With the new shooter The Finals (Steam, Console), Embark Studios hit a success in December 2023, presenting perhaps the best shooter of the year. The developers initially found the idea of making a shooter quite boring.
Which shooter is it about? Embark Studios surprisingly released the new shooter The Finals during the Game Awards 2023 on December 8, 2023.
- The Finals is an arena shooter with various modes where you play for victory with up to four 3-member teams
- In the modes, you need to collect as much money as possible and secure it in a cashout
- There are three classes – light, medium, and heavy – each having different weapons and gadgets that can be used tactically
The great unique feature of The Finals is the enormous destruction you can wreak across the entire map. Accordingly, there is no fall damage and gadgets that enable a lot of vertical gameplay.
Tilleby successfully pitches “boring” ideas
Why was there almost no The Finals? In an interview with Game Informer, The Finals Creative Director Gustav Tilleby reveals that Embark Studios initially did not want to make a shooter:
At the beginning, we did not want to make a shooter. I don’t think this was really expressed loudly, it was something everyone assumed, like “no, we shouldn’t do that” because we had done it before.
The Finals Creative Director Gustav Tilleby via YouTube
Many developers at Embark Studios have previously worked for EA DICE and contributed to the development of various Battlefield titles. Besides Tilleby himself, this also applies to Patrick Söderlund, Robert Runesson, and Stefan Strandberg. These are three of the founders of Embark Studios.
During the interview, Tilleby then shares that he pitched two ideas which he referred to as “boring idea 1” and “boring idea 2.” “I call them that because I didn’t think anyone would be interested in making them,” Tilleby adds.
Subsequently, the developers actually talked about the pitches and decided to give it a try. The starting point throughout the entire pitching process was to create something “unique” that “nobody else does.”
Is The Finals really the best shooter of the year? After The Finals initially faced some criticism from players for its movement feeling worse and slower than in the open beta, the shooter managed to recover and gather up to 240,000 simultaneous active players on the release weekend.
Generally, The Finals has consistently ranked among the most popular shooters on Steam (via SteamCharts) since its release, leaving all other new shooters behind, including CoD MW3, except for Counter-Strike 2.
Whether it is the best shooter of the year must be decided individually by each player. Aside from a strong cheating problem, criticism of The Finals has since remained quite limited. This is different from other new releases like CS2, MW3, or EFT-Arena.
Meanwhile, Embark Studios is even responding to feedback regarding individual gadgets and is making specific changes to the balancing:
The Finals brings a major balancing patch, nerfing the strongest meta strategies
