The Finals Creative Director, Gustav Tilleby, and Design Director, Mikael Hogstrom, sit down with us to discuss new additions coming in The Finals Season 5!

We’re coming up on the one-year anniversary of The Finals, marking a little over four seasons of content, events, and community. We sat down with Creative Director Gustav Tilleby and Animation Director Mikael Hogstrom to discuss upcoming weapons, gadgets, and the new map. While Design Director Matt Lowe couldn’t attend the interview, he did provide answers to our questions regarding balance in a follow-up email.

GT: We’re approaching the one-year anniversary of The Finals! I remember last December during the Game Awards, people going feral in the comments asking, “Where’s The Finals? Where’s The Finals?” So do you have any plans to celebrate that anniversary, like in game events, that kind of deal?

Gustav: Absolutely. I mean, we are super proud of this journey we’ve been on. It’s been a long journey and we have a lot of things that we’re doing in the game to celebrate and commemorate the first year. For example, we’re doing an edition of a playlist feature that will allow players to customize the music in the game so they can have all the music from all the seasons from the very beginning. So that’s one example of a thing we’re doing to kind of celebrate the year that we’ve gone on. We’re also going through all of the maps in the entire game, and we’re updating some of the branding, kind of to give it a bit of a face lift, so it’ll be familiar, but there will also be some new things as well. So those are some other examples.

Mikael: I think we’re also celebrating our players inside of the game from the past seasons. So that’s going to be interesting to see how those players and everyone else respond to that. That’s, of course, a key theme for us is our players, which we love, and we also want to celebrate with them inside of the game.

Gustav: That’s also a part of building a history within the game, right? That you know everything that players have done. There’s some reflection of that in the game, we already have the trophies in the practice range with the winners from each season so on. So we’re kind of expanding on that idea to really celebrate that. And we’re also adding on the billboards and all the screens in the arenas, dynamic billboards. So basically, if you’re playing really well, if you’re, you know, doing something cool in the game, you can be featured on the screen in the round dynamic as it goes, which is also quite cool.

GT: What are some of the areas of balance the team will be looking at in Season 5, both the launch patch and throughout the season.

Mikael: There are a ton of new things coming with season five. I guess that’s also a, you know, the package that we want to celebrate the game with. There is, again, a theme with community and communication, basically. So maybe not the most exciting features, but for us, it’s a very exciting feature is that we’re adding an inbox to the game where we are able to communicate with our players directly inside of the game, which has not been something that we have been able to do in a great fashion before. So, we can announce things happening in the game and announce patch notes. You know, we update the game quite often, so it’s kind of hard to keep up, so having a history of that is exciting for us to be able to share with the players. We are also adding a very exciting feature, which is clubs. That is coming to the game. So now, you can basically create clubs inside of the game and join with 49 other people, which is the maximum of a club in The Finals. It is something that we’ve been wanting to add for a long time, but it’s a big feature. It has to be done correctly, and now it’s the time to introduce that into the formula. So that’s very exciting.

Gustav: It’s a formal clan system. It’s confusing sometimes, because we call it a clan system internally and clubs is the player facing name for it, but the idea of being able to build communities within the game, that’s really what we’re after. That’s just such a strong feature for multiplayer online games, so we’re super excited about that finally coming.

GT: The season 4 patch notes gave us a rare look behind the scenes saying: “While the Light (most played) does remain much more played than the Heavy (least played) as of the end of Season 3, across all skill tiers and modes we see that the Heavy is by far the most winning of our three archetypes, with Light the most losing.” Now that we’re coming to the end of season 4, has this pattern changed at all? What are the rough statistics of win rates in higher level play for each of the classes? What is the team’s philosophy for tackling the challenge of increasing the Light’s win rate and increasing Heavy’s play rate while keeping both class identities intact?

Mikael: This is, of course, something that is at the core of how we’re trying to look at new items, new gadgets, new weapons, but also, you know, existing balance, right? Player expression is at our core. So, the idea is that we try to balance and shift things to to promote that, of course.

Gustav: Absolutely. That’s something that we’re constantly looking at: how can we make these body types and play styles that they enable be viable to players? But there’s always going to be outliers, I guess. You know, the Medium character was always kind of intended to be a bit of a Jack of all trades, if you will. But a big part of our design philosophy, though, has to do with balancing pros and cons, because we think that’s really important for team dynamics, sticking together, and working together. So that’s actually something we’re looking at going forward, is how we can spread team utility across all body types so that they can all contribute to the team, right? I think that’s something that will help at least to a degree when it comes to this, yes, but we’ll pass that question along to Matt, and I’m sure we’ll have some more insights for you on it.

Matt (email response sent post-interview): When we discussed pick and win rates in Season 3, we were looking at trends across a number of modes together, but as time goes on, pick rates are an increasingly difficult stat for us to generalize in that way as they vary quite a bit across different modes.

