The Finals is here, and it’s already reaching big numbers on Steam as players attempt to make it through the high-speed multiplayer shooter following its surprise launch during The Game Awards. While it’s already climbing the most played charts on the Valve platform, the new FPS from former Battlefield developers at Embark Studios is suffering from negative review scores, falling to a ‘mixed’ user rating of 68% positive on Steam, with the primary complaints being around slower movement. However, Embark says players are mistaken about this perceived change – and it looks like they might be right.
Many of the negative reviews for The Finals call out slower movement, saying it’s “slow” and “sluggish” in comparison to the slick, fast movement and parkour felt in the beta, a problem that seemingly persists across all The Finals loadouts. Curiously, however, Embark says the reason for this feedback has “been hard to pinpoint, because there was no change in the movement system or the movement speed” between the beta tests and the launch of the FPS game. However, it did conclude a possible reason for the outcry.
“We have identified a few things that might be causing everyone to experience the gameplay differently,” Embark says in a post to the game’s Discord server. “In the past month, we have made small adjustments to animations, sounds, and settings that, in combination, may be giving the feeling of slower movement – especially in light and medium archetypes.” The team says it’s currently “working on rebalancing some of the changes.” That’s not all, however.
Perhaps a more immediate issue, it suggests, is that “Settings were reset as well, so FOV is defaulted to 71, which can have a huge impact on how the game feels.” It’s certainly true that cranking up your field of view can often make games feel dramatically faster – as anyone who’s tried to run around The Elder Scrolls Skyrim at 120+ FOV can certainly attest. “For your part, changing your FOV can be really helpful,” the developer notes.
In some cases, reviewers have been surprised by this news – one remarks, “FOV was set to 60 for some reason, game [is] good! Crazy how an FOV change can make the game feel so slow.” Others, however, say they jumped into The Finals settings and adjusted their FOV as soon as they started playing the full release, meaning the issue isn’t quite that simple and may require the promised animation adjustments from Embark.
The movement isn’t the only complaint, either; many reviews call out the heavy as feeling too strong among The Finals classes, something that was a frequent comment during the beta tests but appears to not have noticeably changed for the full release. In closing, Embark says, “As we have always said, live games take constant iteration. Your feedback is so valuable to us. We want to thank all the kind people here who took the time to explain what they were experiencing nicely and in detail so we could learn more.”
Hopefully those issues will be ironed out with time, then – with The Finals player count already pushing it near the top of the Steam charts, it certainly seems like people are still willing to stick with it for the time being at least. The allure of a new, free-to-play game to jump into with friends is likely to draw many in over the holidays, so Embark Studios will no doubt be eager to leave everyone with the best first impression possible.
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