The Next Big Shooter Is Here! The Finals

The Finals is shaping up to be the next breakout shooter of the year with it's open beta release back in October, let’s talk a bit about it.

The Finals, developed and published by Embark Studios, is an objective-based, 3-man squad first-person shooter. The outcome of every match is determined by your team’s ability to maintain control of a neutral objective against 2-3 other teams. The many game modes can be broken down into two different styles, either a team has to hold onto a control point as it expires in order to score or teams have to collect money and deposit it in key spots across the map. These objective-based game modes keep the game flowing. Players are constantly moving around. The objectives in this game create organic, flowing action. The only time it makes sense to be camping in an area is when you’re trying to lock down an objective.

The gunplay is tight. Most of your gunfights are going to be decided by both individual skill and, more importantly, your team’s ability to coordinate an attack. With the game’s time to kill being on the medium side of things, you’ll want all the help you can get from your teammates. You don’t want to be the chump that peaks two enemies at once.  Focused fire and good movement go a long way towards winning team fights. These fights can be frenetic, and snappy, with moments of intense action. No two fights look the same, especially with the game’s class system. 

The Finals has 3 distinct classes: Light, Medium, and Heavy. They each follow the conventions we’ve come to expect in class-based shooters. Your light class is mobile and nimble, with low HP and high damage outputs – think Tracer or Scout from their respective games (Overwatch and Team Fortress 2). The medium, by comparison, is your all-arounder. They have some of the best weapons for medium-range duels in the game, an assortment of mobility and support tools, and have a moderate amount of health. Heavy is as heavy does. Being the slowest of the three classes, this debuff is offset by their absurdly large health pool, their destructive potential, and their ability to bunker down on the objective.

 

Within its own narrative, The Finals is framed as a bloodsports game show, with quirky announcers and arenas that resemble real landscapes and buildings that have been stitched together for maximum carnage. The maps are dynamic,large, but not enormous. These maps are just big enough so that teams aren’t on top of each other at all times, but just small enough that every gunfight can be heard from almost any point on the map. In short, you have some breathing room, but an enemy team could be around any corner, so you have to be on your toes. Most of the gunfights you’ll have happen at either medium range, close range, or (sometimes) at a dangerously close range!

The Finals is jam-packed with crazy weapons and even crazier utility. One of the most bold sandbox decisions Embark has made is the omission of secondary weapons. You can only pick one weapon to walk into the arena with Shotguns, SMGs, Assault Rifles, Sniper Rifles, and even Melee Weapons. Melee weapons are dynamic and capable of some serious damage in the right hands. It’s an interesting choice from Embark. The games that The Finals takes inspiration from offer 2 or more weapons to the player. The one weapon system in The Finals forces you to make a conscious decision as to what playstyle you’re going to adopt and stick to it. If you’re the heavy and you have the sledgehammer as your primary, then all you have is the sledgehammer. You have to play around your utility and your team, you have to put yourself in positions where the enemy has to push you — that’s when you strike. By comparison, if you are the light class and equip the suppressed pistol, you have to be zipping in and out of the fight, diving in to get a quick kill or to burst an enemy down and get out as fast as you can. Both of these play styles are engaging and balanced.

The diversity of weapons as well as the one weapon loadout creates an interesting harmony of different play styles all running parallel, making for diverse and nuanced gunfights. For a big-budget shooter to produce such a dynamic sandbox is refreshing. I am deeply excited to uncover the many inventive and unique ways The Finals can be played as time goes on. 

If you thought the classes, were crazy, the way the player interacts with the map is even more bombastic. Players can be almost anywhere across the dense and vertical maps. Players can take elevators and ziplines to traverse the map quickly. Additionally, the game offers the players various movement tools in their kit, such as grappling hooks, bounce pads, dashes, and much, much more. Not only are there many ways to traverse the map, there are even more ways to interact with it. Almost every building is fully destructible. Explosives transform a pristine building into a piece of Swiss cheese with just a few RPG shots. This dynamic destruction makes each building its own unique combat puzzle.

