The Finals new season is here, toting permanent team deathmatch and a giant minigun

THE FINALS | Season 6 Trailer - YouTube

The Finals has experimented a fair bit with its gamemode selection since it came out, ranging from a serviceable free-for-all format to the more popular Power Shift—and that continues with today’s launch of Season 6, which will permanently add team deathmatch as a mode for anyone eager to trade all these fancy rulesets for a no-nonsense bloodbath.

TDM is available to players on six maps this time, and is the headlining addition of the game’s newest season, Rising Stars, which was outlined in its shiny launch trailer. It brings with it three new guns: a mid-range bullet hose of an assault rifle, a snappy lever-action rifle, and a gargantuan minigun, each of which corresponds to the game’s light, medium, and heavy weight classes,. Not to call it too early, but it always seems from the outside like heavy players have the most fun.

Regardless of how you take your Finals, the new season also boasts an updated Las Vegas Stadium, quality-of-life improvements like saved outfit slots, anonymity settings and a streamer mode, and a whole host of balance tweaks. And as always, there’s a new battle pass in store, with players signing up to earn rewards from one of three new in-game sponsors. With over 100 rewards to snag, players will have plenty to use those new outfit slots on.

Power Shift is also coming to two new arenas, Bernal and Las Vegas Stadium, and has seen some slight retooling to its platform mechanics: namely, goo will no longer slow the mode’s moving platform down as players fight for control over it and it’ll go a bit faster if you only have one or two players on it. Embark Studios explained the changes in the patch notes, saying: "Quite a lot of Power Shift matches get ‘stuck’ near the middle of the platform’s route … we hope to see a more dynamic back-and-forth along more sections of the path."

Notably, the update also removes the aforementioned FFA format Bank It from quick play, with Embark noting it was the least played game mode and that TDM "has similar gameplay but has proven to be much more popular."

The Finals has long been at a crossroads with how much it leans into the sweatiness of its hyper-competitive shootouts, as opposed to the casual appeal of its inherent bedlam. The move to embrace TDM certainly edges toward the casual fun direction, which is fine by me, but it’s hard to say what the staying power of this mode will be—or if Embark will be able to simultaneously appeal to both casual and competitive sensibilities in the long run.

The Finals’ sixth season is out today, and the game is free to download on Steam.

Justin first became enamored with PC gaming when World of Warcraft and Neverwinter Nights 2 rewired his brain as a wide-eyed kid. As time has passed, he's amassed a hefty backlog of retro shooters, CRPGs, and janky '90s esoterica. Whether he's extolling the virtues of Shenmue or troubleshooting some fiddly old MMO, it's hard to get his mind off games with more ambition than scruples. When he's not at his keyboard, he's probably birdwatching or daydreaming about a glorious comeback for real-time with pause combat. Any day now...

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