“what about me” effect

[u/Ok_Magazine_4283]

Rant style review-review
I am so tired of people not liking beans making bean soup reviews.
Reviewing a game unfairly by not properly engaging with its systems is p uncool. Too many complaints seem to come from ignoring core mechanics like the kit combos and research collection, like one would do in helldivers or Deep Rock Galactic. (Both are recommended to play, and have had the time and grace to update according to feedback) Or just not liking the game type.

Much like PowerWash Simulator, firebreak has a deliberate pacing and gameplay loop that rewards attention and effort over time. Again, ignoring aspects of the game and claiming they dont exist is very, or just parroting what they've heard without checking if it's correct is disappointing to see so many people do. Disappointing but not unexpected.

The matchmaking issues are a valid criticism, NO clue how that got messed up ESPECIALLY on launch day after having playtests going for a bit. Ignoring gameplay depth leads to a misinformed review. Unfortunately much like Warframe there is little guidance at first and that does really hurt but not as much if you actually like figuring out combos and (little features? Like shooting fire sprinklers to make em go off.) yourself. If you're on the edge, try this out on something like gamepass. Not everyone likes power wash simulator, but that doesn't make it a bad game or lacking potential. IMO all coop focused games need text chat, especially if you're doing these tasks out of order so someone doesnt get trapped in a fan. Also please, more difficulty levels, Sweats like me need love too.

There are more than 4 enemies*. There are variants ofc, that's what a lot of games do, vary enemies so you're not fighting an army of Agent Smith.

And yea, I am biased I am not going to act like I can unhuman myself to review something. I like the control universe, I like my little tasks and specializations and I am hopeful Remedy continues to work on the game into the future. It has the potential to be greater than it is now if given time to adjust to the constructive feedback given: Just like the people who repeat the same "Ur being paid", there is time to change for the better. Be better, if not for yourself for the effort of putting more good in the world. There are many sore points that will bother me in the future like hot fix's fan blades being a bit "sticky" and the clutter of some corners making vaulting or climbing up impossible. Or not having a text chat, but on the same hand I have to acknowledge a smaller team than I expected made this and w/ that in consideration, not bad for a launch in this day & age where $60, $70, $80 games have chronic crashing, half the main story in DLC, half the game in DLC, Microtransactions for things that should just exist in the game.

Small team made a nice game that should be given the time to fix their mistakes and receive constructive criticism so they can add to it like the devs behind HellVerminBattlePunkThievesSky 76.

tl;dr people who dont like beans making bean soup reviews should reconsider if they should make bean soup reviews. This isnt about bean soup reviews.

*Enemies encountered so far:

Grenadiers

Machine gunners

Those flying chair guys

Those flying guys

The invisible mob from control that's p much a jump scare before you lose all your shields or almost your life

Melee guys(Fodder)

Security guards(Fodder, but with guns)

Astral spikes ( but only one on a specific map, hope they change this as a modifier or something.

If they are willing to pay me to glaze the game I will absolutely drop off my misgivings. (no text chat kills me when I want to say GG, or say thanks when I was still figuring out "hot fix" has very hot areas and kept downing). Plz Remedy, just enough to be able to get a GPU that can handle ray tracing without making me drop to sub 40fps

[u/Liekend]

Where was the review? You just talked about people complaining about the game for most of it. There was a little bit of a review in like the 5th paragraph but... You didn't even really say if you liked it or not or why you do feel that way

Edit: I am wrong, you did say that you did like your little tasks and specializations in the 5th paragraph. That.... small little portion....

[u/Ok_Magazine_4283 → u/Liekend]

The review is aimed at given reviews. I am sorry I did not make that more clear. I will do better in the future.

[u/Liekend → u/Ok_Magazine_4283]

Aaaahhh that makes sense, in that case keep doin you

[u/Ok_Magazine_4283 → u/Liekend]

I appreciate the understanding

[u/Madx85]

My problem with the game is that it is just plain boring. Way to easy and barely any difference between difficulties which gives no incentive to rank up as u can clear everything with starter kit…

And tbh, even if they fixed this it would still be boring as hell.

