Hello, Firebreakers! I'm Vida, Senior Community Manager at Remedy. You may see my name pop up around here!
We held an AMA – Ask Me Anything – session with Mike Kayatta, Game Director on FBC: Firebreak, right on this Steam page. Thank you to everyone who participated, and for all your questions. We got over 100 of them, which is fantastic because it means you're all very excited and curious about this game.
Below are some of our favourite questions and Mike's answers, in case you missed the AMA. Read on to find out about mission and content variation, playing with(out) friends, build-crafting, status management, and of course, tips on getting rid of sticky notes.
Has your question been answered? Do you have more? Would you like to come hang out with the community? If you answered "yes" to at least two of these, come join our Discord server.
1. From Uwublubme
Q: Last time we fought in the Oldest House, we were in the boots of the exceptionally powerful Jesse Faden and able to tear through enemies with relative ease. With us now taking control of these Firebreak operatives in a cooperative experience, how has the approach enemy balance and design changed to match this change in power level? For example, did enemies like the Hiss Distorted or Astral Spikes, which relied on the player having Jesse's abilities to evade or counter them, have to be removed to fit the new gameplay experience? Or did you rework them to match the new capabilities of the player?
A: Yeah, this is a great question. The All-Powerful Jesse and Her Infinite Coolness was definitely on our minds when figuring out how to position the players in this game. We wanted you to feel powerful... but also didn’t want to devalue Jesse by suddenly revealing that tons of other people in the Oldest House could deal with these threats in the same way. And that’s how we arrived at the Firebreakers, who are extra ordinary rather than extraordinary. They are very human. They get hot. They get tired. They catch on fire and burn to death. So, you’re still effective, but your power is in teamwork (and there being a lot of you). And when it gets to be just too much... okay, you can attach an Altered Item to your wrench. Just don't complain if it kills your entire crew when you do that.
As far as enemy reworks, yes, lots and lots goes into the shift in gameplay and perspective of 3rd person to FPS. All returning enemy behavior was readdressed, but it was a push and pull. We wanted to maintain the things that make them special while making sure they worked for this type of game. Sometimes they changed. Sometimes the gameplay changed to accommodate NOT changing them.
2. From budderken
Q: Will each job have a final boss like Sticky Ricky from paper chase, or will some jobs have a final objective of sorts. Where it's a more complicated task at hand with a time limit or something akin to that?
I kinda put together that status effects will be numerous in this game, with fire and the basic kinds, and the more unique like the sticky notes or the cold shower. How will these status effects play into each other, how much depth will they have? For example, soaking enemies with the hand crank liquid ejector and then hitting them with an electrical weapon causing more damage. And a follow up question, will there be even more job specific effects like the aforementioned sticky notes?
A: Okay, so, each job has three zones, and each zone represents a deepening of the job crisis, culminating in the crisis' heart. Sticky Ricky is definitely “boss-like” but the game isn’t about bosses and boss fights--in that job, he is, in some manner, the heart of the sticky note crisis, and so that’s what you need to deal with in the final zone. Other jobs have other manifestations of “crisis hearts,” and each one is unique. So, other bosses? It’s a grey area. (Why do I feel like "Crisis Hearts" is probably the name of a JRPG? Anyway...)
And yeah, glad you picked up on the status effects. There are indeed lots, and some more mundane ones like fire and shock and some strange ones like sticky notes. Some are pretty straight forward, like your example of wet enemies being more susceptible to shock (and to spreading shock). But then you’ll run into less, uh, common game interactions like dry sticky notes being more resistant to bullets than wet ones. Just like real life(?)
As far as more weird ones related to jobs, I’ll just say that this is a game about crisis management and crises in this game often manifest as effects you need to deal with. So expect to see more.
3. From Alan Baked
Q: What were some of the challenges you came across while trying to balance each job?
A: The fun thing about balancing a multiplayer game is that no multiplayer game is ever REALLY balanced (and maybe never should ever be really balanced? But I digress...)
