The Finals devs are continuing their war against the FPS's controversial 'nuke', with yet another patch aimed at countering the strategy.
In The Finals patch 1.8.0, notes, which were released earlier today, Embark Studios made changes to cloaking and headshot sounds to provide some extra audio clarity to firefights, tweaked some destruction tech in the Seoul map, and tackled some bugs. The headline change, however, is yet another attempt to curtail the nuke meta.
Since the early days of The Finals, Heavy players have been strapping multiple blocks of C4 to explosive barrels, sending those barrels toward their opponents, and blowing up the lot in a devastating blast. It's a relatively low-cooldown, incredibly high-damage combo that's capable of one-shotting even fellow heavies with a direct hit, so you can imagine the impact it's having on squishier classes.
Embark has tried to curtail the nuke multiple times already. The first effort came in December, but by the time the new year came around, nukes were still being flung around the game with reckless abandon. A week later, C4 damage got nerfed in a second attempt at disarmament, but that simply led to the slow but powerful 'snail nuke' instead.
Now, the developers have put together another attempted fix, and it looks like they're hoping that third time's a charm. The first of two changes is a fix that should immediately cut a chunk of damage off any nuke - previously, C4 could do "more damage than intended when exploding together, for example when attached to an object." It's not clear how much extra damage that led to, but it does seem like a step in the right direction. Elsewhere, the 'snail nuke' has also been hit by a change that enables "gravity and physics" on any red explosive canisters fitted with attachments. That means that canisters weighed down by bonus explosives seem likely to be far less accurate than before.
It's worth noting that this is the third time that The Finals devs have tried to stop the nuke, a strategy that's been in the game for much of its lifespan, and that Heavy players seem to be outsmarting them each time. This does seem like the most aggressive attempted fix so far, but I'd be somewhat surprised if this marks the last time I've died to one of these concoctions.
