The Finals - Flavor of the month, or the hero the FPS scene needs?

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I applied for The Finals beta thingy and it's a ton of fun I would recommend playing it at least once. However, I do have many gripes with the game. The guns feel and look like shit I feel like I'm playing a Chinese mobile game half of the time and anytime I get in a match I feel like I'm sweating my balls off. Etc Etc. Though there are some positives it's fun to dick around in the game with all of the destruction it has and switching around the weapons allows you to create your own class kind of like tf2 except much more minimal. I definitely don't think this game is gonna be the next cod or anything or be the game that rejuvenized the hero shooter genre like what Overwatch did when it came out. But once again it's a lot of fun and is worth a play.
 
Game is pretty good if you can get two other friends together.

My biggest gripes with this game are how retarded the heavies are.

This is a class with a shitload of HP, that can run through walls, equip grenade launcher and an RPG or a Flame Thrower and an RPG, drop shields, and just lock out any other class from being useful.

Highly annoying, but every FPS needs to take a page from Battlebit and go a step further: Remove weapons that 1 shot. Or barring your willingness to do that, remove weapons that you can 1 shot people with like RPGs that don't also one shot the shooter when fired at close range.
 
PROTIP: If you're getting tired of getting focused down in an instant as heavy, try using barricades with the Lewis gun. Heavy is tall enough to shoot over the barricades, meaning you can engage enemies with little more than your head exposed. They hardly take any time to deploy either, so dropping one to put yourself in an advantageous position is a good way to open up a fight.
 
Played one game, then noticed the absence of a text chat and since I'm not interested in watching the entire game as spectator I quit and uninstalled the game.
The guns feel like I'm playing Overwatch.
 
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AY YO NIGGAS GOT BEAT BY A GURL
 
I am now dooming. The game's in a pretty sorry state, and it's down to a couple of really boneheaded design decisions turning the meta into a stale and frustrating mess.

For those who haven't been keeping up with the game, a major controversy has been ongoing since launch regarding the implementation of aim assist. To put it simply, it's extremely powerful. But what makes it a game breaker is a third-party program called reWASD, a program which allows you to spoof your input method so you can use aim assist while on mouse and keyboard. There is a pretty good video on Reddit showcasing the capabilities of the game's aim assist system. What the video doesn't show is that it also tracks targets through concealment such as smoke and foliage, and, prior to a recent patch, even cloaked players.

Said patch released just over a week ago as of writing, and besides making some tweaks to the aim asisst to make it less powerful, also implemented a simple check to ensure players couldn't benefit from aim assist while using a remapping program:

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Problem solved, right? For a day or two it seemed so until a trivial workaround was found, which simply consisted of pausing reWASD, launching the game, then resuming it. Whoops. To make matters worse, recoil control scripts have also become prevalent, allowing cheaters to spray with minimal loss in accuracy at range. All of this dovetails with a rather overpowered ability of the medium class, recon senses. This is basically a toggleable wallhack that has a maximum range of 200 meters (covering the vast majority of any given map.) Add in the similarly overpowered FCAR assault rifle, and by all your powers combined, we have a metagame that revolves around teams of three mediums holding at standoff range dealing ~200-300 DPS with perfect accuracy and negligible recoil, while knowing where you are at all times.

To break up the monotony, you have heavies using the "nuke" strategy which involves attaching C4 to throwable barrels and hucking them at enemies for massive damage. It made for a decent enough counterplay to the terminator mediums, but due to player outcry the damage of C4 was reduced rather heavily. So in ranked it's all mediums all the time. Oh, and they also have heal beams to quickly recover from damage and defibrillators to instantly revive killed teammates. Good luck!

EDIT: An Embark staff member has said via Discord that resolving the reWASD issue is "Part of the daily conversation" in their offices, but they've made an explicit policy of being tight-lipped about changes regarding anti-cheat measures. There have been banwaves against people using scripts in the past, so odds are that further measures of some sort will be forthcoming.
 
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I've tried it with a friend for about 15 hours total. It's shocking how punishing and unrewarding off-meta plays are (and the quantity of aimbotting nerds present in matches once you rise up in the game's SBMM system).

Seriously, I see no reason to run anything else outside of hitscan, breach and mine builds with maybe traversal items and defibs as a medium. Nothing else matters beyond that outside of maybe the CL-40, which instantly triggers every trap the moment you shoot it inside buildings. Melee is awkward and shitty unless you spam dashes with lights or charge heavies dumb enough to run the MGL, and even then, good luck hitting or killing anything with the dagger, which is so unbelievably garbage you'll barely hit neutral k/d/rs due to how jank it is. Beyond that, the game also has severe Overwatch syndrome, in that skilled and calculated solo plays are instantly negated by the sheer volume of utility spam per game 95% of the time. It feels less like a team-based arena shooter like Dirty Bomb, where individual performance was (almost) on par with team coordination once utilities were spent, and more like I'm playing another MOBA disguised as a FPS.

For a game all about creative and dynamic plays, it's deceptively static.
 
