Today, Mike Kayatta (Game Director) posted a new blog post on the FBC: Firebreak Steam page, detailing the team's progress as they enter the final few weeks of development.
By this time next month, FBC: Firebreak will be out, but there's still a lot of work to do before then, from last minute performance tests to bug fixes. Last weekend, the team held a closed tech playtest, trialling the matchmaking systems to a select group who signed up. Less than a week later, "we have found and fixed countless connection and performance bugs across all platforms. We’re still working on it, but we’ve already made great strides forward."
Improvements has been the main focus, with the Game Director also stating that the game's perk system has been completely revised following similar playtests and previews, "though it fundamentally works the same way we’ve always explained it. You can buy three levels of a Perk, and each level you equip will take up a different number of slots. Level one is weak, level two is strong, level three is strong and shared with your crew."
Another aspect that Mike dives into is the game systems and the role of the Crisis Kit. We had a guided tour of the systems during the Developer Update Livestream back in April, but the team is exploring how players feel about the system coming in fresh. In the post, he writes, "Some of the feedback we’ve heard is that it takes a bit of time to understand the game’s systems and the role of the Crisis Kits, but once you “get” those, players are having a lot more fun in the game. On the other hand, we’ve also heard how joyful the organic discovery of new systems and interactions has been for many people, who’ve asked us not to jeopardize that feeling. It’s clear to us that we must find a strong balance between these ideas. To help, we’ve added dynamic tutorials for global and job-specific actions and new 'sub-objective descriptors' in the HUD to help better describe the specific actions required to progress against an objective. This should give players a clear path forward without limiting them from discovering alternate ways of going about things." Clarity was one of the aspects that were brought up repeatedly throughout the livestream, an important aspect for the pick-up-and-play approach to the game.
For the blog post, the areas of focus have been broken down into four categories; Gunplay & Combat, Clarity, UI [User Interface] and Technology. With each Mike takes a look at what the team has been working on and what they hope to achieve by June 17th.
Click HERE to read the full Steam blog post.