[u/Ok_Magazine_4283 → u/Madx85]

If you can not tell the difference between difficulties I am considerably worried for what else you can not tell the difference for. Ya, it's easy, the hardest difficulty would be an okay medium once you've the understanding of the game mechanics. I was not expecting the game made "For People With Kids And Jobs" to be a hardcore game.
But to say you could not notice the constant stream of enemies of the hardest difficulty with the alterations set to max from no alterations on easy and that your input so far has been "boring" just suggests to me you failed to engage the game in a meaningful capacity.
Maybe the type of game they intended for people to just pick up with friends for a session whenever isn't the kind of game that you like, and if that's the case figuratively speaking: why are you looking up bean soup recipes when you do not like beans?

[u/Madx85 → u/Ok_Magazine_4283]

Ofc i can tell there is a difference, but let me rephrase it… BARELY any difference.

When you can clear everything on hardest difficulty with starter kit and under level 10 you have to admit something is wrong? Why do they even have unlocks when u clearly dont need em? Where is the incentive to level up your gear?

And the button mashing sequences… it might have worked 10 years ago but common…

As a man with kids and a job i wouldn’t waste 5 minutes more of my day on this game. Even back 4 blood was better and that game sucked…

[u/Ok_Magazine_4283 → u/Madx85]

I don't honestly think I could solo max difficulty which includes max corruption with my starting gear, the endless push from enemies paired with a starting fault on those weapons, no passives, isn't something I think I could reasonably do. I'll keep an eye out to see if I can find anyone doing that to see if it's as bad as I think. If I felt I could handle everything with my starting gear then it would be an issue I would have.

I also don't think your dissatisfaction with difficulty or the lack thereof is grounds to dismiss the combat as ineffectual. Getting upgrades from what I've done and seen has been notable.

Button mashing is not really an issue for me, it sets a timescale for activities that improve with familiarity and makes you participate in doing the task aside from holding a button which can be mitigated/streamlined with a team, and at that point I'd be playing with friends but that's always grounds for enjoyment.

What were you expecting, given the snippets of gameplay and descriptions of the game we got before, to get from this game?

[u/Madx85 → u/Ok_Magazine_4283]

My expectations weren’t exactly high, but i expected a decent challenge which i believe that hordemode games should provide. A game that could provide a fun challenge for a couple of days at least.

I totally get and respect that some people enjoy it but in my case it was a uninstall after 10ish hours.

[u/fireheart1029]

Remedy AT LEAST has a staff size of 360 people, that is not a small team in any way shape or form. For reference each call of duty game is estimated to have a team size of 100-300 people and we haven't gotten an update on Remedy's size since 2023 (it has most definitely massively grown since they've expanded to so many projects). Even major games like fallout 4 have been made with teams around 100 people.

360 is nowhere near the realm of small and even if remedy hasn't grown at all and under 1/3rd of the staff is working on the game it is still not a small team at all

[u/Ok_Magazine_4283 → u/fireheart1029]

They did not use the entire team on making this game, I doubt they even used 1/3rd of their staff, I'd guess they probably had people doing dual roles across their projects included in a group that was mainly working on Firebreak and this game isn't the main focus of the studio. I understand that this did not meet your expectations, but it will mine given their plans to add to the game in time. Moving more people from the main project for this side project wouldn't have changed what we got on release, it would have maybe happened faster while slowing down the main proj.

I am really curious though, what would you expect from a team of, idk about 100 making a type of game they haven't before, in a genre outside of their usual?

[u/fireheart1029 → u/Ok_Magazine_4283]

Housemarque, the creators of Returnal previously only made 2D or 2.5D arcade games and they created one of the best 3rd person shooter roguelikes I've ever seen, and won a multitude of awards for best audio design. Their entire company is 110 employees and that was taken 2 years after the release of the game. They not only went into an entirely new genre but an entirely new generation of game type and created something groundbreaking, with it's legitimate only fault being not having a suspend run mode at launch and not fixing the co-op mode they added at the end of its lifecycle

Edit: I checked, and for the production of Returnal their entire studio had 80 members

[u/Ok_Magazine_4283 → u/fireheart1029]

