Building a groundbreaking multiplayer shooter with next-generation destruction physics
Our consultant builds gameplay for THE FINALS, Embark Studios' fully destructible, free-to-play shooter.
In most shooters, walls are walls. In THE FINALS, they're a suggestion. Teams of three compete in a virtual game show inside arenas based on real cities, and almost everything around them can be blasted, collapsed or carved into a new route. Out of cover? Make some. Enemy team upstairs? Bring the floor down.
The game comes from Embark Studios in Stockholm, founded by veterans from DICE and the Battlefield series, and known as one of the most technology-driven studios in the industry. Built on Unreal Engine 5, THE FINALS runs its movement, physics and destruction on Embark's servers rather than on each player's machine, so every player sees the same building fall in the same way at the same moment. It launched in December 2023 on PC, Xbox and PlayStation and peaked at over 240,000 concurrent players on Steam, and has kept growing through new seasons, maps and modes since.
Our consultant works on the game experience itself: the systems players touch every second of a match. That work runs across three layers of Unreal: C++ for performance-critical gameplay systems, Blueprints for fast iteration together with designers, and the engine itself to make it all hold together at 60+ frames per second in the middle of a collapsing skyscraper.
Game development is also where AI has been practical for years, and Embark is a front-runner. The studio has used machine learning for animation and AI-assisted voice for its in-game commentators. Its second game, ARC Raiders, launched in October 2025 and sold more than 12 million copies in its first three months.
“The best feeling is watching a match where players use something you built in a way you never planned for. With destruction, that happens every single game.”
