The Finals Launched At The Game Awards, Faces Backlash For ‘Slowing Down’ The Game
Embark Studios made waves at The Game Awards earlier this week when it surprise launched The Finals during its slot on the video games awards show. The free-to-play game show-styled team-based shooter is now live on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S, and is one of the most played games on Steam right now.
The Finals currently sits at number seven on Steam’s Most Played Games list as of this writing and set a record-high peak daily concurrency of 221, 396 players this afternoon. The game, however, was review-bombed by players right off the gate, claiming that the developers slowed down movement speed, added delays to animations, and that the gameplay now felt extremely sluggish compared to October’s open beta test.
What’s funny is that Embark didn’t tweak movement speeds at all since the playtest, although they did make small adjustments to animations. The real culprit turned out to be the FOV settings which were reset to a default value of 71 at launch. First-person shooter fans will probably know where we’re going with this.
Increasing and decreasing the FOV values of a first-person shooter game can have a significant impact on the perceived speed of a character’s movement. Higher FOV values widens your character’s peripheral vision and makes objects on both sides of the screen seem to move faster. Lower FOV values have the opposite effect.
In response to the massive backlash, Embark says that its working to rebalance the animation changes and advises players to change their FOV values to whatever feels comfortable. Meanwhile, players who’ve realized that the sluggish experience was due to lower FOV values all along are now trying to repair the game’s “Mixed” review average on Steam by leaving positive reviews with advice to play around with the in-game settings.