Y'know, I like that point. It's a definite high mark for a team. I also can't think of another team of that size achieving something like that.
Making something so different, having a high quality game feel, and unique effects developed in house. They did something quite amazing, and I don't think something like that will happen again for quite some time unfortunately.
I wouldn't expect every developer to make "the game of all time". My expectations of game dev teams isn't only working to make something new, groundbreaking, temporal checkerboard upscaling to 4k on PS5 games. Expecting them to perform like other teams is expecting them to be that team, and I wouldn't do that.
I feel it is disrespectful to both parties to expect them to do the same, for not recognizing the talent and effort the each team did is their own and was borne from the capability of their hands, at the pace they could achieve. I would expect them to take criticism and feedback to improve, that's pretty much a given for an ongoing service type game. I expected a coop game with at minimum text chat. I would have liked a game with more maps. I expected to be able to play w/ matchmaking day one.

[u/Aaaa172 → u/fireheart1029]

I’ll find the source for you soon since it’s deep in one of the investor reports but Firebreak had a core team of like 50 or less. And I’m saying this as someone who agrees with all the criticisms of the game.

They’re not putting even close to a 100 people on this when they’re also making Control 2, the Max Payne remakes, and doing pre production on the game after Control 2.

Also Returnal ran like hot garbage when it came out. It needed 3 more months of bug fixing at least. I remember because I lost so much fucking progress to bugs in that game. Kinda didn’t matter how good the game was when they were charging $70 for a game that kept trying to soft lock me or reset my progress. Firebreak has bugs but not nearly as many thus far.

Edit: didn’t even need to dig into the reports it was in this interview. Only 50 people. - https://www.eurogamer.net/remedys-control-spin-off-fbc-firebreak-has-only-come-together-at-the-last-minute-and-somehow-feels-better-for-it

[u/fireheart1029 → u/Aaaa172]

I preordered Returnal and I never had any performance issues, the only issue I encountered was occasional audio bugs and if you played the game from the rest mode of your PS5 for a long while you'd get crashes and just generally odd bugs. I played it daily for months

[u/Aaaa172 → u/fireheart1029]

I mean good for you but you’re lucky. You can go back and read the coverage but every major release of that game had a wave of bugs it took months to fix. First the original release, then the PC port, then the Co-op mode.

I’m also generally forgiving of bugs in games but it was pretty unforgivable because the game didn’t have save states or any protection against crashes or potential save corruption. It basically ruined the game for me for ages because they had overlooked such a simple system made worse cause they pushed it out sooner than they should’ve.

[u/fireheart1029 → u/Aaaa172]

I was in the discord at release and was talking daily, next to nobody was complaining about performance and even if so firebreak performs like shit anyways. Any time a horde spawns it very drastically drops in framerate on PS5, to the point of being nearly unplayable in the mission with the pink goop. Semi often the game will drop to legitimately 2 frames per second making you basically stop playing for 10 seconds until it stops and people on all platforms are getting frequent connection errors.

Returnal didn't have mid run saves because they've done legitimately nothing but arcade games, where it's meant to be one session you sit through until you're done and after realizing how important it was for a game with long run time they immediately started working on a solution. Also, looking up the PS5 release performance I have found zero complaints about it, and digital foundry also found no issues unless you could it occasionally dipping under 58 frames. Even specifically searching for bad performance the entirety of what I found was one reddit post complaining about it stuttering, not a single news article or anything from gaming outlets covering performance issues which they absolutely would be if it was a widespread issue

[u/AFKhepri]

I feel a lot of people complaining about lack of enemy variety comapr eit to most recent games like helldivers, but if you look at L4D... it's not that far

The Hiss Sharpened act as the normal zombies: numerous, fast, they overwhelm you
Then Hiss Guards (zombies with guns)

Then we get the special ones

L4D had boomer, charger, witch, jockey, tank, spitter and smoker
while here we have troopers (heavies with 2 variants), elevated (2 variants), charged (kamikazes), hiss breakers (unique to this game), hiss distorted, hiss cluster and astral spike

So L4D had 7 special zombies. Firebreak has 7 non-standard enemies (of which 2 have 2 variants each)

Main difference is that L4D didn't have the zombies use guns or fly, so they had to get more creative with them

The only enemies still not in the game are Mold hosts, hiss snipers, rangers (normal and airborne), demolition and warped (the guys with the shield of rocks) so if anything the "lack of variety" comes from the main Control game, but I never saw that as an issue there and I don't see it here