The Finals Is a High-Octane Blast—Too Bad about That AI Announcer, Though
It took a few rounds of The Finals for my friends and I to find our footing, but once we did, the game rarely let up, allowing us to be the coolest dudes ever. We managed to secure a cashout station and plug in our cash box before beginning to formulate split-second strategies to hold down our position as it processed our cash reward. Our heavy placed barriers along the perimeter to duck behind, but me? I placed a jump pad at the end of a zipline connecting our platform to a neighboring one, hoping to catch potential flankers by surprise and launch them off as soon as they stepped foot on our territory. One of my friends, realizing what I’d been thinking, laughed and applauded my plan, not knowing whether or not it’d actually be effective, but commending me for the thought nonetheless.
It took no time for every other team to eventually descend on our location, no thanks to The Finals‘ announcer broadcasting our every move for everyone in the arena to know. One second, we were successfully repelling our enemies’ efforts, and the next a gas grenade had burst on our position and taken out one of us. Eventually an invisible assassin took shape and cut me down with a rapier, leaving two of us watching our last man hold out… by repeatedly bouncing off my aforementioned jump pad and peppering enemies from above like a fully automatic rain cloud. Eventually he also bit the bullet and we collectively watched our efforts seemingly go down the drain as opposing teams squabbled over control of our terminal in the dying gasps of its countdown. The only problem was that no one player could actually secure the now mobile objective because—get this—the terminal was now perpetually bouncing off of my jump pad just like my friend, evading all of our enemies. By the time they figured out how to use my jump pad and their own bodies to knock it off course, it was too late: me and my friends were already dying of laughter watching everyone in the lobby fruitlessly give us a commanding lead because my best laid plans went sideways and still worked.
My innovation was a complete accident, and also the kind of story you hear about the wonderful times people spend in their favorite sandboxes. It’s the kind of story that me and these exact two friends would excitedly parrot to each other about our early days in Battlefield 3 more than 10 years ago. The kind of stuff we’d try to recapture in subsequent titles and other games that promised some sort of freedom and a canvas to project ourselves onto. If my first few nights with The Finals, a competitive shooter from ex-DICE devs now at Embark Studios, is this frenzied and chock full of surprising emergent moments, it might just be the honest-to-goodness inheritor of that legacy. Might.
In a later instance, the entire lobby filled seemingly every other floor of a steadily collapsing building, because we were simply blowing it to bits. I chased one guy from the roof to a stairwell, jumped to the very bottom of it and popped someone else entirely before shouting aloud how messy and, importantly, fun the whole scenario was. Since then, we’ve played numerous games where the building has collapsed in on itself, and all the while we’re surfing on slabs of floor hurtling towards the ground level, securing wins by ever so slight cracks in the debris. These are the kind of moments that make a cut of a hype announcement trailer, which is to say they’re typically scripted. Not here though. It’s quite easy to slip into this flow state where you are constantly accounting for the ways in which the environment around you can shift against you or in your favor, and getting to that level of thinking makes you feel ingenious. It’s the kind of thinking that keeps you on your toes, and The Finals thrives on that energy.
In The Finals, action never lets up and mess is around every corner. You begin a game by bursting out of a wall into an arena and immediately darting for objectives that net your team cash boxes, which you then cash out at designated objectives you have to protect. It’s the front half of an extraction shooter, but no one leaves the map. Instead, you’re trying to be the highest-earning team by the end of the match and are given a pretty decent sandbox to make it happen however possible. Maps are intricate and involved, boasting ziplines, jump pads, canisters that can be flung or detonated, and interactable elements like a drawbridge that once bought us enough time to bring back our whole team in a hairy fight. Environments vary in destructibility, but generally you can put a hole in a surface if you need or want to—and even destroy some of those interactables I mentioned—making itt a great deal of fun to play around the static objectives. After all, what better way to snatch a goal from another team than to blow up the ground supporting it, springing a trap and nabbing it at the last second.
If the constant threat of other players weren’t enough, the arena is perpetually shifting between matches: they can toggle between day and night, clear or inclement weather, and even the nature of the placement of objectives can differ. One match had the cashout stations on flying platforms that knocked suspended construction sites out of the sky. Another planted one in an elevator that my friend barricaded and turned into a death trap as it cycled through floors and picked up poor unwitting stragglers we’d reduce to bits. Matches that come down to the wire often experience hazards (since the game is set in a dystopic game show) like meteor showers that level whole blocks or orbital lasers that disintegrate immobile players. I’ve been dying to see the modifier that literally turns the map into a game of The Floor is Lava.
To match the frenetic pace, The Finals‘ also boasts an aesthetic fundamentally opposed to the drab military-sim look and feel of the likes of Battlefield. My squad, for example, chose to deck themselves out in these yellow parkas, puffy white cargo pants and animal masks. I wear a panda head and have a plush Shiba Inu that resembles one I actually own strapped to my back as I pepper my foes with enough rounds to make them explode into coins. There are no dead bodies in The Finals, instead players become a small toy-like statue which you can retrieve, throw with insane force, or revive unless the downed player wants to expend a token (which are limited in some modes) to respawn.
It’s regrettable then that the announcer, an extension of this breezy and fun game, is voiced by AI. Over the weekend it was confirmed that the team was using AI for every bit of VO save for “vocalizations,” like player grunts. The team hasn’t exactly shied away from this either, taking to their own podcast to confirm as much. As I played the game, we occasionally poked fun at the bad puns and dad jokes that they said, which felt just a smidge out of place, but knowing that it’s AI has completely warped my relationship to the announcer and the game. Multiplayer shooters like Call of Duty, Destiny, and Halo have all prided themselves on the very human and dramatic turns that the announcer can take as they heap accolades on players for triumphing over others, but the announcer in The Finals is kind of just static by comparison. Though they’re all canned responses at the end of the day, The Finals AI voice feels especially phoned in knowing a program made it. If there were ever a game that called for a vibrant and human announcer, this would be the one.
It’s a shame because so many of The Finals‘ more brilliant touches feel authentic. People who know what they’re doing and are at the top of their game came up with The Finals‘ high-octane premise and realized the potential of blowing it to bits. When I walk away from playing it, it is my and my friends’ very real and very human comedy of errors—enabled by the game—that positively sticks with us. I hope somewhere down the line that Embark Studios might remember that human element and consider how impactful its loss is.
Moises Taveras is the assistant games editor for Paste Magazine. He was that one kid who was really excited about Google+ and is still sad about how that turned out.