A recent leak that was shared on Twitter has gotten hopes up that Returnal DLC may be coming at some point in the near future. While the leak isn’t certain, Returnal has a 6 gigabyte update coming soon, which many are speculating may be a prelude to something big in the works apart from just being a mid-game save feature.
Returnal seemed like a fully complete game on release, being a roguelike with an entirely self-contained story with just enough information kept away from you to keep you guessing exactly what is actually happening. So with that in mind, what exactly could there be DLC for?
Returnal centers around a space explorer named Selene, who finds herself stranded on a hostile planet known as Atropos as she attempts to investigate a mysterious signal while also confronting her own past. As Selene is killed by enemies, however, she finds herself waking back up at her crashed ship, leaving her stranded until she can find the cause of the loop.
Any Returnal DLC that might be coming, based on the size of the update, could be anything ranging from new areas to explore, to new weapons, to an entirely new story segment. Even though the game allowed Selene to find the signal and confront her past, there’s always the possibility that Atropos might hold many more secrets.
Of course, at the same time, it may not be DLC, but simply a large quality-of-life update. For instance, many players, when Returnal first released, expressed frustration that progress couldn’t be saved in the middle of a run. Considering the length that a run could go, perhaps Housemarque has finally decided to release an option to save mid-run.
Either way, whatever it is, hopefully it will be something that can draw people back to Returnal. While the game did very well both critically and commercially on release, it’s sort of fallen among the various other Playstation 5 games slowly coming out.
There’s no telling when this supposed Returnal DLC will release, either, but until then all we can do is sit and speculate.