In World Tour, over the course of Season 4, we’ve seen the pick rate of the Medium (most played overall during S4) come down slightly, while the pick rates of both the Light and the Heavy (least played) have increased slightly as the season has gone on. Overall, this makes the usage rates more balanced than Season 3.

In Quick Cash, the Heavy unfortunately lags behind the Light and Medium still when it comes to usage, but not as much as in Season 3. The Medium has caught back up to the Light in Season 4 and now sits at roughly the same usage rate. It was Quick Cash where we saw by far the highest Light usage in Season 3.

Of course, where the pick rates are now isn’t the whole story of the season. Early in Season 4, in several modes, we saw a spike in Medium archetype usage related in large part to the power of the Pike-556 and Model 1887 at the time, which have since had a balance pass to bring the Medium back in line.

In high end play, the upper skill tiers of Ranked Tournaments, the Medium remains the most popular archetype over the course of this season, but it has dropped as the season has gone on, with both Light and Heavy’s usage catching up. Despite that though, the win rates per archetype in Ranked are very close, with just a 1.5% difference in win rate between the three. It’s worth noting again here that, in Season 3, our ranked mode was Terminal Attack, where the Light archetype saw very high usage, but with the shift to Ranked Tournaments the Light sits between the Medium and Heavy in usage.

Individual archetypes’ win rates can be a little misleading though, THE FINALS is a team game after all, so team composition matters. In high end Ranked play (Diamond and Platinum tiers), as we’re headed towards the end of the season HML, HMM and MML are the most winning compositions, although the top six comps are within 5% win rate of each other. HMM, HML and MML are also the most popular compositions by pick rate, with MMM in 4th place. MMM was very popular in the first 2-3 weeks of the season, but as we’ve rebalanced the game its usage has dropped quite a bit.

Ultimately, when it comes to trying to even out pick rates and win rates between archetypes, our approach is very much focused on identifying which weapons, gadgets and specializations (or combinations of them), cause spikes in usage and then trying to even those out. Where we can, we’re trying to do this by buffing under-used items, but we also occasionally have to nerf some items to bring them in line.

We are mindful that some items, which are more specialized or perhaps require a higher skill ceiling, may never reach the same levels as more accessible items, so our goal is not to have every item with the same win or pick rate. Instead, the goal is to make sure that viability changes over time, with different items having their ‘moments in the sun’, so that the meta varies over time.

GT: So looping back around to the map. How would you describe the layout and atmosphere of the new map? It’s based on Bernal Mexico, correct?

Gustav: That’s right. It’s set in Mexico. So it’s, in a way, kind of similar to Monaco. It has lower buildings, but it’s a lot of rooftop gameplay, so a big focus on this map is enabling that. So that when you’re running across the rooftops, there are a lot of entryways and layers of cover that you can use. You can also duck into the streets below or go into the buildings, of course. So in a way, it’s familiar and feels very Finals-y, but it also gives this new experience at the same time. I really love that map. I think it’s so cool. It’s super fun to play. It was fun from the very beginning. We felt that immediately, when we had the first mock up of it, that it’s like, this is going to work really well. So that’s what was really encouraging, as we sorted out. I don’t know if you want to add thoughts…

Mikael: Yeah. I think it’s a great addition to the other maps. It plays differently, but familiar.

Gustav: Yeah, it’s a great fit.

Mikael: Yeah. I hope people will like it.

GT: Moving on to weapons and gadgets. Are there any new details about the new weapons and gadgets for this season? Maybe a new specialization?

Mikael: No specialization, unfortunately, but we do have four new items we are introducing with season five. So we have the ShAK 50 for the Heavy which is, I’m going to read the description here. It’s the heavy hitting rifle with immense stopping power, firing unique rounds containing two bullets per shot. So we’re introducing a new type of bullet with this, or shooting mechanic with this assault rifle for the Heavy. So basically, you should shoot two rounds each time you fire, and it will hit you hard on the short to medium range, whereas it can be kind of hard to compete on the longer ranges. We’re interested to see where this fits with the LMGs, of course, but also the shotgun, which is available on the Heavy right now, and we feel that this is a space that we’re not covering right now. So that’s an interesting addition to the Heavy. And then we have for the Medium, we have a Cerberus 12GA, which is a break action triple shotgun, but it’s also loaded with something that we call Dragon Breath shells. Maybe that’s the common term for it, but basically what it does is that it can ignite parts of the level, like everything else, if you throw an incendiary grenade, that will work in similar fashion. So if you shoot a bush or a tree or something like that, that will ignite, but also, if you fire at players, if you get enough heat from the pellets, you will also ignite the players. So that will make you sustain a little bit of damage on the tail end of the damage, so you burn a very short time getting hit by it. So that’s a three shot shotgun basically, so heavy hitting, but high risk, high reward, for that one. And then we have two more gadgets to introduce, and it’s the gravity vortex for the Light, which maybe you want to explain how this one…

