Ex-DICE developers have made a very un-Battlefield shooter

polygon.com:

Death came from above the first time I was killed — sorry, “wiped” — in The Finals. I was standing in the hallway of office building in Seoul. Someone blasted through their floor/my ceiling with a rocket launcher, and their two teammates poured on the lead. I was smoked before I could aim down sights.

It’s the most fitting allegory for three hours of hands-on time in The Finals, a squad shooter coming soon from Embark Studios, the Nexon-backed operation started by alumni of EA DICE’s Battlefield franchise. The Finals is not a battle royale, nor an extraction shooter, nor does it resemble any buzzy sub-genre du jour among first-person shooters. But if you play it like a conventional FPS, you — if not your whole team — will get your ass wiped. Fast.

This is partly because of The Finals’ most distinctive trait: Most everything is destructible. You can see it for yourself if you get into the game’s next closed beta, which begins March 7 and runs through March 21 on Windows PC via Steam. Walls, floors, and entire buildings if you take out the right supports (though I didn’t see this happen) can all be pulverized. It’s not destruction in a set-piece way, either, where hitting the right node triggers a map change. It’s entirely in the moment, reflecting either the collateral damage of a landmine set in a parking garage stairwell, or the deliberate choice to blow out a wall instead of looking for the door.

All of this demolition is handled by Embark’s servers, and I can attest that it ran as advertised when the studio announced its new title last fall. I played on an Alienware Area 51m, with its GeForce RTX 2060 — not a bad setup, sure, but one that’s also four years old — and I never saw a framerate drop the entire time. My