In Remedy’s Control spin-off FBC: Firebreak, trios of gadget-toting humans from the Federal Bureau of Control descend to the shapeshifting halls of the Oldest House, fighting eldritch Hiss invaders and possessed objects such as swarming Post-It notes. Where Control cast you as the FBC’s newly appointed director, equipped with executive perks such as telekinesis, the folks who make up the Firebreak initiative are regular office shmucks brandishing comparatively straightforward guns and bludgeoning implements. They’re here years after Control’s denouement to do some clean-up, with the Oldest House still under lockdown while the FBC seek a proper, lasting solution to the Hiss menace.
There are FBC rangers with military training in Firebreak’s ranks, but game director Mike Kayatta emphasises that the majority are just hapless, white collar pencil-pushers enlisted as paranatural exterminators. “Secretaries, middle managers, basically anybody you could think of in this big, thriving bureaucracy – they come down, they put on a suit, and they help as much as they can,” he explained at a preview event earlier this month.
For the women and men of Firebreak, battling the Hiss is a mixture of desperate survival and voluntary overtime. It’s framed as an extension of their regular duties, a bit like signing up as your department’s First Aider. The game’s co-op missions are called “jobs”, and “the idea of jobs” is “the heart” of the game, as Kayatta observed. “Everything that Firebreak does centres around jobs, just like how everything a firefighter does centres around fighting fires,” he said. Are we fighting our jobs, then, or doing them? The ambiguity there is perhaps in keeping with the theme.
The jobs themselves and their accompanying customisation systems are lightly coated in bureaucratese. Each has a Clearance Level, describing how many zones of the Oldest House you’ll need to purge of Hiss (and thus, the rough mission playtime), as well as a Threat Level that dictates enemy numbers and spawn rate, with loot rewards proportionate to the danger. Crisis Kits, meanwhile, are the game’s lingo for equipment and cosmetics, with players able to save up to three loadouts and change them during missions.
I’m looking forward to going hands-on with Firebreak, which is inspired by vintage team blasters like Deep Rock Galactic. What really intrigues me about the game right now, though, is that little word “job”, which Remedy elsewhere seem rather fearful of, because while jobs are the “heart” of Firebreak, they do not want it to actually feel like a “job”.
By “job”, in this case, they mean a live service game that asks you to clock on regularly to ‘earn’ new outfits, guns and the like. Firebreak doesn’t aim to be a weekly-monthly regimen of drops and unlocks; it was conceived as a “pick up and play” experience “that players could enjoy on their terms, not ours,” as Kayatta commented elsewhere in the presentation. “We’re ditching all of the engagement stress you often see with live service titles,” he said. “In other words, we don’t want to do daily check-ins, monthly grinds, and these kind of FOMO battle passes. Basically, we’re not here to give you a second job.”
The undecided rhetorical line Firebreak walks around “job” makes a useful mirror for the current, convoluted industry conversation about live service games. When I asked Kayatta to unpack his and Remedy’s feelings about live service in a follow-up interview, he took the view that nobody quite knows what the term means anymore, including the concept’s fiercest detractors. That idea of being “given a second job” has been applied to an exhausting and contradictory range of projects, from indie horror jaunts that receive a patch as-and-when to blockbuster strategy games that launch with gilded 12-month content roadmaps.
“I think one of the reasons why this is a hard thing to talk about is, honestly, just because everyone does not seem to share a definition of what live service is,” Kayatta told me. “I mean, by some people’s definition, the [Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion] horse armour microtransaction controversy back in the day would have been some form of live service.”
“It’s such a massive genre of games, right?” added Remedy’s communications director Thomas Puha. “Like, you have your Call of Duties and your Destinies and World of Warships, and all these things. But then you have Vermintide, Helldivers, Payday 2, things like that. Does ‘live service’ cover all of them? The way people, especially in the current climate, take to that word or to ‘games as a service’ is not great.”
I share this concern that the conversation around ‘live service’ has become open-ended to the point of nonsensical. I’m sure I’ve contributed to the confusion, by bandying those baleful words around without examination in various news articles. The borderline all-inclusivity of live service is dangerous given both the disgust the concept now attracts from players who associate it with predatory, habit-forming design, and the expectations others have about regular injections of new material. There’s a growing social media trend of studios such as Palworld creators Pocketpair finding it necessary to remind irate followers that they are not, in fact, making a live service game.
While Puha and Kayatta didn’t name any names, they seem particularly keen to avoid any association with recent blockbuster projects that are popularly viewed to have failed commercially because of their prominent live service component – games like Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League, which is widely despised by lovers of Rocksteady’s previous single-player Batman Arkham games. You can see how Suicide Squad and Arkham, especially, would be worrisome comparisons for Firebreak, as it seeks to extract Left 4 Dead-style watercooler anecdotes from the architecture of a cherished single-player game.
“This is just me speaking as a gamer myself, with some of the live services that people see sometimes – and I’m not implying any particular studio or project here, when I say this,” Kayatta continued. “But sometimes I think it feels as though there is some sort of mandate from above, from a publisher, from a studio, to say ‘Oh look at this, we must be the [new] Fortnite, give me the money’, and stuff. And it’s like, we’ll ruin everything and throw everything out the window.
“And I can at least say this about us – this game was not born of that conversation or that requirement,” he went on. “I don’t know where that would come from [within Remedy]. Honestly, this game is born from us having a chance to do a lot of different games now, which is fantastic. And, of course, you got a tonne of really creative, ambitious, passionate people, and they say, ‘hey, here’s a game that we’ve never done, that I would love to do.'”
It’s tempting to be cynical about this last response. Given its reuse of the setting, Firebreak can’t help but look like a cross-genre money-spinner, foisted on a smaller, 50-person junior team while Remedy’s A-listers work on the next Control game. The narrative positions the game as disposable connective tissue, inasmuch as the overall solution to the Hiss problem will surely surface in Control 2 – Firebreak doesn’t have a plot, just an incessant series of “jobs”, and besides, what’s Jesse supposed to do in her next outing, if the clean-up crews succeed in putting the extra-dimensional hooligans to bed?
That’s probably unfair. As Puha pointed out to me elsewhere in our interview, Remedy don’t really have a reputation for chasing trends and cranking out cash-ins. I’ve seen nothing so far to indicate that Firebreak is less than an enthusiastic, albeit calculated experiment. But Firebreak’s uncertainity about whether or not it is a job does, I think, neatly encapsulate the malaise over live service.
Despite recent disasters, live service as a shareholder-facing business model won’t be vanishing anytime soon. Two of this year’s biggest Steam successes, Monster Hunter Wilds and Marvel Rivals, are live service productions with bulging conveyor belts of planned updates. Many developers at studios such as Rocksteady appear to be waging an indefinite rearguard action against management who want every game to feel like a job, packed full of engagement devices to ensure a steady player commute. As Kayatta says of Firebreak’s tooled-up cubemates, these developers are trapped in a cycle of doing jobs and fighting them.
