We've finally gotten a good look at The Finals, an upcoming free-to-play FPS from Embark Studios that was announced at Gamescom 2022 - and it looks pretty wild. Check out the trailer above, and read on for more of what we learned during a hands-off preview.
The Finals is set in a virtual reality competitive game show that is hyper-realistic and based on famous locations. The Finals wants to take environmental dynamism and level destruction to new heights, with fully destructible levels practically begging to get blown up by players. You can fully customize your contestant's look and loadout, whether you want to cut people down with a katana or fire off a rocket launcher while wearing a cowboy hat. The Finals is a team-based competition, so you'll need to have a solid crew to ensure you win.
Unlike other FPS titles, however, The Finals' maps will never play the same way twice. That's because Embark wants them to be highly dynamic and depict changing weather patterns, random "game-changing events", and different times of day. Add that to the fact that every map can be altered, beat up, and/or reduced completely to rubble, and you've got a dynamic FPS we haven't yet seen at this scale.
The Embark team features several shooter veterans, including people who worked at DICE, so you know that The Finals will feel as good as it looks. "To be very blunt, it feels like the industry has been more or less on repeat, we've been reskinning the same game over and over for almost 20 years," Embark Studios co-founder Rob Runesson says during a virtual preview. "At Embark this is what we're trying to change."
Embark is a small studio, but it's leaning into new technology to help make its work on The Finals easier. "We believe that there is a much better way of building content and making games," Runesson says. "We are trying to completely change how we produce and create games by removing all the overhead and all the hard manual work that is done in the game industry."
The Finals does not yet have a release date, but it will launch on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S. A closed Alpha Playtest on PC via Steam starts September 29 and runs through October 3.
We may see The Finals join our list of best shooters in the semi-near future.
