I almost don't believe the destructibility in this FPS is real

pcgamer.com:

I thought multiplayer shooters had run out of ways to surprise me, but I had a genuine shock to the system yesterday morning watching this gameplay trailer for The Finals(opens in new tab), a free-to-play FPS in development by the ex-Battlefield devs at Embark Studios. The trailer shows a brief look at what's apparently possible in The Finals: Entire buildings crumbling into hundreds of pieces at the whim of a grenade launcher while players parkour across the falling debris like Nathan Drake.

What I saw didn't line up with my current understanding of what's possible in online games. You can't do destruction this big in a multiplayer lobby, so how is The Finals pulling it off? If I hadn't seen it myself in a remote presentation by Embark, I wouldn't believe it.

The Finals is a team-based FPS set in a virtual game show. The premise immediately brought back memories of Ubisoft's mediocre, now shuttered battle royale game Hyper Scape(opens in new tab), but this definitely isn't that. The Finals' main mode is played in 12-player lobbies (four teams of three) on a variety of completely destructible maps based on real-world locations. Embark called it an «extraction mode,» but its description sounds more like a normal respawn mode. Players fight over boxes of coins and compete to hold the most dough by the end of the round.

So there's a lot of standard shooter stuff going on, but everything revolves around The Finals' server-side destruction tech, which promises that players can flatten «everything from furniture to entire buildings.» Embark is really proud of the behind-the-scenes technology making this possible, so much so that it won't comment on how it works before The Finals releases. Mysterious! And another reason to stay