The million-plus-seller Remnant: From the Ashes debuted in 2019, the brainchild of Austin, Texas-based developer Gunfire Games. A sequel, Remnant II, successfully launched in late 2023, and Gunfire expanded their library again with the release of Remnant II: The Forgotten Kingdom. The post-apocalyptic, third-person shooter role-playing game is available for PlayStation 5, Windows, and Xbox Series X/S.
Remnant II: The Forgotten Kingdom features lush environments and excellent combat animations.
The Forgotten Kingdom is the second instalment of Gunfire’s planned three-part series of downloadable content (DLC) for the sequel. “The response from the players has been amazing,”, says John Pearl, the Narrative Director at Gunfire Games. In this iteration, players visit a location never before seen, and interact with all new characters and a storyline unlike the previous adventures. Pearl reports that early sales have been strong, with great retention among the player base.
Gunfire’s success should come as no surprise; the studio has consistently produced high-quality work in their 10-year existence, starting with their first major release for the Oculus Rift launch, Chronos. Gunfire was founded by David Adams in July 2014, bringing with him the core team of Crytek USA just before that studio’s closure.
Remnant II uses a procedural generation algorithm to randomize level layouts and campaigns.
Since the launch of Forgotten Kingdom, Gunfire continues to push forward, with new content, resolved issues, inclusive game events, and more. Pearl says the team takes special pride in its scrutiny of player feedback. “While it’s impossible to address every request and concern,” Pearl acknowledges, “we do read the comments and work to address the big ones where we can. We recently added cross play, the most highly requested feature to date, and the release has had an overwhelmingly positive response.”
Players can immediately access The Forgotten Kingdom content as a one-shot in adventure mode, and it has the potential to show up in a new campaign playthrough. Pearl says Remnant II is built so that players likely only see half the game in a single campaign playthrough, as each of the three main worlds have two unique storylines, so in a playthrough players only experience one world. “Our goal with the DLCs is to expand that to three unique storylines per world, increasing the overall replayability of Remnant II.”
Each player archetype has a complex set of combat skills.
The Forgotten Kingdom is a full-fledged, all-new experience, as with the previous DLC, The Awakened King. From a gameplay perspective, this means players can look forward to a new world boss, all new mini-bosses, a new storyline, a new archetype, new armor sets, and, of course, lots of new items and weapons.
Pearl says the team tries to make decisions about game updates that benefit the player base, and allow for as much accessibility as possible. Much like with The Awakened King DLC, players who don’t own the DLC can still experience it by joining the game of someone who does own it. Those joining players are able to collect all the items and see the entire storyline, they just won’t be able to use the items they collect in their own campaigns, until they purchase the DLC themselves.
As with most new games, up-to-date hardware is recommended in order to get the best visuals and performance. Gunfire Games worked hard to accommodate a wide spectrum of hardware, from low-end to high-end, but Pearl reports that with high-end hardware, such as a system with an Intel® CoreTM i9-14900K CPU, the game “really sings, with all the bells and whistles the newest hardware allows for.”
Remnant II started as an Unreal Engine 4 game, but the team decided to make the jump after reviewing some of the technology that Unreal Engine 5 brought to the table,. There were a lot of features and tools they were able to utilize to push the visuals of Remnant II beyond what was possible in Remnant: From the Ashes, and still deliver a solid performing game on PC.
The Remnant series has been a true passion project for Pearl’s team, one that started long before even Chronos. “It’s been humbling to see the positive reaction from fans,” Pearl says, emphasizing that he appreciates the passion fans show for the series. Going forward, Gunfire Games will focus on more new content, although they are not discussing specifics at this time. Pearl did say that the team has more free content releases planned for the future. Judging from their current body of work, the wait should be worth it.
