Did Remnant 2 miss out on the opportunity of a lifetime with its DLCs?

Remnant 2 has received three outstanding expansion packs. Each adds even more variety to one of the game’s main worlds, and yet I cannot help but feel like Gunfire Games has missed out on something crucial here.

Remnant 2 is still one of my favorite games and one of the finest shooters we’ve had in years. The Forgotten Kingdom and The Awakened King expansion packs were both excellent and while I’m writing this ahead of The Dark Horizon’s release, I have no doubt it will be great as well. It’s a matter of track record at this point.

I fully understand that this will come off a tad whiny and annoying in the grand scheme of things, then, but I genuinely believe that Remnant 2 would’ve been an even better game had Gunfire Games looked beyond its three base worlds.

Remnant 2 will remain stuck on its three main worlds for good

By default, without any DLC whatsoever, Remnant 2 takes place across several different worlds, dimensions, or universes, whatever you want to call them. The main narrative, however, focuses specifically on three distinctive worlds: the Victorian-esque Losomn, the forests of Yaesha, and the sci-fi horrors of N’Erud.

Each playthrough rolls a randomized selection of maps, bosses, and progression opportunities. The game comes with two full playthroughs’ worth of unique content, and each new campaign rolls from this selection, so you never quite know what you’re getting. Due to this formula, Gunfire Games could quite easily insert all-new expansions of existing tilesets, and so each of the three DLCs adds a massive chunk of new goodies into its respective world.

The Awakened King added one new playthrough’s worth of stuff to Losomn, The Forgotten Kingdom did the same for Yaesha, and The Dark Horizon will do the same for N’Erud. It’s quite phenomenal, really! In the grand scheme of things, the issue I have is that this feels like the setup for more. More worlds, more dimensions, more goodies to chase and puzzles to solve.

I can’t shake the feeling that this really was the plan at one point in time because the original Remnant: From the Ashes did introduce whole new worlds to its content roster. Swamps of Corsus added, uh, the swampy regions of Corsus, while Subject 2933 took us into the mountainous regions of Reisum. These DLCs weren’t outright phenomenal, mind, but they sure did up the ante in terms of variety. Remnant 2 isn’t going to have this same opportunity afforded to it, sadly.

Why is Remnant 2 not getting any more DLC?

After Gunfire Games announced that The Dark Horizon would be the final Remnant 2 DLC, I was taken aback. Sure, its heyday has passed by now, and I’m all but certain that the expansions weren’t nearly as successful as the base game, but the principal designer of Remnant 2 specifically said there was a “very good chance” more DLC would be coming after the three originally planned ones. With each essentially doubling a given world’s content, Gunfire should have had free reign to redirect the game’s next chapter into any direction it chose.

Yet, that’s not happening at all. With no word from the developers on the matter, we can only hypothesize as to what happened in the background. Given the quality of Remnant 2‘s post-launch content, I feel bad that I’m disappointed with Gunfire Games choosing to drop the game before exploring a genuinely new world. Yet, at the same time, isn’t this more than enough content for dozens of hours of gameplay?

More Remnant is absolutely coming, but who knows when?

There’s no way Gunfire Games is going to drop Remnant for good, not given just how successful Remnant 2 was early on. Remember, the game absolutely captured the zeitgeist of its launch window, and everyone and their mum was playing it.

The fact is, though, that Gunfire Games is billing The Dark Horizons as the definitive and final Remnant 2 DLC despite the studio heads’ claims that there’d be more content coming down the line. Is Remnant 3 that far along that it makes no sense for developers to stick around working on this entry in the series? I find that hard to believe. Even optimistically, sequels take three to four years to produce in the current industry climate.

While the game’s not a live-service title, Gunfire successfully pushed out three massive expansions for each of Remnant 2’s main worlds. Why stop there unless something’s going on? And, you know, something has gone down: Darksiders 4. Is this a good thing? We’ll just have to wait and see. As for myself, though, I feel that Remnant 2 deserved one more year of content.

Remnant 2 is left in a good state, but it could’ve been even better

It’s funny that my only real complaint about Remnant 2, about a year after it first came out, is that it won’t get even more content than initially planned. The crux of Remnant 2 is not genuinely novel and unique: it’s a gun-fighting Soulslike. Or Souls-lite, if you will. Yet, the execution of the game leaves virtually nothing to be desired, with engaging combat and progression loops, oodles of content, and a better take on exploration and puzzle-solving than I had seen in years.

For what it’s worth, I’m hoping that this franchise is, at the very least, thoroughly done with the world of Yaesha for good. We’ve seen it in the first Remnant, we went back in Remnant 2, and then went back again as part of the sequel’s Forgotten Kingdom DLC. N’Erud is infinitely more interesting in my opinion, and I’m happy that we are going back to it as part of Remnant 2‘s grand and final expansion pack. That’s a win, at least.