Summary
After weeks of teases and reveals, Embark Studios has finally released the highly-anticipated Season 4 content update forThe Finals. The patch is available to download now on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC, and is filled with a plethora of new content forThe Finalsplayers to check out, including a new stadium, three new weapons, a new gameplay feature, and much more.
The official patch notes also detail all of the new bug fixes and balance adjustments that have been made in the September 26update forThe Finals. Whether players are on console or PC,The Finals' Season 4 update makes various fixes to the game’s audio, modes, maps, matchmaking, movement, and much more, meaning the new content update should ensure a smooth gameplay experience for everyone.
The Finals Season 4 Patch Notes
New Map: Fortune Stadium
.50 Akimbo
HEAVY
These bad boys bring extra firepower and precision to the arena!
Pike-556
MEDIUM
Extend the effective range of the Medium build with this designated marksman rifle!
Swiftly master this new pump-action shotgun!
New Feature: Sponsors
New Feature: Alternate Sights & Scopes
We’ve added a selection of alternate sights and scopes to some of the existing weapons, allowing you to switch between traditional sights or alternatives like Red Dots or Scopes. These alternative sights are unlocked using VRs via the weapon customization screen.
New World Tour Ranks
For Season 4 we’ve introduced Platinum and Diamond ranks to World Tour! We’ve also heard your feedback on the difficulty of earning Emerald rank, so in Season 4 Emerald will now be unlocked and available to earn from the beginning of the season and will be earned with Win Points, not tournament wins. Expect lots of fun stops along the way as you climb your way to Emerald Tier 1!
New Ranked mode
Ranked Tournaments are back! This Season, you’ll be competing in Cashout with an 8-team, 24-player tournament format. As part of improving the ranked experience, we’re also now seeding tournaments based on the strengths of each team, and your change in Ranked Score will be dependent on where you finish in the tournament as a whole compared to your initial seeding. We believe this will give a clearer and much more authentic tournament experience.
Cashout Rule Variants for Ranked and World Tour
To give the best experience in our competitive Ranked Tournaments and our more casual-friendly World Tour Tournaments we’ve introduced slightly different variants of the Cashout rule set in each mode.
In Ranked Tournaments, the 10% team wipe penalties are active, gameshow events such as ‘Low Gravity,’ for example, are disabled to reduce randomness, and loadout changes are only permitted between rounds of the tournament.
In the World Tour, team wipe penalties are disabled, game show events are still enabled, and players will be able to swap items from their Reserve into their Loadout between team wipes and between rounds. While Ranked Cashout is set in stone, there will be opportunities to change up the World Tour experience in various ways throughout the season!
Improved Player Cards
It’s time to get personal on the Player Cards! For Season 4, we’ve added a new layout, collectible and adjustable badges, borders, and player titles. There are new backgrounds available to collect as well, and we’ve improved the lighting on your character to help showcase your style!
Updated Circuits
Two Extra Loadout Slots
Due to popular demand, we’ve added two additional Loadout slots, bringing the total number of slots from six to eight.
New Battle Pass
New Career Levels
Leaderboard Improvements
We’d made some big improvements to leaderboards for Season 4. Players can now filter leaderboards by region, and the World Tour leaderboard also includes filters for the different tour stops.
New Static Crosshair Setting
THE FINALS’ default crosshair is a dynamic crosshair that will often move as your character animates, for example when running and jumping. We know that some of you prefer a crosshair that stays locked to the center of the screen. We’ve added a new setting to our crosshair customization to turn “in-world crosshair” off, which will create a true static crosshair that stays in the center at all times.
New Feature: Facial Hair Customization
You’ll now have the option to select from a variety of beards and mustaches to give your competitor a more sophisticated look! Check it out in the style tab!
New Feature: First Time Player Experience
In order to welcome new players into the game with more confidence, we’ve made some significant changes to the onboarding experience! These changes include intro videos for each build type, a more advanced Cashout tutorial that shows off destruction, clearer and faster menu systems, and more!
We’re also debuting a brand new set of OSPUZE-branded starting outfits because, let’s be honest, we’d all grown tired of the rookie ‘pajamas!’ Don’t worry veterans, you’ll get them, too!
In addition, we’ve added a clear set of goals and unlock activities to the main menu to guide new players through their first five rounds. We hope this helps ease new players into the game and introduces them to all the fun there is to be had.
Season 3 Rewards Coming Soon
Normally, all ranked rewards are delivered at the start of the next season! This season, however, we will delay the delivery in order to do a final sweep of our leaderboards and ensure that all players have earned their rewards fair and square.
In Season 3, we added new competitive modes and rewards to THE FINALS by introducing Ruby rank in Ranked Terminal Attack and Emerald in World Tour.
We know all of you want to show off your prowess from Season 3 as soon as possible, but we want to be sure that these rewards are handed out correctly, to those who earned them through fair play, these rewards will be handed out in Update 4.2!
DLCs
At the launch of Season 4, we’ll have three new DLC available at three different price points for you to browse through and check out! Do note that, just like last season, the Starter Pack returns as a DLC for this season as well.
Let’s get into the details!