One of the joys and challenges of trying to balance a game with so many systems is that you are constantly surprised by things that happen. Some of those things are really amazing and give us glimpses into what I hope will be some day be unique and memorable moments for future players. Ones that we never expected or produced ourselves. But then some of them just break everything! So, we try fix those ones...
4. From BluFrame
Q: Hi Mike and Remedy team! Got a quick question about the Crisis Kits that you have mentioned on Community First Look. So each Crisis Kit has a special weapon and perk my question is, can we switch/change weapons such as Lewis gun, shotgun etc.. or the kits is fix with the weapon already? (Pls do tell me you have Suomi M31 in the game as well..)
A: A Kit is a loadout centered around a special tool, an associated Device (like the “chair turret” you saw in the last trailer) and an associated Altered Augment (stuff like the Garden Gnome, etc.)
You can then customize each of those loadouts with your choice of gun, grenade, and set of perks. You can make them different for each kit or all the same. Up to you.
Also, no word on the Suomi M31, but maybe if you turn the Lewis gun on its side...
5. From Darshan
Q: Will the game include build-crafting and if yes to what extent?
A: You will be able to craft builds for each crisis kit through our perk system, primarily. And one of the fun things about that is that you can actually make builds that share effects to others, which means you can even start thinking about team builds if you’re into that.
But a really important thing to remember is that we don’t want people to feel like they need to be on top of a meta to enjoy the game (but CAN be on top of it if they do care). Like, I love intense theorycrafting in the right game, but for Firebreak, no need for a companion app and three hours with a calculator to feel baseline effective.
Of course, until we’re live, this is just what we think is important. I’m definitely looking forward to watching how people engage with the game, though, so we can adjust build balancing to work best for actual players.
6. From MagnoliaSimms
Q: How many maps/jobs are there planning to be at launch? Is there a plan to add more post-launch to expand on the gameplay?
Will there be a way for single players to party up for team balance? If we're solo-queueing, can we find other players that want to play the loadout we need in the squad?
A: Our approach with Jobs has been to prioritize quality over quantity and to inject as much meaningful replayability into each one as we can (considering the scope of the game). Our hope is that they feel a bit more like unique ways to play Firebreak rather than a sort of “campaign level map” you might see in other games.
As for single players partying up, yes! You can matchmake solo. However, matchmaking doesn’t take loadouts into account because we want to be careful about how many ways we divide the player pool.
The hope is, though, that shouldn’t be too much of a problem. You can change your loadout mid-match in response to what others have (or for whatever reason you want). It’s also not always the best or most fun to have one of each kit, and so matching based on loadouts felt a bit too prescriptive anyway.
7. From Ultamisia
Q: Might have been asked (sorry in advance): if some of us don't have two friends on hand to play, outside of matchmaking, will there be AI bots added in post launch for those solo players?
A: We made the decision early on to not do bots. This might be something better understood once you play, but the non-combat interactions in this game (especially working with tools and status effects and objectives) just don’t feel good with them.
So, instead, we made a lot of decisions that empower you to play with a partial team aside from (but in addition to) balancing it out. To give you one example, if you don’t have the tool that puts out fires, you can pat them out with your hands (though, full disclosure, you might catch fire and die if you don’t do a good job). This sort of thinking just felt way more fun in our playtests.
8. From Wild_hunt
Q: Will it be easy to play with people you do not know? How essential is communication?
A: The goal is definitely to make Firebreak easy to play with strangers. One part of that is communication. For people who don’t want to use a mic, we’ve got pings, we’ve got a voice wheel.
As for how crucial it is? It depends on how you play. You can carve out a variety of experiences depending on your gaming group. Some, you get definitely get away without active coordination because a lot of the design is about passive coordination—in other words, most of the things you do in this game organically help the team. That said, if you want to take on serious challenges, coordinating will help you do those things more efficiently. And that matters because efficiency affects your chances of survival pretty directly.
