'We try not to make it painful, except when it comes to skill': Remnant 2 design leads talk adding player-driven QoL features, and the task of making a player-friendly soulslike

Despite the praise I have for it now, Remnant 2's launch wasn't pitch-perfect: The game released with some difficult performance issues, which have been slowly improved over time, but it also staggered out of its big red crystal with some mechanical sore spots.

A somewhat stingy resource economy, expensive respec costs, and a lack of loadouts stopped it (at first) from being the soulslike-slash-shooter ARPG mashup it was clearly aiming for. None of those things are a problem anymore, however, thanks to some timely updates in the game's opening months—ones which also introduced other quality-of-life features, like making Archetypes easier to unlock on your alt characters.

At the time, I remember being impressed by the pace of these updates. It's always difficult for a dev to suss out fair complaints from gripes—especially in a game like Remnant 2, that's meant to be difficult. Gunfire Games, however, seemed to pull it off pretty tidily.

Talking with both principal designer Ben Cureton and principal level designer Cindy To during a preview of the game's upcoming DLC earlier this week, I had a chance to ask them about the process of doing just that—starting with the team's reactivity to builds the player base has discovered.

I was like: Hm, I didn't think about that, but we did script it.

Cureton says that, while his team obviously throws plenty of intention behind Remnant 2's many items (the combination of which massively defines your build, like in an ARPG), the team also looks to the community for inspiration.

«Somebody made a build—it used the Ring of Spears, which is a weapon mod that puts a ring of spears around you, but you can throw the spears individually,» each one of those flings counts as a skill activation, Cureton says, which plays nicely with certain items that trigger upon skill use. «I was like: Hm, I didn't think about that, but we did script it and say it was allowed.»

From there, Cureton says that the team went: «what if we made some more on-skill