot of that has to do with our designers religiously watching streams on Twitch and scanning forums. When people say "this item stinks," or "this build is overpowered," our designers are plugging away. We just released for PC, and soon for consoles, a rebalance patch before Subject 2923 that brings a lot of lower-tier weapons, abilities, and traits into at least a viable state. That's something we're very eyes-on with the community.
Obviously, people are going to be negative no matter what you do, but we try to pick out people who have a good point and really dig into it. Our balance guys have been really passionate about that.
Since launch, we've had a free Adventure Mode patch that allows people to re-roll these worlds without story; then shortly after that we did Leto's Lab, which added new lore and an entirely new section to Earth where you can find one of the scientists involved with the Dreamers; then we did a couple of smaller patches. Every time we do a patch, our designers add a bunch of balance stuff. We want to make sure there's a lot of ways to play, and a lot of that comes from interacting with and watching the community.
Q: How long have you been working on this DLC? Have world events affected the development process?
A: Certain aspects of it, high-level ideas and concepts, have to come really early. For example, a lot of the ideas for creatures you find on Reisum are concepts we didn't use for the base game. Whenever you're making a game, you let the gates loose on your concept artists. They will deliver some of the most amazing ideas, but you have to whittle it down. There's this one really iconic image of a humanoid giant walking down a street, with human-sized rats trying to avoid him. That was an image we had early on, and it was striking. But we had certain areas planned and it didn't fit, so we figured maybe it could come back in DLC.
From the perspective of how long we've been working on this, certain ideas have been around since the earliest days of development. However, a lot of the actual work has been happening here or there since launch, and when we got Swamps of Corsus out we switched entirely to Subject 2923.
With everything going on in the world, the work from home situation has actually worked out well for us. I think we transitioned in March, and luckily it was pretty smooth. We're a tight team. I used to say that we're a small studio, but we're up to 70 people now. Relatively speaking that's still small, and it's a passionate group. We're always in contact with each other. Obviously it's not the most ideal situation, but I think we've made the best of it and have really good DLC.
Q: With that smaller team, what has it been like working on Remnant compared to other projects you've been a part of?
A: It's definitely been a passion project. This is my 20th year in game development, and I've been at quite a few studios. But it's funny, the people who founded Gunfire are a core group I've been working with since 2006 or 2007. I was at Vigil Games working on Darksiders, and there were about a dozen of us who had come and gone. We left Vigil when the original THQ went bankrupt, moved over to Crytek for a while, set up Crytek USA. Then they had financial problems, and we figured this was going to keep happening to us. So, we figured instead of working for someone outside of the building, why don't we start our own studio? If this happens again, it's our fault. It's more in our control, and it's on us to do something awesome.
That was the start of Gunfire Games, and it has been six years this month. It's pretty cool that we're releasing Subject 2923 on our sixth year working together. When we started we had about a dozen people, and have grown to 70. We always try to find people who are passionate about the types of games we want to make.
Our focus is always on games playing well and having an interesting world, and you can see that if you look at what we've done — though a lot of our VR stuff isn't well known because it was the early days of VR. We also have some work-for-hire stuff with Oculus, like a horde shooting mode in one of their games. We did Darksiders 3, Remnant, the remaster of Darksiders 2.
We really want to find games that get us excited. Those are the key points that draw us to a project: Finding a cool world we can work in, and whether the game feels good to play. We started from there, and we've been lucky enough to find people who share that feeling.
Q: Last month, you did an interview with PC Gamer where you teased anything being possible following this DLC. Now that it's around the corner, what are the future plans for Gunfire? Are you moving on to something new?
A: Anything is still possible, but we are moving on to something else. We never want to grow stagnant. Though, we will continue to support Remnant after Subject 2923 comes out, to make sure that whenever we're done it's in a solid state and we feel good about the balance.
We are going to be moving on to some other stuff, but I can't talk about it yet. It's stuff we're really excited about. Exciting worlds and good-feeling gameplay.
Q: Any chance you're going to be working on next-generation consoles?
A: We haven't announced anything yet, but they are right around the corner. So, take that for what you will.
Q: Is there anything else you want to add?
A: We're excited for people to get their hands on this DLC. It's a new campaign, and we spent a lot of time on new lore and cutscenes out of Reisum, as well as the rural stuff. There's a lot of cool things to find, and for those who just want to shoot stuff there are a lot of cool bosses. There are also a ton of new items, and if you have Swamps of Corsus you'll have access to all the Reisum stuff in Survival Mode. If you don't have the first DLC, you'll still be able to play it through Adventure Mode.
It's not just one campaign and you're done. Subject 2923 offers a lot more value to the base game, including lore for people who are into that.
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Remnant: From the Ashes, and its Subject 2923 DLC, is available now for PC, PS4, and Xbox One.