The finals is such an impressive game. I’d love to learn how they managed it. The destruction of the entire map doesn’t slow down the game at all.
That said, the only thing stopping the finals from becoming a leading franchise is some balance and game design issues. They’ve built a wonderful casino, but the rules for the card games are rough around the edges. I hope they can drive a dump truck of cash up to riot HQ, and hire a designer passionate about esports. There is so many obviously wrong things in the game… like the recent lh-1 buff that lasted a day before being reverted. What were they thinking? That said, it’s the first game I’ve played in twenty years that makes gaming feel new, and we love so many things about it.
I'm a gameplay engineer who worked on THE FINALS. There's a GDC talk that one of the engineers who worked on the destruction system gave and I imagine that talk will be uploaded on youtube at some point in the future: https://schedule.gdconf.com/session/engineering-mayhem-techn...
Most of the answer to your question is really good iterative tooling on the authoring side, and very pinpoint optimizations on the runtime side. You basically amortize everything, how much is "strain" is simulated per frame, how much physics simulation is simulated per frame, how much is replicated per frame, etc. Almost any game could do what THE FINALS did but it really just requires you to solve many of the hard obvious problems for a good couple years.
I'm glad you enjoy the game! I also agree with you that there's a lot that can be improved.
That said, the only thing stopping the finals from becoming a leading franchise is some balance and game design issues. They’ve built a wonderful casino, but the rules for the card games are rough around the edges. I hope they can drive a dump truck of cash up to riot HQ, and hire a designer passionate about esports. There is so many obviously wrong things in the game… like the recent lh-1 buff that lasted a day before being reverted. What were they thinking? That said, it’s the first game I’ve played in twenty years that makes gaming feel new, and we love so many things about it.