Archetypes
Heavy
Dev Note: We wanted to leave a quick dev note on the state of the Heavy archetype, as we know there have been some frustrations that the Heavy is ‘overly nerfed’ compared to the Light archetype. 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. Our intent with much of the balancing is to bring all of the archetypes' win rates more closely in line, while also equalizing their pick rates. This ultimately means that, when it comes to the Heavy, we need to work through a process of both making it more balanced in terms of power and making it more fun to play. This will be an ongoing process but is the underlying thought process behind some of the changes made to start Season 4 when it comes to balance and usability of items.
Data Reshaper
Explosive Mine
Dev Note: Our intent for the Explosive Mines has always been to have them be a defensive gadget that covers choke points to help protect an objective, and where placement is a skill. Being able to immediately place two of them back-to-back led to a lot of mine stacking, often right on the objective, and allowed defenses to be set up too quickly. We hope that adding 15s between each deployment and less damage will lead to less stacking and encourage teams to get to the objective location sooner to be able to fully set up defenses before combat commences.
Flashbang
Dev Note: We found the Flashbang to have been underutilized and have added some quality of life fixes that will hopefully make them more reliable and effective.
Proximity Sensor
RPG-7
Dev Note: We never really intended the RPG to be an ‘opener’ in combat, even if it is an item that is more accessible to new players, the intent was always that this was for destruction first and foremost. We believe this change makes it still usable as an opener, but a much less valuable one, shifting its focus back to destruction and breaching.
Cashout Modes
Ranked Tournaments (Cashout)
Dev Note: To make Ranked Tournaments a more competitive friendly environment, with less randomness involved, we’ve decided to disable all game show events. We believe this will make matches slightly more consistent, less random, and easier to strategize around.
Terminal Attack (Ranked)
World Tour (Cashout)
Dev Note: World Tour is intended to be a more casual tournament experience than our Ranked Tournaments. Ourresearch in Season 3showed that removing team wipe penalties caused less player frustration and led to closer matches.
Dev Note: This is another change aimed at making World Tour more friendly for the casual player, by allowing them to swap items between lives. Ranked Tournaments will continue to only allow swapping between rounds, as we believe counter-picking rival teams and adjusting to maps and map variants should be a skill in competitive play.
Healing Beam
Mesh Shield
Dev Note: The Mesh Shield was intended as a Specialization used to shield teammates or to represent the Heavy archetype’s toughness and staying power. We felt the juggling of the shield, constantly raising and lowering it to fire weapons, was hard for some players to understand and very frustrating to play against. We understand this is a significant change and we’ll obviously monitor its impact closely
Weapons
93R
Dev Note: The 93R has been a difficult weapon for us to balance due to it being a burst fire weapon. Burst fire weapons give players the expectation that all the shots in a burst should be able to hit when aimed well, but this also means potentially doing three bullets worth of damage per ‘shot’ fired, making the weapon also high damage when the full burst hits. Getting this right whilst also differentiating the weapon from the FAMAS has been difficult. We’ve been reluctant to make the 93R a two ‘shot’ weapon versus Lights, because all testing of this scenario has made the weapon game-breaking, but at 72 damage a burst (i.e. three shots, nine bullets to kill a Light) the weapon has repeatedly underperformed, so it constantly sits on this knife’s edge of being too good or very bad. In this update, we’ve focused on making the weapon much more effective when fired ‘from the hip,’ rather than when aiming down sights. We feel this combination of damage and mobility puts the weapon in a better place, but we’d love to get your feedback on it.
AKM
CL-40
Dev Note: This change sounds significant, but keeps the weapon in a place where it still takes two shots to kill a Light and three shots to kill a Medium. The change is mostly aimed at making a Heavy three shots to kill instead of four, as we felt it was unfair to the CL-40 to have to land all four of its available four shots (i.e. 100% accuracy) to kill a Heavy without reloading
Dev Note: A small adjustment to offset the significant damage buff a little.
Lewis Gun
LH1
Dev Note: With the addition of alternative scopes/sights, we felt the LH1 was starting to stray well into the territory of the SR-84. This change reduces that to some extent.
M60
MGL32
Dev Note: The MGL32 is a weapon we’d very much like to re-work at some point, but that will take a more considerable effort. For now, this is a simple and small quality of life adjustment that should make the weapon a little more viable.
Spear
SR-84 Sniper
Dev Note: While the SR-84 is by no means overpowered or overly successful in many of our modes, it has become somewhat oppressive at very long ranges in modes like Terminal Attack and Power Shift, causing frustration for a lot of players. We feel this change limits much of the very long-range harassment that players found frustrating while maintaining the skill level and responsiveness in medium-to-long-range encounters.
Content and Bug Fixes
Performance and Optimization
The Finals
WHERE TO PLAY
Viewers at home, here’s the news you’ve been waiting to hear: THE FINALS is accepting new contestants, and that means YOU! That’s right, soon the world could be watching YOU tear apart our newest dynamic arenas and seize everlasting fame!As you know, THE FINALS is the world’s greatest free-to-play combat game show! Our contestants plug in to our virtual world and join teams in escalating tournaments. They fight it out in our beautifully-rendered arenas based on real-world locations that they can alter, exploit, and even destroy.Sure, you may aim and shoot, but contestants that add our carefully curated virtual environments to their arsenal are more likely to advance, so do anything you can imagine in the name of victory! Burn arenas to the ground! Send wrecking balls crashing into your opponents! Don’t just pull triggers - pull down buildings!
