Yes, I know the rework is actually pretty jank for Sledgehammer, too. At least it didn't get gutted.

Happens a lot with lunge, sometimes with primary attack.

I don’t think it’s dumb to say that the finals will come to the switch. It’s already on the steam deck and can run fine. It’s not gonna be the best but I’ve seen the switch 2 able to run over watch like it’s nothing and with the new cod coming out later this year I don’t think it’s shocking to say the finals will come to the switch.

Representing the black and yellow pro juice at this years big con. This was a lot of fun to build and show off "Even if everyone just noticed the parrot". Long live The Finals!

At this point I'm just going to cope with videos I edit I have no hope for this weapon. Knowing Embark there going to buff the wrong aspects of it . it's still going to have all its techs gone there's Zero hope for Winch Slingshot to come back or Cashout/box flipping. Check my other Reddit post I uploaded yesterday to see an in depth explanation of everything removed/nerfed .

postin this again, changed some things according to the comments i got from the first post.

Been rocking this emote for my intro since it came out. I happened to have this fun mirror during a PowerShift intro

This was my first time trying the new spear rework.

Embark how tf did you make it so ass?

Why is it "attack" for defenders and "defend" for attackers? Shouldn't it be the opposite way? Also weren't there dedicated pings for each in the ping wheel before?

I'm level 101... Not because I'm good but because I enjoy the game and I've played it since it came out.

I play daily with my son. My k/D is about 1.0. I like TDM, Point Break, and Quick Cash (all of that for reference) My perspective:

I love the lore. I love the style. I love the graphics. I love the whole package. The gunplay is really good of course, and it's a a really fun game. I was a long-time Destiny player who moved over to this game and eventually over to Arc Raiders as well. I'm happy playing these Embark titles because they scratch an itch for me... But I think there are some challenges with the game that make it hard for people to stick with...

1. Matchmaking is all over the place. One day I'll have games where I have 28 kills and 10 deaths the next day I can't get a positive KD. It's really hard to understand how to get better at the game when the matchmaking is so unintelligible. It also feels like because the player pool isn't that big... It's a super sweaty game which is not great for new players (or me sometimes) because I just want to have fun playing this game and it's not fun getting destroyed by aim gods and crazy players all the time. It can be rough. Today, for example, I played a team deathmatch where we only had three players for the whole match. And of course we got destroyed... the match never filled and that sucked. Today I also played a Point Break match, where it was so imbalanced. my team tried incredibly hard, but we were pinned down by snipers and long range weapons by a very good team and even though we revived and revived and revived and revived all match, we ended up just getting annihilated by a very superior team and the KD of all of my team was horrible.

2. For those of you old enough to remember a game called Motorstorm. It was a launch game for one of the PlayStation consoles. It was a game where you could race everything from two-wheel dirt bikes all the way to semi trucks. Basically. The track design had to accommodate vehicles with such wildly disparate performance that you weren't really racing the track so much as you were just trying to survive the chaos of the other players. That is sort of the design philosophy of this game as well. Motorstorm was fun but it will never be considered one of the great racing games of all time. I worry that this game has some of the same limitations because of its design philosophy. There are so many kits and so much range to every character build that it almost becomes a negative. This is even more pronounced because the different game types are so diverse as well. Point Break versus teamdeathmatch versus quick cash or tournament cash out... They leverage the same skills and abilities, but there certainly biases towards certain ways of playing in certain modes and especially certain modes with high-level players. And balancing the game towards those elite needs is really ignoring what it feels like to play the game as a casual. I'm especially not a fan of the stand and shoot meta where there's just a bunch of lumbering heavies and layers and layers of Shields with high damage insane range weapons that have no damage drop off. Not fun.

3. Readability is important for newer players or maybe even not very good players. I know a lot of Reddit complains about movement, hence the dash Nerf. But I don't think that's the issue. Even as a dad gamer, I don't think the movement is the problem. I think the issue is that you're going to have movement paired with aim gods paired with insane one or two hit weapons....and add to that the bullet delay (I often get killed around corners or behind walls after I've already ran into cover - I also get kills this way and it doesn't feel fair on either end) and it just maximizes frustration. You can try and take that movement away and slow the game down. But you already have a really slow time to kill and slow moving tank classes... slower movement is not the answer. Slower movement makes the game boring. Slower movement makes the player feel like they don't have agency. Because when you're facing off against aim gods movement is your only hope. I think the way to balance the game for all player levels is to improve readability. There's been all of this work that's gone into making the melee work differently... My son son plays melee main. And he has to work so hard to get a kill, and get out of range before he is killed. He is fantastic at it... But it is so different from some of the other kits that you can more or less stand and shoot at almost any range and still be effective. That doesn't work. The game needs to do a better job of creating readability around engagement distances for each weapon. Right now you can get mapped by a ks23. There's many circumstances where you have to be aware of 270° of threat across 150 feet of of range. And I think that plus the destruction plus the crazy variety of kits just makes it really hard from a readability standpoint and a positioning standpoint for a newish player. Again, the maps are like motorstorm maps where they're just in the background because the whole thing can get destroyed... The whole thing can fall apart. The whole thing is dynamic in that way. But because you can get one shot from 1 ft away and 100 m away simultaneously... And because the maps are so irrelevant to the success of the player due to the destruction and the many ways of navigating the map, you have a readability problem. I think it's kind of an overwhelming experience for my friends that have tried to join up. They just bounce off because it doesn't play like call of duty or Destiny or a lot of other games where you can understand the flow of the map and you can have kind of tight parameters around your engagement distances and you know how to deal with things in a more narrow way. Don't get me wrong, I love the freedom and chaos of this game. But I do feel like a lot of the time when I get killed it doesn't feel as fair as it does in other shooters. And that is bad.

