FBC: Firebreak Has A Plan To Win Back Disappointed Players After A Rocky Launch
Remedy is already bringing big changes to its uneven multiplayer shooter.
After the success of the supernatural adventure and indie darling Control, Remedy Entertainment made an unconventional return to the world of its hit game with FBC: Firebreak. Set in the Federal Bureau of Control’s base, FBC: Firebreak is an oddity both as a Remedy game and a multiplayer shooter, but early impressions haven’t been nearly as glowing as the studio’s usual singleplayer fare. After a rocky launch week, though, Remedy says it’s introducing changes that it hopes will make the game easier to get into and more satisfying to stick with.
Early reviews of FBC: Firebreak were lukewarm, mostly noting that while the game has some interesting twists on what’s expected from a multiplayer shooter, it quickly grows stale due to a lack of variety and a slow grind to reach higher levels.
FBC: Firebreak retains some of the strangeness of Control’s world, but launched with a lot of issues weighing it down.
“We’ve been reading all the reviews, comments, and feedback from the community across social platforms, Discord, and our Steam forums, as well as the analytics we are getting,” Remedy writes in a Steam update on June 20. “It’s clear there are features that need to improve. And they will improve.”
That update came with the first of what Remedy says will be a series of patches designed around improving the early experience of FBC: Firebreak to get players into more interesting content faster and making upgrades more meaningful for those who stick around. In FBC: Firebreak, each mission type has three phases, but originally, newcomers first had to play the first simple phase of each mission to unlock higher tiers. That changed in Friday’s patch, with players now starting with the three-phase version of the Hot Fix mission and unlocking additional mission types by completing the full run.
That alone feels like a significant change. FBC: Firebreak does a great job of keeping missions short enough to tackle multiple in a quick play session, but having to play the least interesting part of each mission first made for a quick first impression. Getting to the interesting parts of the game quicker is a definite improvement, and one that Remedy clearly hopes will keep players around.
Remedy has already made changes to make FBC: Firebreak’s first hour more enjoyable.
Other changes from the patch revolve around speeding up progression. Initially, the pace of unlocking upgrades and new options for loadouts in FBC: Firebreak was ponderous, and even finding the materials needed to upgrade could be difficult. Remedy has added a visual highlight to upgrade materials and made earning them faster while reducing the prices of unlocks. Like the changes to how missions are unlocked, this should let players have a more varied and interesting experience, at least in theory.
Within a longer timeline, Remedy has plans to make the early game more effective at teaching its rules, like making status effects clearer and pointing out the ways that class abilities can complement one another. Remedy also says it’s considering ways to make upgrade materials even easier to earn, as another way to increase the speed players earn upgrades.
“Today’s patch is just the beginning,” Remedy writes. “These are some of the most immediate changes, but we are actively discussing and planning broader improvements to the game based on what we are hearing and seeing.”
Improving progress should help FBC: Firebreak but there’s still work to do.
The current patch does alleviate some of the biggest issues players have had so far, but they won’t fix FBC: Firebreak on their own. In addition to critiques of progression and the early experience of the game, many reviews just didn’t find most of the game’s mission types very fun. There are standouts, like a mission that has you destroying sticky notes before they can cover the characters’ bodies, culminating in a boss fight against a monster entirely made of them, but even the best of the bunch start to get old after just a few runs.
Looking forward, the real challenge for Remedy will be to make a game that’s as varied and strange as the world of Control allows, while improving the core of its shooting and mission objectives at the same time. That’s a tall order, and while the changes already announced are a good start, it will take more than the tweaks on offer for FBC: Firebreak to stand a chance of living up to its predecessor.
