Remnant 2 is, in many ways, exactly what I wanted from a sequel to Gunfire Games’s fantastic co-op game. The world and art design is gorgeous, the shooting feels sublime, and there’s all manner of builds to craft with all the Remnant 2 Traits, Relics, and Mods on offer. I’m just a few hours in, but I can already see myself playing Remnant 2 for hundreds of hours as I did with the first. Fortunately, the team is already addressing concerns about its endgame grind, and whether certain restrictions might discourage long-term play.
The big focus here is on Trait points. The original Remnant: From The Ashes allows players to effectively level up every single Trait to max, if you’re prepared to play long enough – with a potential 1,000 points to invest, that’s a lot of endgame growth. Despite my extensive playtime, I never collected every last one, but it gave a reason to keep coming back, which suits the roguelike-adjacent progression of Remnant.
That has changed in Remnant 2 – you’ll now have just 60 Trait points to spend. This has led to concerns that players won’t have anything to work towards in the endgame, and that certain Traits such as ‘increased ladder climb speed’ will simply never see the light of day, as opposed to being a nice little bonus you could pick up in the first game as you played more.
In a post shared on the official Remnant Reddit, Gunfire Games says that the current Trait point cap “isn’t set in stone.” It also notes that the cap “isn’t going away, but can certainly be adjusted.” In part, it explains, this allows for more powerful Traits that they avoided in the first game for fear of “raising the baseline power level, which makes balancing every difficulty even harder.”
It continues, “With the cap, we noticed people are using many other rings to supplement their build,” pointing to the four ring slots you now get, up from two in the first game, which allow for some rather dramatic additional boosts to character power. “This was the goal,” Gunfire says, “We aren’t against adjusting the [Trait] cap value, but the gear was designed around a cap being present.”
The team is aware, however, that in choosing to step away from what was, for many players, the main endgame draw of the first Remnant, it leaves a void to be filled. “We definitely understand the desire to keep playing in a world you love, with mechanics you enjoy using,” it says. “Traits are not meant to be the endgame grind in Remnant 2. It’s a different game.”
In their place, the team says something else is in the works. “We have plans to lean into things for the grinders and those that want more things to work towards. We play Remnant 2 a lot; we enjoy playing it and we want to keep playing it, too, so we definitely understand where some players are coming from. The good news is that we’ve had these plans for a while,” it notes, “We wanted to make sure to do it right, so we set the foundation first.”
Some other rebalancing is also in the works – the team plans for more rewards for picking up Chests, Rare Chests, and duplicate Trinkets to encourage exploration, along with ensuring that duplicate Trait Books offer bonus EXP and Scrap as intended. With regards to the respec process, the team also has “quite a few ideas on how to make this more seamless,” but isn’t yet ready to commit to any specifics.
Gunfire Games certainly showed that it is willing to listen to the community and respond with smart changes over the course of the first game, so I’m hopeful that means we’ll see plenty of cool things arriving in Remnant 2’s future. I certainly hope so, because I’d love to spend a lot, lot more time in the world that team has crafted.
If you’re still busy taking down all the Remnant 2 bosses, make sure to take a close look through our tier list of the best Remnant 2 classes to see which Archetypes are right for you.