There’s a new shooter in town and it’s free! Embark Studios has launched free-to-play shooter The Finals just a few days ago, and MP1st was fortunate enough to chat with the developers before their debut game was available commercially.

Talking to us in an invite-only event, we managed to wrangle Sven Grundberg (Comms & Brand Director), Joakim Stigsson (Senior Environment Artist), Gustav Tilleby (Creative Director) to talk about the shooter, their design ideas, SBMM and more.

• Related Reading: The Finals – Beginner Tips and Tricks to Help Conquer the Arena

Q: A pitch we’ve heard is that levels are fully destructible. How true is this? If we managed to convince everyone in a match-made room and went all Heavy with explosives, would we be able to flatten the entire map? 

Is that possible? Yes or no? 

Joakim Stigsson: Yes, there is. Obviously there is a ground level that you can’t destroy and the map. We kind of had to draw the line at some point. Otherwise, you would be able to just dig your way through. We kind of felt at some point, if it’s intuitive enough that’s where we kind of draw the line.

Right now it’s the ground level or anything that is kind of connected to the terrain or the ground in the game, but you can destroy all the buildings, all the architecture, all the props in the game. It’s something that we’ve been exploring as well – like how much should we be able to destroy and how fast and all that. The levels are fully destructible to the ground level.

Gustav Tilleby: That’s something I pushed really hard for early on because I think consistency is incredibly important in order to enable players to actually use destruction in a meaningful tactical way.

You need to be able to rely on that; if it breaks in one area, it needs to break in another area as well. 

That was the direction from early on.

Q: Balancing is always a touchy subject because it considers player skill. If a player dies a lot, they call a weapon OP when it could be a better player. What feedback does the team look for when determining something isn’t quite right with weapons and build combinations? 

Gustav Tilleby: This is a little bit out of my area, but I think it’s important that we maintain some sort of balance, and that some things aren’t overpowered. But one thing that’s really interesting, I think, in the game is, that players find things sometimes that are considered overpowered, and that’s kind of becomes the meta that people use.

But then, after a while, they realize, hey, we can counter it by doing this other thing. And then everybody starts doing that, and it kind of evolves, which was our intention from the very beginning, with this sort of open-ended load-out approach. But, if something were so overpowered that it couldn’t be countered and it just basically became the more powerful, most efficient way to play the game, then that would be a no-no for us. We would try and fix that. 

Joakim Stigsson: Yeah, and we’ve had a closed alpha and now two closed betas and an open beta as well. That’s where we, you know, collect feedback and look at the game that we have and see what works and what doesn’t work. That’s the reason why we do those tests. 

We look at the feedback. We look at community things and also just look at telemetry data, you know, we gather a lot of information about weapons, the maps, heat maps, and then from that, we can kind of see what works and what doesn’t work. So it’s been super useful for us to have those close betas and open beta now as well, just in order to see did it actually turned out as we wanted to achieve the goals that we wanted to go for. If it doesn’t work, then of course we will, you know, go in and fix it, then balance it. 

Q: Skilled-based Matchmaking is another touchy subject. We know The Finals can be a pretty competitive game, but are there any match-make systems in place for new players to ease them into the game better before throwing them in with more competitive long-time players? 

Gustav Tilleby: We have skill-based matchmaking in the game. This is another area where I’m not really an expert on how that sort of is built. It will protect new players that come in, in a way, because they won’t get matchmade with, players that’s been in for a long time and, that are much better than them.

Q: I know for example, in Fortnite, when you’re playing a game, like the first match in Fortnite, you deal bots galore, right? Just to help you ease into that, are there gonna be any bots?

Gustav Tilleby: Not right now. We don’t have bots in the game. 

Sven Grundberg: What we do have is a pretty extensive tutorial. We didn’t have that as part of the playtest we did last week because we wanted you to get as much playtime as possible. But for new players, they’re going to go through, the tutorial process.. 

Gustav Tilleby: We’re also gating our game modes. The tournament modes, the more competitive modes, they’ll get unlocked after a little while. 

Q: Private lobbies, is that going to be happening?

Gustav Tilleby: Not for launch, but, it’s definitely something that we want to do in the future. When exactly it will come I can’t really answer right now.

Q: This is a common trend with Free-to-play titles; why skip out on traditional core modes like TDM, free-for-all, etc.?

Gustav Tilleby: The reason for that is when we started building this game our ambition was to make something different. Part of us doing that is this whole idea of environmental dynamism and using the environment and all that sort of stuff. Obviously, there are a lot of different types of gadgets in the game as well.

So we’ve been consciously designing modes that leverage those features basically, and what we saw was that modes that are objective-based create these sort of defend and attack scenarios where players need to be in a place over an extended period of time worked best to leverage dynamism and the gadgets and all that stuff.

So that’s why we started there, but we’ve tested a bunch of different modes during development. It’s something that we want to work on over coming seasons, adding more types of game modes and different types of play. But for the launch, we focused on these modes for that reason.

