Remnant: From the Ashes is due to release tomorrow on PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. It's the latest project of Gunfire Games, the studio founded by former Vigil Games developers; they've recently made Darksiders III, as you might have noticed.

　　That game was entirely focused on single player, though, while Remnant: From the Ashes is clearly meant to be a co-op game, even if it can be played solo.

　　That's why they have focused on systems that would enhance replayability, such as randomized levels. To learn more about those we've talked with Gunfire CEO and President David Adams, while Colin Bonstead, Studio Tech Director at Gunfire, shared some tech info on Remnant. Enjoy!

　　How do you make sure that the random dynamic generation consistently delivers interesting levels, objectives, etc. for the players?

　　DA: One thing that is different with our game - and other randomized/procedural games - is that all the content in the game is handcrafted. Bosses, merchants, special events, etc… are all hand made. What our system does is take a library of these different pieces, and stitches them together to give you a unique experience each time. The system even allows for relationships between different events. For instance, if you spawn one event that has a fictional/gameplay interaction with another event, the system will spawn the other event somewhere else in your world, as well.

　　Can you provide us with an estimate of how many permutations are in the game? Do you plan to add more post-launch?

　　We haven’t run the actual math on the number of permutations, but I’m sure there are thousands

　　of different permutations for the main campaign. Part of the reason we made this game is that we

　　wanted to be able to add more content after launch so that the number of permutations continually increases.

　　Our hope is that people load up the game, roll a new world… and experience new things they have

　　never seen before – either because they have just never generated that event before, or because we added some new events since the last time they played.

　　Similarly, will there be additional realms coming to Remnant post-release? If so, will these be free or paid DLCs?

　　Yes, we plan to add additional realms and other content post-launch. A brand new world would

　　most likely be paid DLC, where smaller drops of content like armor skins would most likely be free.

　　Are you considering cross-play between platforms as a possible future addition to Remnant?

　　This is something we would love to do, but to be honest we haven’t had a ton of time to look into it

　　yet. We have spent all of our time and energy completing the base game.

　　Can you share the technical specs of the game on PlayStation 4 Pro and Xbox One X? Do you think Remnant could potentially run on the Nintendo Switch?

　　CB: The PlayStation 4 Pro and Xbox One X builds both target 4K and use dynamic resolution to hit our target framerate of 30 fps in more intensive areas. We doubled the shadow resolution, increased the streaming texture pool size by 60% and increased foliage density as well as draw distances by 40%. We also use more complex rendering methods for anti-aliasing, ambient occlusion, bloom, tone mapping, and light shafts.

　　We’ve been doing a lot of optimization in the final stretch on Remnant to get it running well on the base PlayStation and Xbox consoles, and that would make a Switch version more feasible, but it’s not something we’ve investigated yet.

　　Does the game support High Dynamic Range (HDR) displays?

　　Remnant will not support HDR at launch, but we may add support down the line.

　　Remnant: From the Ashes was confirmed a while ago to be featuring NVIDIA DLSS technology on PC. Is that still the case and if so, will it be available at launch? What was your experience with DLSS and what kind of performance improvements can players expect?

　　We gave NVIDIA sample data for Remnant to run through their DLSS training network, and the

　　results should be automatically downloaded the first time you launch the game. We don’t have final

　　numbers for the performance improvements yet, though.

　　Did you look into adding real-time ray tracing or would that be something for your next game?

　　Ray tracing support was added to Unreal pretty late in our development, so we experimented with it but didn’t have time to properly take advantage of it. We do plan to look into it for our next game, though.

　　Thank you for your time.