9. From IX
Q: What variation is there when doing multiple runs on the same job? Do the same enemies always spawn in the same places?
A: There are some levers for you to pull that change the difficulty (which affects enemy types, locations, frequency of spawns, etc.) and that change the complexity (which affects what sort of things are randomized, what Sticky Ricky does, things like that). Lots of the mechanics are also a bit unpredictable by their nature, like oil puddles igniting and sprinklers going off, to name a few. Basically, we tried to make a series of playgrounds where different things happen depending on what you and your team do.
10. From Bort
Q: Will there be endgame-style content where you can replay missions with modifiers or something similar?
A: Oh yes. I look forward to discussing a few things like Corrupted Items in more detail later.
11. From UhhhSomeone
Q: How much of a narrative can we expect from this game? Is it relevant to the overall narrative of Control?
A: NARRATIVE NERD MODE ACTIVATE
Okay, let’s break “narrative” down into two pieces: space and time.
Space is your “world.” A world is a place where things are or they aren’t. Like, there IS a castle. There IS a queen in it. It IS the year 1232. There IS a dragon 3.4 miles to the south-south-west.
Time is your “story.” Story is applying multiple points on a timeline to a world. This happened, then that. Like, the queen stuck her head outside of her castle window when she suddenly saw a dragon approaching from the south-south-west and called for the captain of her army.
So, when we talk about narrative in Firebreak, we focus on the world. It’s the Oldest House. It’s six years after Control. The Firebreak Initiative’s job is to clean up strange crises. But when it comes to adding a "what happened" element... well, that’s up to the player, really. What did YOU do? What did your friend do? And in a more meta way, what are you talking about on your mics... maybe not even about the game! And the more we try to tell a story on top of you, the more we start competing for space in the world in a way that harms your experience.
As far as Control is concerned, you do NOT need to play Control to understand Firebreak. This was important to protect Control players (who maybe don't want to have to play a multiplayer coop FPS to get the full story) and to protect non-Control players (who might not want to go back and play a single player action game to understand Firebreak). That said, we are cannon, and we want to explore this time period in the Control universe, and we do want to put in as much narrative value as we can (at least in the small, unobtrusive places we have to do that in). As to how we do that, well, you’ll see!
So, tl;dr on this one:
* No cutscenes
* Jobs are not part of a campaign
* Emergent moments > scripted moments
* Yes “narrative”
* Control is great. You don't need to play it for Firebreak, but go do that anyway
12. From Koter
Q: I've noticed sticky notes self-replicating in my house since watching the reveal, and they're currently blocking access to my kitchen. Any advice?
A: The main thing to understand is that they are weaker to bullets and explosions when wet. So, you have a hose or something, that's aces. Otherwise, water balloons, home sprinkler systems, whatever you have. If you don't want to throw grenades into your kitchen (or light it on fire, which is another option) you can try electrocuting them. Maybe fill the sink with water, plug in your toaster, and toss it in.
It's a bit riskier, but if you don't want to lower to resale value of your home or pay out the deposit on your lease, you can always just run in there waving your arms. If you haven't soaked the notes yet, they'll jump off the walls and floors onto your body as you run past. Then just get to your shower quick, otherwise they will definitely consume you and turn you into, well... just get to the shower after, okay? Or just, you know, grenades.
13. From Rachel:
Q: What does a typical day as a Game Director on FBC: Firebreak involve?
A: Honestly, I don’t think I have a typical day? Thinking back... today I did UI reviews, helped prioritize some production items, wrote a casting document, rewrote some player barks, tweaked a few things in the game’s economy, took notes on people playing, played the game myself, answered localization questions, worked on a marketing thing, did a quick design, and did this Steam AMA. Tomorrow will include maybe none of those things.
But generally speaking, most of my job as game director is to understand what the game is, consolidate the team around that vision, and then jump into fires until they’re out.