Remedy and FBC: Firebreak Interview – Unraveling The Oldest House
[summaraize]
While Remedy Entertainment is mostly known for big budget single-player games with an engrossing narrative, the studio is taking a huge departure to what they’re known for with FBC: Firebreak; a multiplayer co-op game based in the same universe as Control (and Alan Wake).
MP1st got the chance to talk to Remedy as part of our FBC: Firebreak preview, and we asked a lot of sutff about development budgets, the game’s live-service component and more.
Answering the questions were Thomas Puha (Communications Director), and FBC: Firebreak game director Mike Kayatta.
Unraveling FBC: Firebreak With Remedy Entertainment
MP1st: What performance is FBC aiming for at launch on consoles and PC?
Thomas Puha, Communications Director: We are aiming to have, as always, as great a technical performance as possible across all the platforms. But especially with an online game, there’s some things we’ll only really know once the game is out there. No matter how much closed technical testing we do on things like matchmaking, etc, before launch.
We are aiming for lower PC requirements than Remedy games traditionally have as we want to ensure a wider variety of PC’s can run FBC: Firebreak, so we’ll be Steam Deck Verified for example. Of course, we always wanted to make our games playable to a wider audience in the past as well, but it didn’t always work out that way.
While PVP is different from PVE that we are making, in a game like this, the responsiveness and frame rate are key, so we’ve focused a lot on ensuring those are smooth as possible, but as I’m sure you can see from the trailers and videos, FBC: Firebreak looks really good too, so we haven’t had to compromise too much on the visual side of things.
MP1st: Based on the preview event, Remedy has said there are no FOMO Battle Passes, but there will be cosmetics that can be purchased with real-world money. Based on this, the game is not going to use the now-standard Season Pass/Battle Pass business model confirmed? But there will be purchasable currency packs?
Thomas Puha, Communications Director: We’re not going to have any time-restricted content delivery mechanisms. That’s what we mean by no FOMO.
Firebreak is a mid-priced game, however all future post launch playable content will be free. Separate from this, we will be implementing both free and paid cosmetics, such as wearables, weapon skins and some other things, nothing that will influence gameplay.
We’ll be revealing more about our post launch a bit later, but ultimately we can confirm that none of this content will be released on limited time rotation. We want to ensure that whether you play daily or play every other week, you’ll have the opportunity to acquire all the same items.
MP1st: Remedy has said FBC: Firebreak is AA. What constitutes a game to be classified as AA? Its launch sale price? Smaller team? I mean, we want to say the development budget, but those are almost always never made public.
Thomas Puha, Communications Director: Good question. The whole AA and AAA “classifications”, what do those really mean?
For us it means the cost of the game’s development, meaning the budget, the development team size and the amount of content and features we ship on day 1. These are all intricately linked to each other.
Then there’s things like, we aren’t doing a lot of VO localized into lots of different languages, being more economical there, which is easier when you don’t have cut-scenes which are some of the most expensive things to do in video games. The aim as always is put out as great of a game as possible.
FYI
The initial 25 million budget was announced way, way back in 2021.
MP1st: Given the game has no PvP component, will console players be able to use mouse and keyboard controllers without penalties in FBC?
Thomas Puha, Communications Director: We are looking into this currently.
MP1st: How is Remedy looking to rope in new players who haven’t played Control or Alan Wake? Will there be a primer video of sorts in-game, or will players be able to understand everything that’s happening even without proper knowledge of the Control universe?
Mike Kayatta, Game Director: You definitely don’t need to have played Control or Alan Wake to understand the world of FBC: Firebreak. And that’s not because we try to catch players up on those events through summaries or exposition – you can enjoy everything in this game to its fullest without ever knowing those stories. So, it’s been less about onboarding those folks and more about making sure that the space and time we’re exploring in Firebreak is self-contained. As for explaining important concepts like the Hiss, the FBC, and the Oldest House itself, we tackle that organically on a case-by-case basis.
MP1st: Any chance we’ll see an Alan Wake skin? Maybe Max Payne as part of the rewards?
Mike Kayatta, Game Director: We’ll announce cosmetic types and specifics at a later time, but we can say that our general approach to this and all such game connections is to celebrate the RCU without parodying it because Firebreak is part of that universe—not an outsider looking in or a commenter on it.
MP1st: Remedy is possibly one of the best studios when it comes to managing expectations, not overflowing on goals and budgets. What makes the studio different from the rest that they’re able to weather storms like the one we’re seeing now.?
Thomas Puha, Communications Director: We’ve been around making video games for 30 years. There’s been some really tough times at Remedy during that time, but somehow we have always managed to find a way to keep moving forward.
We did go over budget on Alan Wake 2, not an uncommon thing in this industry when you are always pushing the envelope and game development is unlike any other software development out there, so knowing how long it takes to really polish ideas into a great game, it’s always hard to tell. There’s always a big challenge in trying to match the creative ambition with realistic budgets and how many units you can sell.
We’ve always been careful about our budget sizes, the scope of our games and not hiring too many people, too quickly. It feels like a lot of people at Remedy do multiple roles and jobs!
MP1st: FBC Firebreak story stems from the aftermath of Control, and takes place six years after the events of it. That would also, assuming our years are right, mean the game takes place two years after Alan Wake 2? We learned from Alan Wake 2 that time isn’t linear, with the past and future happening all at once in some instances. Could we expect more time-related things in FBC Firebreak that may connect it to the other games, and even future ones?
Mike Kayatta, Game Director: Right now, the only story details we’re discussing are the state of the FBC, specifically. It’s been six (linear) years since Control, lockdown is still in effect, and Firebreak’s job is to put down the growing crises.
MP1st: I know it was mentioned we could play the game alone, with a friend, or two friends/randoms. Obviously there’s a very online focus here, but will there be any offline modes available? What about servers? Will they be dedicated, or peer-to-peer hosting?
Thomas Puha, Communications Director: No offline modes and the game is peer to peer.
MP1st: Looking at both Alan Wake 2 and Control, the studio really pushed things on a technical level. Not specifically to the visuals, but also storytelling. Obviously this being more online and co-op focused, that’s a little harder to do, but the studio is known for pushing the boundaries of things. So, is there something we can expect from FBC Firebreak that’ll surprise in the way its done that just screams, “yeah this is Remedy”, and ties thing into a bigger picture?
Mike Kayatta, Game Director: Narrative is very important to Remedy and to Firebreak. Being a coop multiplayer game though, we’ve of course had to approach it in a very world-first sort of way to make sure we don’t fight against people talking on mics or harm our replayability by asking people to watch specific story beats occur and re-occur over and over. So, lots of thought has gone into the presentation of the environments and how characters feel being inside of them. There are few precious places for direct storytelling, but we have sought to make the most of as many as we could without detracting from the gameplay forward nature of this type of experience.
FBC: Firebreak is set to launch this summer on the PS5, Xbox Series X|S and PC.
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