You have to use your tools at hand to create new angles to peek through, an unexpected escape route, or to steal the objective out from under your opponents.  What does all this destruction mean for players? Dynamic Problem Solving. Comparing it to one of its contemporaries, Apex, if you have players bunkered inside a building you either have to flush them out with utility or push their building through pre-made windows and doors. However, in The Finals, the map is your oyster. 

One of the hilarious ways a player can take advantage of the dynamic destruction is by blowing up the floor the objective is on, so that it falls to the room below. If an enemy team has invested their resources towards bunkering down one room, you've effectively made their tools ineffective. I really recommend trying it, it's hilarious! The Finals’ maps aren’t just destructive for the sake of a gimmick, destruction in this game is a brush for the player to paint the map with. Players can interface with the environment in a way that’s novel, brought about by the sum of this game's parts.

The Finals has many features that were made popular by Battle Royales, but since it's a multiteam arena shooter, it has shed the features from the genre that many people have grown tired of. The hectic multiteam gunfights, the tension of killing an enemy squad, the sneaky revive on a downed teammate that turns the tide of a fight, and even the dynamic abilities, they are all here. What’s absent in this game are the long wait times after your team gets wiped, having to search for ground loot (you come into a match fully kitted out), and the downtime between team fights…basically there’s 50% less waiting with all the same high octane BR-like moments. As a result of this design choice, The Finals has that tight ‘Battle Royale-like' experience without most of the downsides. If you’re hungry to play a BR with less waiting, this game will certainly scratch that itch.

An important aside, like many BRs, this game has cross-play. I’m always on the hunt for a good crossplay game to play with friends and family who are still, to my dismay, console die-hards. Most quality crossplay games are Battle Royales, but with The Finals, I now have an amazing Non-BR option to play with my favorite controller players. 

The game is in open beta, set to close on November 5th. It’ll be a long, and sad, wait until the full release. There’s no release date in sight as of the time of writing this.  All things considered, this game has launched in a great state for an open beta. There are some minor changes I would like to see happen between this build and the next version. These are less so huge sweeping changes to game balance, but more so quality of life criticisms. First thing’s first, backfill. Too many quick-play matches become these lifeless, uninterested wait-fests when one (or both) teams leave and no one comes in to take their spot. This issue betrays what The Finals is otherwise great at non-stop action. There are two issues I want to roll up into one and critique, ‘the lack of team comms’ and what appears to be a lack of Skill Based Matchmaking.  

These two issues, in tandem result in some lopsided and unenjoyable team experiences. Many popular team-based shooters just get communication right. Clear voice comms with push to talk and a working text chat. Embark hasn't implemented either in this build. If Embark wants this game to succeed, these features need to be implemented and working when the game launches. As a seasoned FPS player, I enjoy playing and chatting with random players casually. I’ve had some memorable moments and made some lifelong friends because of these features in other games. Without working voice comms, I and so many other players will be robbed of these amazing moments.

The Finals could be the next big thing for The FPS genre. The biggest subgenre for online shooters these last 5 years has been ‘The Battle Royal’. There’s no denying that the titans of this genre have changed the gaming landscape forever, in both game design and monetization schemes. But like all trends in gaming, players want something new, they want a change of pace. 

The Finals is a wonderful medley of different FPS genres coming together, underneath one roof. The way teamfights play, the ability to resurrect downed teammates, and the types of abilities on offer are also present in BRs, but gone is the RNG of the BR as well as all the dead air and downtime. This generation of gamers who have been grinding Battle Royales for the last 5 years now have a shooter with all of the gameplay elements they love, but now they've been repackaged into a more conventional arena shooter format. The Finals is an exciting next step for shooters. Tons of crazy, zany combat with that rewards individual skill and team play. I know when the game is fully released, I'll be one of the first to log on.

Looking forward to seeing all of you out there, in The Arena.