Nvidia provided me with a playtesting key for THE FINALS, which is a game that I’ve
been keen to check out for its destruction, and whether or not it can finally match the
chaos seen in Red Faction Guerilla, which is the golden standard for destruction.
To put it simply: THE FINALS’ destruction isn’t so detailed, but you CAN level virtually
every structure entirely and it IS done on a much larger scale.
This cathedral, for instance, can be completely levelled, by 1 person, in under 10 minutes.
And I spent one.
Two.
Three happy games doing exactly that.
Much to the horror of my teammates.
This one set up these skyscrapers?
I didn’t expect the WHOLE thing to be destructible.
But it seems like it is, at least, down to the bottom playable level of it.
Because this is how part of the level looked after I was done with it.
It’s almost like it’s too much destruction because everybody ends up having to crawl
over the rubble in search of objectives in the area.
But of course, it isn’t too much destruction.
Because you can never have too much.
The only unbreakable things seem to be metal structures like this crane here, and I think
it would have been pretty easy to make those breakable so I guess these things were done
for gameplay reasons.
But the rest of the environment?
To dust.
So the desired level of destruction is here, but things could have broken into smaller
parts, and things could have been more willing to collapse under their own weight and from
resulting collisions with other things.
Analysing any aspect of the destruction would be awesome if compared against any other game,
but damn you Red Faction Guerilla, you were ahead of your time at release and still are
in 2023, and THE FINALS still lacks all those gorgeous tiny details found in that game from
14 years ago on the Playstation 3.
Some of the collapsed pieces seem too big and cube-ular, but destroy a large building
and a satisfying amount of the debris does remain in the level and it can make it jolly
hard to venture through a place you had previously levelled.
I think my strat would be to destroy a key part of the level, and then to have my teammates
lure the enemies into the killzone.
The game is made by ex DICE devs (oh that’s nice to say), so if this looks at all similar
to Battlefield to you then that could be why.
Only in this game there’s more destruction.
How do they achieve so much destruction?
Well it’s all done server-side.
Which is quite an achievement when you consider just how many parts it’s trying to keep
track of once I’ve been let loose in it for 10 minutes!
Shout out to my poor teammates, none of whom complained at all after dying and then having
to spectate me back at spawn using my special abilities to charge through walls.
I WILL say, my teammates were nice… too nice.
But they couldn’t be bots.
Not in a completely destructible environment like this, surely.
Although this guy sure does move like he’s a bot.
Although if you are actually a real person Adde4king, I’m sorry.
I didn’t mean it.
Although you do move like a bot.
Now you know me; I would never play a game to ruin it for others, so I stuck mostly to
the training room, which comes with its own destructible building which lets me test it
out under controlled conditions, and away from the rest of the game’s community.
Though even playing the game in this mode requires the game searches for players, which
you wouldn’t think makes any sense since you’re playing it alone.
I think it’s more that it’s searching for a server to host the destruction on.
Destroying regular objects isn’t something to write home about.
It looks nice enough but it’s been done to death in most games already.
Fences collapse in very convenient square-shaped chunks, stuff explodes or breaks after enough
damage.
But destroying stuff like this isn’t on par with the stuff that was seen in the game,
‘Control.’
Destroying trees feels distinctly Crysis-esque in how they suddenly burst into a load of
leaves and twigs, but they can’t be chopped up by well-placed bullets like they could
have done in Crysis.
But I noticed larger trees could have separate trunks blown off them, which was a nice touch.
Oh, and there’s fire as well, which spreads across the place kind of like in Far Cry 2.
I’m aware that I’ve mentioned 3 15 year-old games in this video already, but… in a good
way?
While I’m covering this kind of stuff , I also tested the smoke grenades in the hope
that they wouldn’t pass through walls, but the technology still isn’t there for that
it seems.
I did also notice that some building decorations would stay floating in the air which again…
I never saw with Red Faction.
Some of the loose debris doesn’t seem to behave like its rough, broken shape would
suggest, which in this instance you can see gives it a fake, weightless kind of quality.
But there are some really nice touches I found too, like when large cracks would stretch
across the walls or floors or ceilings, yet the structure as a whole would remain standing…
if a little creaky and angled.
That stuff’s nice.
It feels like stuff remains solid even when it does begin to collapse.
Which isn’t something that games always do.
The framerate on these collapsing bits is lower than the rest of the gameplay is.
Sometimes it feels like 30, other bits feel like 10.
I’m not sure what dictates the framerate of this, but some of the knock-on interactions
between large scenery elements can end up feeling quite choppy.
And stuff, once it is collapsed, doesn’t like sitting still, occasionally shakes about
or refuses to settle.
But to see them trying to add this destruction as a gameplay mechanic into what’s meant
to be a fast-paced shooter is kind of exciting, and your character’s movement system is
reasonably forgiving at not getting glitched on stuff, and it’s pretty easy to pull yourself
up and over and under stuff.
So I think the destruction in this game is more about dynamically altering the environment’s
shape than it is about killing people with falling stuff.
So why did Nvidia send me this game’s key?
Well, because this game features several Nvidia technologies.
Though not as many as you might expect.
There’s Reflex, which makes sense in a competitive game like this.
