Remnant: From the Ashes Co-op Design Interview

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Written by ValH on October 7th, 2020

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David Adams, the creative director on Gunfire Games’ co-op focused action-RPG Remnant: From the Ashes, was recently interviewed by Gamasutra. The interview’s main focus was Remnant’s unique online functionality that sets it apart from most other live games by encouraging cooperation and eschewing endless grinding.

Here are a few sample paragraphs to get you started:

First, some tablesetting. Remnant: From the Ashes is comparable to Dark Souls in that it's a linear hardcore action game with a monstrous setting that rewards player reflexes. But one of its core differences is that online co-op takes a more dominant role in the game, and that the levels players pass through are uniquely generated for each player, giving them independent access to different zones with different loot.

So if a player wants a particular item, they need to work with their friends or the online community to figure out who has access to a particular room with a particular boss that needs slaying. And since items are designed to be more unique than the "make numbers and colors go up" method other online RPGs use, the incentive to explore those areas is strong.

Adams says this model has worked for Gunfire over the year in part because the company has pushed far away from the idea that players should need to grind for loot. "The emphasis of Remnant was to make a game that you could play over and over again, and get different content," he explained. Because content is so expensive to produce, many live games (justifiably so!) rely on a grinding loop to extend previously-made content while new players work on that.

What's interesting about Adams' perspective on this model is that it actually strays away from the "forever game" that's attracted developers to the online RPG genre of late. Adams said there was some desire to make a game that players could walk away feeling satisfied from, with the hopes that new content would lure them back in to capture something like the original experience.

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