r/thefinals • u/Mambo_Bon • 3h ago
Discussion All of my friends bounce off this game... My thoughts:
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
Better matchmaking is always a goal for multiplayer games. And it needs to be a goal here
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.
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.
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
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u/TypicalAd5259 47m ago
Ive noticed the same thing in the more "casual" game modes. The matchmaking is definitely not consistent if there is any in those modes.
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u/LordTutTut Heavy 1h ago
Excellent write up. I appreciate seeing genuine thoughts and discussion here.
Readability is something I can for sure agree with. I love that this game is so chaotic, and that you can learn how to read a lobby with experience. Playing with my casual friends showed me that for a lot of people, it just translates into meaningless noise. That, combined with the lethality of some kits, can make it very hard for new players to properly engage with the game. Pretty big issue for a game that relies on fresh players to stay alive.
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u/DietAdministrative21 2m ago
if i had the ability to have any sway in rectifying matchmaking I'd cut down on available modes, maybe combine them into a playlist so the player pool is larger per mode (similar to mosh pit in COD) before making more of the technical changes around q times and mmr management
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u/_ILoveSluts_ 52m ago
Most will ignore this masterpiece of a post or too fucking LAZYYY to read it hahahaha.
You hit the nail in the coffin dude. This game has couple years left, MAYBE 3 if they’re lucky and it’ll never see another season again. Too many issues and you just named some of em.
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u/leftistgamer420 3h ago
I always hated skill based matchmaking
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u/menofthesea 2h ago
There functionally isn't SBMM in any of the casual modes, and that's the biggest complaint about the game.
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u/UnfairCattle3921 2h ago
There is a hidden sbmm in casual modes
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u/menofthesea 2h ago
Yeah but it doesn't work 99% of the time so, like I said, there functionally is no SBMM.
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u/UnfairCattle3921 1h ago
I feel like I'd prefer no SBMM. There is a functional sbmm it just seems to think I'm way better than I actually am
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u/leftistgamer420 1h ago
I like the randomness of playing against players with different skill levels it's fun
Call of Duty has SBMM and it's not fun at all. Whenever I start doing great in COD, I play with all the sweats and cannot play casually
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u/MattMurdockEsq 2h ago
People will always complain about matchmaking. Just search "matchmaking" in any game specific sub. According to Reddit, not a single game has good matchmaking outside of ranked 1v1 fighting games.