Remnant 2: The Dark Horizon adds another new Archetype: The Warden. If you’re familiar with Discipline Priests in WoW or Tech-Priests in Warhammer, you already know what it’s all about—and after seeing the Warden first-hand in Dot Esports’ preview of the upcoming DLC, it might be the most interesting one yet.
Wardens are the shield specialists of Remnant 2. They summon a Drone and employ support tools to protect allies or attack enemies. Remnant 2 principal designer Ben “Tragic” Cureton told Dot Esports that Wardens are “the engineer of all engineers. They’re the supreme tech—like a Tech-Priest, almost.”
Bubble me
At its core, the Warden’s “whole gameplay is about shields” and “you can really build into them,” according to Cureton. You get a 25 percent shield from your Prime Perk, and your Drone automatically tops up your shield when you take damage. Your Drone has an active component, like shields or healing, and a passive component, like damage reduction.
You can use your Drone to protect yourself or assign it to allies, which confers the bonuses to them. “The unique feature about this guy [the Drone] is that you can assign him to chaperone a player,” Cureton said. “It’s really helpful if you want to play a support build, where you stay back and heal people. It’s really versatile and not complex to use.”
Wardens start with a Beam Rifle, the Harvester Scythe, and the Repair Tool—a new pistol that heals or deals damage, depending on what you aim at. It “basically repairs anything that’s hurting, so I can repair a friend on low health, and if I shoot at an enemy, it’ll do damage,” Cureton said. “It will heal your Dog. It will also fill up a turret with bullets. It’s pretty cool.”
The Warden dodged the cutting room floor
It sounds like the Warden meshes well with Remnant 2’s existing Archetypes, which makes sense—it was planned from the start. The Warden was datamined a while back, so I asked Cureton to elaborate on the Warden’s origins, and he said it was initially one of 20 Archetype ideas.
“We came up with like 20, right? And we narrowed it down to 14 or 15 and started working on those. One of our concepts was the Warden—a guy that has to do with shields. It wasn’t specifically N’Erudian. It was just a class that’s a protector,” Cureton said. “What if somebody was kind of like the Disc Priest of WoW that puts shields on people?”
According to Cureton, the Warden was originally going to be an Earth-based class like the Challenger or Hunter. But over time, the team realized the Warden was a great fit for N’Erud as a high-tech caster, which is how it came to life.
“And so we made the folder—we had it in the DLC 2 folder because we were way off from making DLC 1 at the time,” Cureton said. “There was just a folder with the name of the blueprint, and it was called the Warden. We didn’t even know what it was going to be exactly at the time, aside from a shield guy. But then it was datamined.”
The Remnant 2 devs even hid an entire Archetype, the Archon, behind a complex puzzle only dataminers could solve—so the Warden leak didn’t come as a surprise. “We were like, ‘well, we were going to make the Warden anyway, and maybe it’ll excite some people,” Cureton said. “We know datamining exists. We made an entire secret because of it, so we can’t really get mad. We just hope they like it.’”
No more standing in sand piles
And if you’re keen to experiment with the new Warden Archetype, I’ve got good news for you: It won’t be as tedious to unlock as The Forgotten Kingdom’s Invoker. Cureton says finding the Warden is “much easier” and “way, way, way, way less convoluted” than the previous DLC’s Archetype, but “not as easy as the Ritualist.”
“We do it on purpose. We don’t want every secret to be easy. We want people to strive for it and figure it out. But we don’t want every secret to be like that,” Cureton said. He hinted that unlocking the Warden is linked to one of the DLC’s new mechanics, and I strongly suspect he was referring to gliding—but we’ll have to wait until The Dark Horizon drops on Sept. 24 to find out.
