I am quietly optimistic about FBC: Firebreak, Remedy’s upcoming co-op, PvE Control spin-off. Having played a couple of hours of it, particularly towards the end of my time, as the systemic complexity began to compound, its coming together at the last minute almost feels like a strength, as I wrote in our big FBC: Firebreak preview. But naturally at a time when live-service, multiplayer-only games – particularly ones from studios known for the purely single-player output – are hardly the most popular pitches in the world, there is plenty of scepticism out there.
Speaking to game director Mike Kayatta, lead designer Anssi Hyytiäinen, and PR director Thomas Puha, however, the sense was – maybe predictably – that the studio remained bullish. They gave a few reasons.
“For me, at least one element there in that conversation is always the predatory practices in player retention,” Hyytiäinen explains. Instead of battle passes, daily objectives and the like, for instance, Firebreak has a somewhat old-school approach of a set of upgrades to your weapons and kits, and a set of unlockable perks, both earned through the main loop of playing rounds of the game, collecting resources and spending them on said unlocks.
As Hyytiäinen puts it, Remedy has intentionally aimed to make it something you can dip in and out of, “the session lengths are short – we’re almost thinking: we don’t have time to play games ourselves, what kind of game would we like to play that doesn’t need to be sucking us in? You know when you lock in, you have 12 phases of stuff that has happened, that just reading through that is already your time gone for the night?”