Foghotten said:
For a game all about creative and dynamic plays, it's deceptively static.
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It was better in the betas. The medium-centric meta is the result of heavies and lights getting repeated nerfs while the medium got powercrept outside of nerfs to the heal beam and defib in the second closed beta. Lights arguably got it worst, with their most powerful guns being severely nerfed and their cloak gaining an obvious audio tell. They have no place in the current game due to recon senses being omnipresent, invalidating flanking plays. Heavy likewise lost a lot of its fragging potential by multiple nerfs to explosives, and the durability of their shields has been whittled down substantially. Meanwhile, the medium's assault rifles are as powerful as ever and remain dependable all-purpose weapons. When it comes to weapon selection, there's just no compelling reason to pick anything but the tried and true FCAR/AKM/Lewis Gun.

Thus, we are in a situation where the "support" class is also top dog when it comes to dealing damage, outside of cheesy C4 plays. Why wouldn't you run all mediums? The only thing they lack is the ability to destroy buildings. And when everyone runs mediums, that means every team will have three defibrillators to negate picks, and at least one heal beam to negate damage taken from exchanges. This leads to very static games with no-one wanting to make bold plays, because any advantage they gain will be undone in a moment.

Also here are the latest patch notes. The FCAR got a whopping one point reduction in damage. Recon senses rework coming Soon™️
 
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Really sad about how this one turned out, fellas. It could make a comeback and be great again, but I'm starting to feel like I should hang up competitive FPS games for good. The Battle Royale Extraction Shooter Dark Ages have gone on for too long.
 
I suppose it's worth necroing the thread to mention that season 2 is live as of yesterday. It comes with a several new weapons and gadget additions as well as a new 5v5 game mode which is pretty fun. C4 got nerfed (again), but most interesting is that recon senses have been removed from the game entirely, at least for now. I'll take it. Supposedly ranked matchmaking has been overhauled and there's a new placement system in place rather than everyone having to start from the bottom of bronze. I haven't tried it, so I've yet to see if the experience has improved much.

The new weapons are fun at least. Light gets a Beretta 93R and medium gets a FAMAS, while the heavy gets a shotgun loaded with slugs. The former two feel pretty powerful; I'm not sure how the TTK on the 93R compares to other light weapons, but it's very accurate and controllable whether hipfiring or using sights. The FAMAS curiously takes 1-2 fewer shots to kill compared to the AKM while having greater accuracy and DPS, so I guess there's just no love for the Slav rifle. The new shotgun is definitely going to take some getting used to. It deals 120 damage with no headshot multiplier and can breach a wall with four rounds, but fires projectiles instead of being hitscan. It has the potential to be really good as you can stay mobile while dealing heavy damage with single shots, and it allows you to poke holes in enemy defenses from a comfortable distance. On paper the SA1216 has better DPS, but the slugs give you far more reliable damage output as long as you can lead your shots against moving targets.

Also the light has a teleporter now. He can toss down two deployables to create a two-way passage usable by both teammates and enemies. I don't know how long it lasts, but it seems to have a lot of potential. You can't toss them very far though, and you can (accidentally?) grief your team by creating a portal that just dumps you into a death pit.
 
No joke a good 90% of the players I met in my 30 hours of so all use the same female head, and can you blame them? It's the only good looking woman preset, and the male ones are all fugly or bizarrely old-looking
 
Stop nerfing the fucking shotguns.

I swear, every fucking time with these FPS developers. "We need some weapon variety in our game. Let's add a shotgun! Oh but players complain when they get killed fast, so we'd better reduce the shotgun damage so that doesn't happen. No, more. More... there we go! There, now their performance is in line with the basic bitch assault rifles, but only at point blank range. Perfectly balanced."
 
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The core gamemode Cashout is extremely fun, but surrounded by probably the buggiest shit I've played in a while and the matchmaking is basically a huge April fools joke so get ready to rage a lot. And get suspended for no reason a lot. Doesn't help the developers aren't actually working on the game due to some bullshit Swedish labor law.

And if someone 3 stacks with a meta abusing team like some kind of wimp then no fun allowed anymore and you're about to be made the bottom bitch of that server. Balancing got wrecked after Season 3 when Embark gave Heavy yet another free kill button. The game has a massive ragequitting problem and too many people just whine about whatever class they dont play being overpowered so Embark doesn't actually get good feedback and just sort of does whatever sounds like a good idea. They do eventually fix all of the balancing issues but they're very slow at it, and half the time they say they fixed a serious bug it turns out to still be there.

Hopefully they address a lot of these problems next month when the storm has passed but some of the problems have been there since launch so I'm not getting my hopes up.

If there's one thing this game really needs to see a thriving esports scene which Embark no doubt wants, it's a demo recorder, photo mode and dedicated community server support. The official game servers are prone to extreme lag under some conditions due to the entire environment being physically simulated in real time, plus they have lower tickrates than most other games and there's no way to review when someone else might be cheating or rewatch matches to perform gameplay analysis. These are all things that older games like Counterstrike have an advantage in that allowed them to be flexible enough to succeed off of the playerbase's enthusiasm alone.
 
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Season 4 dropped and was literally unplayable for a week after launch. Oops.

It took Embark an entire Season 3 of random disconnects and then a botched S4 launch that made half the playerbase get instantly banned from matchmaking before they finally fixed their fucking game (:_(

Do Swedish people not know how to run a live service or is ex-DICE getting molested by Epic middleware?
 
Cantercoin said:
I just wanted to let it be known that I absolutely hate Lights
They make Solo queuing an absolute goddamn nightmare anytime past 5pm
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As a light main, agreed absolutely no question.
Every other light I play with is braindead and then the funny part is when they blame me for it after I switch medium and carry their ass.
 
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