#fbc: firebreak

[lostinthewoodsomewhere]

So, Firebreak huh?

[kasimova-dariia]

— In the Oldest House, there are no accidents. Whatever happens, it is for a reason.

[redactedshapes]

With the confirmation that Firebreak takes place in 2025 and Hank saying it's been six years in lockdown, all the theories about time dilation within the Oldest House based on the Bright Falls AWE alert from four years into the future were, in hindsight, born out of denial that the Control gang has been stuck inside during all this time.

[thechibi]

Anybody else just think of Control and Firebreak when these Progressive commercials come on or just me??

[sluiba]

remedy plays fbc firebreak (endless shift): trivia and funfacts (2026/01/23)

featuring mike kayatta (game director), simon rozner (principal gameplay designer), julius fondem (community manager), as well as off-screen players miika huttunen (senior communications manager), francisco da silva (junior qa tester)

FYI, fbc: firebreak is free to play on steam this very weekend! so literally right now!!!

kayatta is "a gigantic fan" of the "criminally underrated" mass effect 3 multiplayer mode (god!! same!!!!), and that was a purposeful design influence for firebreak from the start

(kayatta says he brought up the game up in an early presentation and was quietly told "you can't mention mass effect 3 multiplayer" so now he goes out of his way to champion this cause. based tbqh)

rozner also mentioned taking inspiration from left for dead and rotato, in the sense that these games are accommodating for even casual players who only have maybe as little as 15-20mins to play

the devs did not want to rebuild the game from scratch with endless shift, but use what was already there, which posed its own challenges

balancing was also apparently pretty difficult, considering the whole rng nature of roguelites. kayatta described two opposing schools of balancing: the "feel" balancers, who play a lot and get hands-on experience, and the "paper" or "excel" balancers, who approach balance as a math problem. he seems to feel neither of these schools alone get the desired results

getting to break the game with a crazy op build is purposeful, but shouldn't happen too often, or it stops being exciting

some powerups might seem useless or solely harmful, but can be extremely powerful in combination with specific other ones

on feedback: the devs take it seriously and have a space for it on discord, even if they dont directly respond to most of it. in fact kayatta says they need the feedback, being a smaller team. rozner further remarks that balancing is never truly done but an ongoing process

in an earlier version of the game, you could shoot into the ground with a shotgun and use the recoil to go off "into outer space" 🚀

rozner holds the record on the dev team for most waves survived in endless shift. he says he got to wave 46 or 47 playing duo with a remedy tech programmer named adam. it took them an hour and a half 😭

someone in chat was throwing shade at julius for wasting the powerups while he was playing and when it was brought up to him he was like "yeah i saw it and i smiled"

did you know? if you leave a bunch of little clumps of corruption on the ground for a bit, they will begin to attract one another and fuse into bigger clumps, which are worth more money than the original little clumps combined, so theres a bit of a risk/reward calculation of how long you can leave a clump but still catch it before it despawns at the end of a wave. in any case, piling up corpses in one place is beneficial

there is an easter egg in the game that, to kayatta's knowledge at least, no one has ever found! here's his very vague hint: "you have to reach a certain place, and it's there."

in addition to being the game director, kayatta is actually also the writer for the game! so he's the source of all the dialogue as well as the characters. he says he came up with most of it "while having dinner with my poor wife".

the voice actors of hank and jerry liked playing off of each other so much that when the devs added more of their voice lines into the game, they went out of their way to get them to meet and work in the same studio at the same time : ) which kayatta says was a big learning from this game

joshua wichard, whomst voices jerry and also the puppets, made an appearance in chat! when asked what jerry's coffee order is, wichard said jerry strikes him as a cappuccino guy. apparently he also streams the game sometimes? it wasn't mentioned which platform, but probs either twitch.tv/joshwichard or www.youtube.com/@JoshWichard

kayatta says the firebreak team acknowledge that there have been some problems with the game; according to him, their small team got so excited about the game and actually making and implementing it that they got tunnel visioned and neglected some details, such as clarity. his suggested fix for this going forward was to prototype small pieces of the game early. rozner added that endless shift had a very short prototyping phase, and while it was daunting to be putting in so much content so fast, that made them focus very quickly, and it kept things fresh; and if something didn't work, they just took it out and focused on what was already fun instead of spending months trying to make it work

remedy is aware of what theyre good at and known for, and do want to stick to that, but also wish to learn from other genres and want to try other things as well. and what theyve learned from making firebreak is that "live service, as a space, is just… brutally difficult", because of various expectations existing outside the game itself: "i can only fit so many of these games into my schedule?", "can i bring my friends along with me? can i convince…"

the goal with firebreak was never "how do we build a perfect live service game?", but "how do we build a really fun game that we on the dev team like to play?"

[deathbecomesnerds]

"The Jokes on Jerry" | FBC: Firebreak | Ficlet | Jerry Standish

A03 Link

Synopsis: A prequel of sorts to why Jerry Standish joined Firebreak. After a baby boom hits the FBC suddenly during lockdown, an investigation discovers that Jerry is the unwilling instigator and victim of becoming a Parautilitarian.

A/N: Thank you to @phenanthreneblue for letting me let this idea run wild and get out of hand. This was fun. Might do more...probably not...too busy killing Hiss.

Lockdown inside The Oldest House was surreal at first, then dull, and then just flat out annoying. Pets were going hungry, children were growing up, and spouses were getting weary by the lack of communication while everyone inside didn’t even have a window to look out into the city. 

The Hiss were still a thorn in everyone’s sides and as time went on, the employees became frustrated with Director Faden’s ‘lack’ of a solution–not realizing that her and the Executive Team were working hard around the clock to put an end to The Hiss, but were also still having to handle the day to day issues of working at the FBC.

“Nobody understands that,” Jesse told Emily during lunch one day.

[wolfleblack]

Remedy CEO Leaves A Week After Company Issues A Profit Warning

Remedy CEO Tero Virtala is stepping down from his role at the company after nearly a decade at the helm. The announcement comes just a week after issuing a “profit warning” on its official blog, where it revealed that its venture into the live-service market, FBC: Firebreak, had failed to meet its targets and was going to cost the company around €14.9 million. As such, the company had to alter…

Remedy CEO Leaves A Week After Company Issues A Profit Warning

[lostinthewoodsomewhere]

(Fire) Break Time (6079 words) by Lost_in_the_Woods_Somewhere Chapters: 5/? Fandom: FBC: Firebreak (Video Game), Control (Video Game) Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Jerry Standish & Hank Flowers, Hank Flowers & Jesse Faden Characters: Hank Flowers (FBC: Firebreak), Jerry Standish (FBC: Firebreak), Jesse Faden Additional Tags: other character mentioned but not seen, established/implied Jesse x Emily, Minor Injury Detail, more characters/ ships to be added as this develops, These three will be the most prominent though, FBC: Firebreak spoilers, life at the FBC Summary: A collection of one-shots from inside the Firebreak office, all about life and lockdown at the FBC…

Back at it again with chapter 5!!!