The Finals had its open beta start on October 26th. Players have had nothing to say but positive things on beta, despite delayed start to the action due to some server issues on Embark Studios’ end. Despite the server issues The Finals Beta started off in a blistering start, with the beta reaching an amazing 229,00 players at a 24-hour peak. Since then player count has stabilized, to an equally impressive 123,000 average player count. Player count has surprised Embark Studios that they mentioned on X that they are working on expanding the capacity for the open beta. This comes after the game had a queue to log in, in the first place after such an unprecedented amount of players wanting to get in on the action.
Much of the praise is attributed to the high-octane gunplay and movement that was promised from Embark Studios. It’s looking to be one of the more exciting releases of hopefully 2023, but as the developers have not mentioned a set release date fans are anxiously waiting to hear more on that.
Now, sadly with all great news there’s seemingly always some bad news, as many players found out that the in-game arena commentators are all AI voice text-to-speech. There has been much debate, especially in the last couple months on whether or not AI has a place in not only the gaming space but in overall art. In a podcast on Spotify by Embark Studios dedicated to everything The Finals related named Meet The Makers, Carl Tamleht and Andreas Glad sat down to speak on the overall process of sound design in the game. Around 6 minutes into the podcast Andreas said the following.
So here’s the kicker, what did the voice overs? So the thing is we used AI with a few exceptions…both of our commentators are text to speech.
This has a lot of players calling out Embark studios, some even going as far as saying that as much as they have loved the game, they would drop it immediately if a real voice cast is not hired. There has been a lot of controversy regarding Voice actors, and their misuse and blatant disregard, and players are seeing this as a direct attack on struggling working voice actors. Hopefully, all of this is resolved and players can continue to enjoy what is surely to be an incredible game in the future.