It has been approximately four weeks since we launched FBC: Firebreak. During that time, we have released four patches that improve the game and partly address your feedback. Now that the game is live, our community plays a big part in shaping the future of the experience. This is just the start.
The updating cadence as well as our communications will slow down as we put more of our development focus on the first Major Update arriving in late September.
So, before we go into more radio silence, let's talk a bit about what we are working on!
While we want to provide you with detailed information on what's coming, the nature of game development is that things change frequently. Some features will make it, some won't, some will arrive later than planned, and some earlier! Giving away too much, too early when features aren’t entirely locked down can also get us into trouble. However, we want to remain transparent and keep you informed about what’s going to come. Even if it might change.
The weeks since launch have given us a huge amount of feedback, from you, the community, as well as reviews, and the data we are looking at. Based on our previous development plans and taking all the feedback on board, we are excited about what our first Major Update, targeted for a late September release, will bring to FBC: Firebreak. Ultimately, we need to get you excited about what is coming.
The following isn’t everything that we are working on for the September Major Update, nor what comes after that, but these topics represent our focus for the upcoming months of development.
Understanding the game
We’ve seen many players come into the game and leave within the first hour. And that’s because our first hour can be frustrating; you feel ineffective and confused as to what to do. This needs to be improved.
For many of you already playing FBC: Firebreak, us focusing on the opening experience may seem less exciting, but to keep the game healthy (and your matchmaking fast), we need to bring in more people with a better first-time experience than before. Here are a few things we’re doing to improve onboarding:
Part of onboarding is understanding the world and your place in it. We have Control players hungry to see more of the Oldest House, but also people who’ve never played Control trying to comprehend its strange universe for the first time. No matter what you’ve played before, everyone playing should know where they are, who they are, and what they are trying to achieve as members of Firebreak. We’ve already started some of this narrative onboarding by placing an introductory video into the game and will continue down that path in the fall.
Once you understand the world, we need to do a better job teaching you its core mechanics and features while leaving plenty to discover for yourself. We think that playing is the best way to learn and so we are building a playable tutorial level.
In addition to our playable tutorial, we want to improve the “pop up” tips you receive while playing by offering important information at relevant times.
Gunplay
We have, from the outset, wanted to get a good balance between pure, good old-fashioned first-person shooter gunplay and using each Crisis Kit’s tools and the environment (water sprinklers and fire, for example) as viable alternatives in dealing with the crisis in each Job.
Our current upgrades can make guns feel weak early on, and only generically better later on. We still want you to feel more powerful over time but, to fix things, we want to change our focus to giving you control over how that happens.
We don’t plan to become a game with 100 guns because we don’t believe that’s the right focus for our experience. That said, it’s important for us to deliver on meaningful variety, so we are adding three new heavy guns to round out your arsenal.
As we bring in these new guns, we also plan to drop all “generic” upgrades from equipment (guns and tools) and start players with a playable and powerful version of everything a Firebreak needs from the beginning.
To replace the generic upgrades we’re removing, we are developing a Mod system that lets you tweak how you want your guns to work and the ways in which they become more powerful over time. We’ll have more to share about this before September.
New Ways to Play
We are making big changes to the way you access Jobs and to the content of Jobs themselves, giving you more ways to play and a more surprising and exciting way of getting there.
Letting you choose how and how long you want to play remains an important priority for us, but we want the game to show you the fun rather than ask you to hunt for it. Firebreak was formed to manage an ongoing crisis, after all, and as a first responder, you should be reacting to dynamic, unpredictable dangers, not being asked to create danger for yourself.
To accomplish this, we are replacing Clearance and Corruption Levels with pre-made, exciting (you’ll have to take our word for that for now) variations of Job experiences that can still be short or long or filled with Corrupted Items, but also a whole lot more. We are weeding out our least fun experiences, focusing on our best experiences, and adding brand new modes with plans for adding even more in the future. As part of this change, we’re also reevaluating our matchmaking flow, making it clearer and segmenting player pools more effectively, to ensure more and better matches.
We're calling this feature the “Crisis Board.” This is not just repackaging our current Jobs but fundamentally changing how you experience FBC: Firebreak content and setting the game up for even more ways to play in the future.
More Things to Do
When we think about content variety, we aren’t just looking at how much is there, but also what it’s like to replay what is there. When it comes to objectives, always knowing what to expect is counter to the fantasy of being a crisis responder. So, while we still want you to know what type of experience you’re stepping into, we want to mix up what specific things you need to do there to proceed through zones (especially zones 1 and 2), making runs a lot more dynamic and surprising.
We’re looking at other randomizations beyond objectives as well, including placement of key items, like showers, ammo stations, suspension lines, and more.
Finally, we know you want more Jobs because you want more to play and that’s the only type of content we have shown you. But as we move forward from here, we’re seeing a lot more possibilities for what to do with levels and, therefore, are thinking up a lot of ways to both expand how much we have and how you play it. We expect to learn a lot more about what you want and don’t want after you see what we can do.
Having said that…
New Job
This first Major Update will bring a brand-new Job into Firebreak, requiring you to identify and eliminate and hopefully not eat strains of mold using something we internally call “the sushi train” ... but more about that later. For now, just know that we’re bringing in a new handcrafted level, three Zones, a new status effect, two more enemies to deal with, and all the rest you’ve come to expect from a new Job.
What’s Next
As we hope has become clear, we are pushing a lot of improvements and changes into the game for our first Major Update. Some of these ideas were improvements that we weren’t able to add before launch, but all were decided on and developed based on what we heard from you (listening to feedback) and seen from you (looking at data).
We are extremely excited about these changes and about delivering even more than we’d originally been planning, but changes now also mean changes later. We need to see what’s working for you and to hear from you again before we can be certain that we’re prioritizing the right things. So, while we are still planning on the next Major Update in the winter, and the next one after that, the specific focuses and features are a lot more nebulous. There are a variety of topics that we are discussing and researching, but for now, we are heads down working on the first Major Update.
Thank you for your feedback and patience!
The FBC: Firebreak team