Embark Studios: AI let devs "do more with less" when making The Finals
gamedeveloper.comEmbark Studios' The Finals is a free-to-play online shooter that brings the Battlefield series' level of mayhem and destruction to an over-the-top team-based reality TV-style competition. After several months of playtests, The Finals is out, and the impressive technology behind its environmental chaos is now on display.
But as The Finals marched toward release, critics zeroed in on how Embark Studios (which is owned by Nexon) used generative AI technology to create in-game dialogue. As described by audio engineer Andreas Almström, text-to-voice AI allowed the studio to generate dynamic reactions by in-game characters, including in-universe commentators responding to the match.
Ahead of the surprise launch of The Finals at The Game Awards 2023, we spoke with Embark Studios creative director Gustav Tilleby, senior environment artist Joakim Stigsson, and brand director Sven Grundberg about using new tools to enhance the over-the-top action—including AI—and how The Finals disrupts the typically sacred rules of engagement for multiplayer games.
Blending the gameplay of an extraction shooter and team-based multiplayer with the "levolution"-style map destruction from the Battlefield series, The Finals channels those fixtures of competitive gaming into a high-energy game show that feels made for the Twitch.tv generation.
As teams of show-boating ruffians battle it out over cash and bragging rights, the battleground combatants enter won't be the same one they close the game on as bullets, explosions, and other methods of brute force reshape the combat zone in real-time.
According to creative director Gustav Tilleby, The Finals is about offering a more dynamic pace for a multiplayer game that puts its stylized, over-the-top competition