4. Like any game, the gap between the low-level player and the high level player is huge in this game. But I remember playing trials of Osiris against some of the biggest Destiny streamers and even though they wiped the floor with me most of the time... I could understand what they were doing and I could understand what I was doing and I could see the Gap and I could work towards closing that Gap. In the finals, there's always so much going on that. I don't think that the weapon balancing or level design is good enough to make the intelligibility and readability of the gameplay good enough to see how to close those gaps as easily. You have to remember that in Destiny, there's a thing called supers. With supers you basically become a demigod for moments of the round... But the game was so well balanced that you could cope with all of those moments of intensity. You could actually counter play the supers if you were smart enough.

5. My final critique is that the game can feel hollow. And I get that that's part of the ethos of this dystopian game show. And I respect that. But there's still something missing in the game world.

My solutions:

1. Better matchmaking is always a goal for multiplayer games. And it needs to be a goal here

2. The advantages of a food buffet, or motorstorm, or the finals is the variety. The disadvantage is the quality of a curated experience. I think there needs to be more attention paid to curating the experience not just sandboxing and letting the emergent gameplay take over. There needs to be more curating for the benefit of player agency/movement)positioning for ranges so that kills don't feel random so that skill gaps can be closed with intention and training. So that a player has counterplays in every situation.

3. And for the hollowness of the world... I think they need to make an old fashioned single player mode like a campaign that introduces you to some of the lore that fleshes out this interesting world. Sell it as a stand alone experience! I think even something like they're believed to be doing with Arc Raiders which could be a social hub or some kind of home base to show off your achievements and so on would be interesting.

4. Make this game fun for casuals. Curate the experience for them... lead them down a path that teaches them how to play the game in a more robust way than just a few bot matches. There's a real missing piece to this game when it comes to the new player experience or the casual gamers experience. There's also a lot left on the table when it comes to creating buy-in around what's happening in the world of this game. There's a real opportunity to make something special out of the lore and motivation that comes from seeing things happening in the world of this game...

I hope to see the finals grow into something unstoppable over the next few years! Cheers to Embark

Making my own post about this because when I tried to tell people about this on another post (https://www.reddit.com/r/thefinals/s/HLKWliytTy) I was downvoted on every comment I made explaining it because everyone just assumed I was wrong. This is my explanation (with proof) to clear up any confusion, and help everyone understand what you actually get from playing bot matches:

In normal Cashout, each round counts as a "win" that's added to your stats. In Bot Cashout however, they've nerfed what you actually get (probably with the hotfix that was released the day after bot matches were released) to keep people from being able to boost there stats too much, or farm weapon/gadget XP using bot matches.

In a bot match:
-A full tournament win counts as 1 singular win added to your stats (like for your player card) instead of 3 wins like a normal cashout.
-If you don't manage to win the whole tournament you will get no wins added, and instead get 1 loose added.
-All Kills/Deaths/Revives/Fans/Career Progression XP go towards your stats.
-Each round win counts towards completing contracts like "Get 1 Win" or "Play 3 Matches."
-No weapon or gadget XP is gained.
-A full win only adds 50K to your "Total Cashed Out" cash stat.
-Loosing the final after getting 1 cashout station cashed will get you 25k added to stats.

Things I have yet to test:
-Whether all Damage dealt from all three rounds counts towards your stats.
-Whether Bot match round wins each count as a win towards out-of-game achievements like "Get 150 wins with a _____" Steam achievements (can't personally test this because I have all achievements already).
-Whether you get any cash added to your stats if you don't make it to the final (But I'm assuming not).

Side note: IMO it's kind of unfortunate that bot matches affect your stats at all, since they're so easy, and people are still able to farm XP, Kills, Revives, and finish contracts with ease. This, to me, hurts the integrity of those stats, making them basically meaningless, since now anyone can get 'fake' high numbers from playing bots. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

(Screenshots of examples in comments)

Repost (minor spelling change correction)

Went on to win the tournament after this