Following last night's reveal of FBC: Firebreak, Remedy has shared a first look video, exploring in more in-depth what the team has been working on.
The four-minute video showcases new gameplay footage, snippets of behind the scenes development, and interviews with Mike Kayatta (Game Director), James Tottman (Art Lead), and Teemu Huhtiniemi (Lead Level Designer). They talk about exploring The Oldest House in first person, bringing in humour to the mix, and the ability to customise your "crisis kits", expanding on the details released in yesterday's Xbox Wire article.
The video acts as a complementary and extended look at what the community saw last night during the Xbox Partner Preview, with fast-paced action and delightful Remedy oddness. Check out the video below or on Remedy's YouTube channel, HERE. As always, you can find a transcript of the video below.
Community First Look - FBC: Firebreak Transcript:
[Introduction] Mike Kayatta: Hi! What you're seeing behind me is FBC: Firebreak. Our new cooperative, three player, first-person shooter in action. I'm Mike Kayatta. I'm the Game Director on this project, here at Remedy. Behind me, you see a few members of our small development team here at our headquarters in Finland. And we're really excited just to show you a small glimpse of what you can expect from Remedy’s next game, coming 2025.
Mike Kayatta: For a long time, we've been looking for a way to take our strength at building these fascinating worlds and taking our really action focused combat gameplay and combine them into a multiplayer game. And not just "multiplayer game", but something cooperative. Basically, we want to provide you and your friends the chance to step into one of Remedy’s worlds together for a shared experience. For the first time. To many of you, the setting of Firebreak might look familiar. It's set in the exact same location as Control; The Oldest House.
James Tottman: Each location has been completely reimagined from the ground up, shifted into something that works well for our chaotic three player gameplay. We knew from the very beginning that we wanted to make Firebreak a first person experience. It just felt so unique and original to run around the Oldest House in first person view.
Mike Kayatta: Firebreak takes place some years after the events of that game, but was designed as an entirely standalone experience. So even if you haven't played Control, if you like cooperative shooters, you're going to love this game. So in this game, you play as a volunteer member of a new unit called Firebreak. And that name, Firebreak actually comes from real life firebreaks. It's a physical idea of something that stands between the danger and the thing that needs protecting. And the reason why you're called Firebreak is because that's your job, to stand between the crisis and the thing that needs protecting, which in this case, is the Bureau itself. So before you and your friends drop into a mission, it's important to pick the right gear. And you do that through loadouts that we call Crisis Kits. But of course, your choices and your friend's choices need to make sense together...Or not, it's up to you.
Teemu Huhtiniemi: So obviously when we're making, like, a co-op multiplayer experience, it’s very important to think about the second-to second-gameplay. And once you really embrace that way of working, you start, seeing a lot of genuine feelings kind of arise. And you're you find yourself thinking, how excited am I playing this? Am I having fun?
Mike Kayatta: What we're really excited about is something that we call "Paranatural Augments". What these are is like a special kind of attachment for your tools. They sort of look like mundane items. And this is like a, like an experimental program from the FBC. And when you fire them out, the unexpected happens.
Teemu Huhtiniemi: And what I like to do personally is use laughter as a metric. So, sometimes in the team, someone proposes an idea that is so outrageous that you can't help but laugh. And usually the next step is, "Let’s try that in the game and see if that works." From there on, it's really easy to take what we have and iterate it further and make it more fun.
[Ending] Mike Kayatta: We've only scratched the surface when it comes to FBC: Firebreak. And we look forward to showing you a lot more in 2025!