There’s DLSS 3, which doesn’t.
And then there’s only 1 raytraced feature.
And it isn’t raytraced reflections- which given the many shiny surfaces in this game
is surprising because it’s pretty easy to break the reflections right now.
No- the raytraced feature in this game is global illumination, which makes a whole lot
of sense, given this game’s dynamic destruction.
Because when everything’s collapsing and continually changing, it’s VERY hard to
correctly light the newly collapsed areas in real-time- especially when they’re only
being lit by the light that’s bouncing off other surfaces, which itself may have already
bounced off another surface and so on.
Metro Exodus benefitted from this real-time lighting because of its ever-changing day-night
cycle.
But THE FINALS benefits from this even more because buildings tend to collapse faster
than the sun can move across the sky.
Although in some games, only by a bit.
So that’s what this raytraced lighting is doing, and if I compare it off VS on, then
you can see the game makes the BRAVE decision to NOT light stuff by default.
But that’s only after destruction has already taken place.
At the start of the level it doesn’t make much of a difference whether the global illumination
is on or off, I GUESS because the map has pre-calculated the lighting beforehand as
a fall-back option for players who aren’t using raytraced lighting.
But now, if I blow these walls up, you can see the lighting has remained about the same
as it was before without global illumination, but now when I turn raytraced global illumination
on, a lot more light now bleeds further into the room from the gaps left behind from the
newly destroyed walls.
And the difference this lighting makes only gets greater, the more that’s destroyed.
For instance, here, despite there being a MASSIVE hole through which light should be
able to pass, no light is getting into this space.
But if I turn raytraced global illumination on… it does.
The reason I care about this effect is because it’s something that could really have helped
me a while back!
So let’s go… back in time.
Back, back back.
Back to like, 15 years ago, to Counter-Strike Source, when I came up with a new idea for
a map.
What if this whole thing was made out of physics blocks, then got smashed to pieces by falling
boulders?
I know right?
Awesome.
But the problem was the lighting: the game didn’t have realtime lighting, so things
always remained how they were lit at their starting positions.
This is most evident on the falling boulders, which appear very dark because they spawned
in a dark hole far above.
And as these platforms begin to fall and tumble, their lighter top-side remains lighter even
when overturned.
It isn’t too much of an issue on this map because I made sure it was all well-lit enough
to not be a problem.
And this turns out to be the same way that Red Faction Guerilla went about this, back
before raytracing and real-time global illumination was a thing.
You get away with this hack in smaller structures and when outside, but when you enter larger
indoor areas, it becomes very clear that everything’s glowing in a way it shouldn’t do.
It looks wrong, but also ‘less detailed’ than it needs to because of it.
So there you have it: Red Faction Guerilla needs raytracing.
Back to the Finals, if you ask me, it’s an odd decision in a competitive game to have
the lighting default to ‘black’ when there’s no setting to light it.
Because this dark, unreadable environment COULD cause problems in a twitch shooter,
which should try to level the playing field no matter which settings are used, because
a lot of people simply won’t be able to use raytraced global illumination on their
systems.
I mean, it could go either way- maybe users of raytracing have the advantage because everything
is brighter.
OR, it could be that player models glow and it makes them easier to see without the raytracing
being on.
Not my problem, I’m just here to blow stuff up.
I tried the low raytraced setting in THE FINALS and it appeared to simply take longer to adjust
to changes than the higher settings did, so I guess the raytraced setting is the number
of rays it shoots out every frame.
Any sort of raytracing is going to be considerably slower than none at all, so if this game does
build up a competitive community then I’m calling it now that it will be divided between
people who insist on lowest settings for highest framerates, and those who use the higher options
if it gives them the very occasional advantage.
Given how buildings take a while to collapse, and for the dust to settle, I’d say that
low global illumination would be a reasonable compromise to get the approximate brightness
of a collapsed building right by the time the air has cleared enough to view it.
But what do I know.
So how much of a problem is it to not have raytraced global illumination when on proper
levels?
Well guess what- you’ve already seen it.
Because most of the clips at the start of this video had the raytracing disabled!
If you didn’t notice then maybe it isn’t a problem.
But if you did, and wondered why it was so damn dark on a sunny day, then maybe this
is something that the makers of THE FINALS should address.
Knowing what I do now, I loaded the game up, to blow the church up.
ONE LAST TIME.
I also inspected my teammates to see if they were bots and- I can confirm they aren’t
because they both quickly disconnected, which isn’t very bot-like because it isn’t very
nice.
So I was on my own.
And it feels like, even just in the few days I spent making this video, that the playerbase
has got so much better and I was under attack several times before I even reached the cathedral.
But eventually I made it inside and began hammering away at the interior.
The wall dash is definitely the best feature for doing this, and there’s comedy potential
when I get caught on some scenery and am just stood on the spot, screaming and failing to
demolish anything.
I’m unsure whether that’s the building starting to collapse from the damage I’ve
dealt, or if there’s a fellow destruction enthusiast doing his bit from the outside.
But here it is: the BIG collapse.
AWESOME.
And an excellent chance to compare the global illumination on VS off, one last time.
Yup, way too dark without it on.
The Finals, please fix.