Sven Grundberg: I might refer to what was said in terms of just choosing the cash-out scenarios. They do utilize destruction in a good way. This concept of one team defending an area, and another team attacking that area. It becomes a bit of a puzzle that you have to solve through destruction.

Gustav Tilleby: It’s the same with the gadgets and all the abilities and everything else as well. Yeah. It really leverages those parts.

Q: Any plans for a mini-series to dive more into the lore of The Final for those who aren’t keen on keeping up and exploring the maps?

Gustav Tilleby: We’ll definitely expand on the lore. There are some different things in the works. I’m not going to spoil anything right now, but there are some things coming. Even during Season One, actually. 

Joakim Stigsson: We already have a little bit of hints here and there on the maps that, you know, people can find if they look close.

Yeah, there’s some hidden messages. They’ve been in our faders. So there’s a lot of stuff as well, but we’re going to keep on, uh, 

Gustav Tilleby: We’re going to keep expanding on that over time. 

Q: During our playtest on the Vegas map, we ran into a UFO event, which was a huge surprise. Can we expect more cool events like that? Any specific ones that didn’t make the cut? Would love to see a Kaiju event, seems like the perfect match for this game.

Gustav Tilleby: I would love to do a kaiju event at some point. I think the game events are really fun and we can really go crazy with them.

There are so many ideas of ones we want to make. For launch, though, I think all of the ones that were in the test are in the launch. 

Joakim Stigsson: Sme thing there. I mean, we’ve been trying a bunch of stuff when it comes to the event, and you know, what kind of enforces the dynamics to people to kind of adapt during the round.

It also becomes this way of during the end of the round where the stakes are high, and they’re so intense, and then you throw something else in there as well that you kind of like have to adapt to, which is super interesting. As you said, we have so many, so many ideas and so many things that are possible to do within this universe as well.

It’s just a matter of what we think will kind of fit with the pillars and the tournaments and whatnot. 

Gustav Tilleby: But we’re definitely going to have more of them over time for sure. For now, it’s the ones we saw in the tests.

Sven Grundberg: What was the background of the UFO event? Who came up with it? 

Gustav Tilleby: I did. It’s like the whole Nevada area. We also have an alien suit as far as our developers are concerned. 

Joakim Stigsson: What’s good with this is that it’s something that we can expand on in the maps throughout the seasons or next season, we can add something or remove something as well to be a little bit more dynamic.

So all of a sudden you might play and then, okay, now we added a new kind of event as well, that kind of would surprise the people playing, to again make them have to adapt to the maps when they’re playing. I think it’s a super cool kind of addition to our game.

Gustav Tilleby: Yeah, it’s the game show vibe as well. 

Q: Speaking of events, the open Beta had a Halloween one. Christmas is in less than twenty days, any plans there?

Joakim Stigsson: Of course. When we tried the Halloween event during the open beta, we saw that it was pretty successful and people really liked it.

I think this is something that we will continue to do as well for upcoming Christmas or Thanksgiving, or if it’s like Valentine’s as well. What’s good about it is there are so many things that we can do on the maps. We can do it with customization skins, whatever it is that kind of fits with the theming of this game in general, 

Gustav Tilleby: Speaking of events, we’re planning to do events over the seasons as well. So some events will be like the Halloween events, more building a vibe and changing music and having cosmetics and stuff like Joakim Stigsson talked about. And other events will offer, you know, variants of game modes, even new game modes, and unique rewards as well.

Sven Grundberg: Generally speaking, if you follow the Embark and how we talk about stuff, we like to announce things shortly before they happen. We like to surprise and delight our community. You’re going to have to stay tuned. We’re deliberately not saying too much about exactly when stuff drops and that’s part of the plan.

Q: Crossovers. GAAS games love doing them, and The Finals seem to be the perfect game to have them. Anything on that front? Hints? Discussion? What are the team’s thoughts on them in general?

Sven Grundberg: Our focus first, and foremost is to launch a really good game, right? We’re not ruling them out, but we don’t have any such plans to announce at the moment. I think we’re going to be very careful in terms of who we partner up with. I think the most important thing for us as we do any potential tie ins would be to, that it fits the game. I think being super careful about it and that it’s fitting our game.

That is the most important thing for us. Then, if we manage to make that happen, then why not? But we have nothing to announce about that at the moment. For launch, there are no tie-ins.

Q: Arc Raiders was announced first, but Embark fully revealed The Finals first and released it even if we haven’t seen Arc Raiders in action. Why did the game take precedence over Arc Raiders? Is it because it’s smaller in scope in comparison?

Sven Grundberg: We talked about Arc Raiders. We have said that we’re planning to release Arc Raiders in 2024.

One of the big reasons we changed the sequencing was that we had started experimenting with adding PVP into the Arc Raiders universe, and we wanted to give the team time enough to develop that fully. It was a pretty big shift in terms of what that game has become. Arc Raider has evolved a lot, and we wanted to give the team enough time to pursue the full vision for that game. 

The Finals is out now on the PS5, Xbox Series X|S and PC.