Gustav: Yeah, so it’s a thing that you throw into the environment and you trigger it, and it creates almost like a local singularity that pulls everything around it into its center. And so every object in the environment can get pulled in and players as well. So it’s really fun as a dynamism enabling gadgets, because there are so many ways you can use this. You can set and use it as a trap to quote, “catch players.” Maybe you place mines around the gadget to get sucked in as well to do extra damage to them. You can place it on or around, you know, an objective, in order to send it in the air. If you know an opposing team is coming in and trying to destroy the building, or whatever structure it’s in, or just to deflect it away from players that are trying to steal it. So there are a lot of interesting and creative plays I think that will come from this. And yeah, we’ll see what players come up with. I think it opens up for a lot of interesting plays.

GT: I’m sure Light mains will be very, very happy to hear about the objective play gadget option.

Mikael: I mean, that’s been the focus, of course, to get more objective type play styles in here. Yeah, I mean, that’s the gravity vortex. It will, of course, hopefully push Light into that capturing space of Cash Out.

Gustav: Yeah, and objective play and being in there.

GT: Okay, so looping back around to the Cerberus, are there plans for more status effect weapons? Maybe, let’s say, poison darts for Light, or some kind of glitch gun for Heavy, something along that line of thought.

Mikael: I mean, we’re opening up for that now with Cerberus. This is, of course, something that we want to hear the community feedback on as well, like, you know, what do they feel about it? What do we feel about it? If that opens up for more things? Yes! I mean, we opened the door so it could be, if you feel that fits the gameplay, but that’s something that we need to discuss as well. Like, what is fitting, and what are the goals for whatever new things that we can come up with so it doesn’t close the door.

Gustav: No, exactly and maybe we just have to see how it goes and evaluate and take it from there. But yeah, definitely not ruling it out.

GT: Does the Cerberus counter gas in goo?

Mikael: It does, so good question. You have played the game!

GT: Oh yeah! I have many hours, trust me.

Mikael: Yeah, it definitely works against goo, it will ignite goo. It actually has a heating system, so the more pellets that you hit inside of, you know, a certain range, the more heat you will apply to a goo or a good ball, I guess you can call it, and it will ignite if you apply enough heat to it, same goes for gas. So if you heat it up enough, it will woosh away. So it’s great for that type of dynamic play as well.

Gustav: And there’s another one, right? There’s one more gadget.

Mikael: Yeah there’s one more! Last, but not least. So we have a Heavy gadget coming in for season five. It’s the lock bolt launcher. And this one, it looks like an RPG. You hold it like it’s shoulder held, and it’s massive, but it doesn’t shoot propelled rounds. It shoots this anchor that you can place into the world, and it will basically try to trap three different types of things inside of the radius. So things could be the usual suspect that you can attach to. So players, of course, cash outs, vaults, cash boxes, other types of movable objects. So it’s a way for you to constrain an area to a certain amount of distance. So if you, as an enemy player, get constrained, you can only run as far as this allows you to do if you don’t shoot it off. So of course, you can counter it by shooting out the anchor so you get released, but it also means that you can fortify a box that you hold to a certain area. So there was a interesting thought about the moving platforms, for example, like, you know, maybe you could create some, some nice bungee thing there. I think again, like, you know, it’s, you know, tapping into that dynamic play that we like so much with our game and seeing what combinations that players can come up with this. And again, like, I think we’ve seen, like, you know, 10% of the stuff that we’re gonna see when we release this.

Gustav: So both this gadget and the gravity vortex are really heavily playing into the dynamic aspects of The Finals which is really exciting. And, you know, players are good at coming up with interesting ways to use these things. So yes, we’re looking forward to that.

GT: So hypothetically, you could chain the, well, chain and the vortex together with a floating island and kind of make it this spinning safe space for your team?

Gustav: You could, yeah. If you want to combine these, you can.

GT: Is there any additional new content in the works, like new game show events?

Gustav: We don’t have any new game show events at the launch, but who knows what’s going to happen during season five? I’m not going to reveal anything, but it’s something that we definitely want to expand on and there’s lots more to do there when it comes to that stuff.

Mikael: I think that’s also something that we heard from our players, you know, they do enjoy. I mean, there was a change in season four where we split the game show events from the rank mode and World Tour mode, which, you know, makes a lot of sense for us to do that, and that gives us more flexibility with these type of events going forward, to add more fun events, or, you know, permanent additions to to our Cash Out modes. You know, we really like the game show, and we want that to continue, and that’s a huge aspect for us. So, yeah, stay tuned.

Massive thanks to Gustav, Mikael, and Matt for their answers to our pressing questions! The Finals Season 5 will arrive on December 12th.

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