Embark Studios just launched Season 8 of free-to-download shooter The Finals, introducing new, revamped destruction and improvements to competitive play. But it also added a standard competitive multiplayer feature that — at least at launch — won’t be available on Xbox Series S.
Season 8 introduces quality of life features to “enhance player experience and help strengthen their competitive skills,” including the beta version of the Instant Replay feature — aka a kill cam.
Here’s the official blurb:
A major addition aimed at boosting competitive clarity and supporting skill development. Players can now replay intense gameplay moments linked directly to their opponent’s point of view, making it easier to identify the exact source of eliminations. Instant Replay has been a significant but fulfilling development challenge and is currently in BETA with ongoing improvements.
It’s interesting to note the disclaimer Embark Studios added to the announcement: “this feature will not be compatible with Xbox Series S, PlayStation 4 and certain PC builds at launch.)”
Killcam is a pretty standard FPS feature at this point, indeed it has been a part of, for example, Call of Duty for years. And usually it is available across all platforms the game is on. Again, with Call of Duty, the killcam exists on Xbox Series S, PS4, and all PC builds the game itself can run on.
So it’s surprising to see it miss out for The Finals on these platforms. Clearly, there is a performance issue the developer is still working on, and it mentions this is a problem “at launch,” so hopefully some point soon killcam will be added to all platforms.
In a blog post, Embark Studios explained the challenge it faces adding the Instant Replay feature, calling it "mind-bending tech."
To be honest, at first and second glance, this was an impossible task. But at Embark we take a challenge seriously. Prototypes for this feature date back to the early days of the project, before The Finals even had a name, trying to prove it possible. What you will see in Season 8 is the result of all that hard work. We had to calculate everything that matters: player movement, environmental destruction, object interactions in a level of data fidelity that’s hard to pull off in a Dynamism Shooter. Then take all that info and quickly reconstruct the moment.
It’s not enabled for everyone by default (especially on systems under 16 GB RAM), but you can toggle it on manually. If you’ve got the horsepower, turn it on, try it, and tell us what you think. We’ll be gathering feedback, polishing performance, and expanding integration throughout the season.
The Instant Replay feature's omission from Xbox Series S specifically is interesting for another reason. Usually Microsoft insists on feature parity when it comes to games running on Xbox Series X and S. Yes, there are performance differences, as games will inevitably run worse on the less powerful S, but we’re used to feature parity, and a killcam would certainly fall under the feature category as opposed to performance.
The Xbox Series S has caused developers a number of headaches since it went on sale in 2020, but Microsoft has made rare exceptions when it comes to feature parity. For example, Larian was able to launch Baldur’s Gate 3 on Xbox Series X and S with split-screen on the X only, so the blockbuster RPG could come to Microsoft’s console just a few months after PC and PS5.
Xbox boss Phil Spencer has indicated the parity clause is staying put, but it will be interesting to see what the company does as it heads into the next generation.
Meanwhile, The Finals Season 8 adds two new weapons, mouse and keyboard support for console players, detailed match recaps, a fresh Battle Pass, an update to anti-cheat and more.
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
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