It has been revealed that the hottest new shooter on the market, The Finals, is getting SBMM tweaks after just one week on the market. This revelation comes from Embark Studios, the game’s developer, and it’s off the back of claims that matches are unbalanced. Recently, The Finals has taken the competitive shooter market by storm, with hundreds of thousands of players across all platforms getting involved with the game since it was shadow-dropped by Embark on December 8.

It’s a highly destructive, fast-paced, frenetic shooter with unique and innovative features that are hugely entertaining. It has the potential to become a solid esports title, and even the base nature of the game is wired to make you think you’re competing in a spectator sport. It’s proving to be a huge hit with shooter fans the world over, and Embark Studios is already showing that it’s a developer who cares, acting on community-led feedback without any delay.

Better Already

If you’re any kind of fan of the first-person shooter genre, you’ll know how divisive the concept of ‘Skill-Based Matchmaking’ really is. It’s something that can split a community down the middle, which is the case for franchises like Call of Duty. For years, COD has been the subject of countless debates centred around ‘SBMM’ and whether it exists to better the experience of gamers or to tune it to ensure they keep playing for as long as possible.

For The Finals, it was determined early on by the community that the game’s skill-based matchmaking algorithms were a little skewed. It felt as though matches weren’t properly balanced, and that far too often, new players were getting set up for a fight against skilled, already-experienced opponents, making for a miserable experience.

So, in a post on Steam, Embark Studios revealed that it has been hard at work tweaking the skill-based matchmaking systems, resulting in longer queue times but more forgiving lobbies overall:

‘We’ve made some changes to our skill-based matchmaking to ensure better-quality games. This means matchmaking times are likely to be ever so slightly longer, but you should find yourselves in slightly closer matches.’

While not perfect, The Finals has launched to a positive reception based on how innovative it is. It successfully fuses the best elements from a few games, like Fortnite, Overwatch, and Battlefield, and presents them to an entirely new and enthralled player base in a neat, free-to-play package. It’s highly expected that The Finals will remain a top-tier shooter going into 2024, even with stiff competition from Call of Duty, a potential new Battlefield, and perhaps a fresh Titanfall game sitting on the horizon.