Gunfire Games’ Remnant 2 has been strongly competing with popular Soulslike games like Elden Ring, Bloodborne, and Dark Souls since its release. It seems like the secret formula for competing with FromSoftware is to analyze their mistakes and work on those certain areas and Gunfire Games has been properly doing that as the success of Remnant 2 speaks for itself.
FromSoftware’s Soulslike games are well known for making their games painfully difficult and creator Hidetaka Miyazaki is aware of it, however, they have continued to do so as they believe it motivates the players to continue playing. Remnant 2 had a different approach, they just toned down the difficulty level.
How Remnant 2 became popular by fixing this one mistake that Hidetaka Miyazaki’s Soulslike games made
The principal designer of Remnant 2, Ben Cureton, was recently interviewed by PCGamer and during the conversation, Cureton hinted that they analyzed the difficulty level of other games, which is obviously FromSoftware’s Soulslike games in this case,
“We’ve come across the struggles players have in other games and gone ‘Okay, well, we’re gonna be a tough game for the majority of players, but what can we do to still make it player-focused?’ – There’s nothing stopping you [from playing co-op], it’s just very easy. I pick up loot, you get it, EXP is shared. We try not to make it painful except when it comes to skill.”
Hidetaka Miyazaki’s games are intentionally designed to punish the players for dying to make the player feel accomplished when they defeat the boss but this is also their weakness as not everyone prefers to play a game this difficult.
By improving this small problem, Remnant 2 became more player-oriented and catered to the fans who were looking to experience a Soulslike game without that punishing difficulty.
Gunfire Games plans to keep Remnant 2 relevant for a long time
Gunfire Games indeed did a lot of research as they also plan to keep Remnant 2 relevant for a long time. In the modern era, it is quite common for games to have a very short shelf-life as developers hope to churn out money again by releasing a new video game every year. As for Remnant 2, Gunfire Games hopes to roll out updates slowly as they will make sure Remnant 2 has a long shelf-life.
The game is all set to get a new DLC titled The Forgotten Kingdom on April 23rd, 2024, while a third DLC is in the works and is expected to be released later this year. At the time of its release, Remnant 2 had some gameplay issues but with many minor updates, things were fixed and today, it is one of the most popular Soulslike games in the gaming industry.
