The Finals Update Adds Wild New Heavy Hitters Mode

Summary

• Heavy Hitters game mode in The Finals transforms gameplay into melee-focused team combat with sledgehammers.
• Players in Heavy Hitters use a unique loadout focused on knocking opponents over the edge, with gravity-defying knockback and new rewards.

The Finals has introduced a new limited-time game mode called Heavy Hitters, which transforms the first-person shooter into something much more akin to a Super Smash Bros. style of gameplay. Available in The Finals‘ 6.9.0 patch, Heavy Hitters eschews gunpowder and lead for a melee-focused team approach to combat, with the goal of knocking all opponents over the edge of a building’s roof.

The big Season 6 update for The Finals, titled Rising Stars, was released on March 20 and has already introduced a lot of new content to the game. New additions include the Team Deathmatch as a permanent feature, with six different arenas to choose from, providing players with a fresh set of progression rewards and leader board rankings. Another big feature introduced in March was the inclusion of new weapons, including a minigun for the Heavy class.

Heavy players in The Finals are now getting some extra attention with the release of Heavy Hitters, as the five-on-five team-based game mode that hands every player the same melee-centric loadout, with sledgehammers being the primary focus. The main difference between this game mode and standard gameplay in The Finals is that players cannot be eliminated by running out of health. Rather, they will have to be ejected from the playable area by force, and the knockback power of weapons used against them will increase as their health level drops, allowing for some gravity-defying hits. Players will also be able to make use of Goo Grenades, Anti-Gravity Cubes, and Jump Pads as they strive for dominance in the new game mode.

The launch of the new game mode also means the addition of a new destructible arena in The Finals. Although Heavy Hitters will be limited to just one location, the floating construction site setting of the Pop Drop Arena provides players with plenty of areas from which to try to launch their opponents over the edge and achieve victory. Players will also be able to unlock some unique rewards by participating in Heavy Hitters matches, including the Legendary Hammered On Juice Sledghammer and King of the Sip Headwear.

Since sledgehammers will be taking center stage among the locked-in loadouts, there are also some new options for customizing these weapons in The Finals. New skins for sledgehammers include the addition of some less conventional weaponry and include a green and red plastic-looking toy hammer and a watermelon impaled on the end of a tree branch, along with some more traditional looks featuring menacing wood-and-metal variations.

The Finals Update 6.9.0 Patch Notes

Get ready to bring the pain in HEAVY HITTERS, a high-impact Limited Time Event where everyone plays with a loadout built for bonking and bouncing! Grab your Sledgehammer and start swinging in this 5v5 Platform Fighter mode. The only way to win is to knock your opponents clear off the edge of the all-new Pop Drop Arena!

Expect intense action, aerial chaos, and heart-pounding showdowns, all fueled by the explosive energy of OSPUZE and their fierce new flavor: Tiger Juice. Complete contracts to unlock fun rewards and earn your stripes!

This mode is raw power and pure momentum, so savor the flavor while it lasts! It’s time to go wild.*

Drink up! Get your bonk on!

*Do not consume more than the recommended maximum dose.

Boosters Activated!

We’re getting close to the finish line! XP DASH is live and running now through the end of the Season. It’s your chance to accelerate your progress with bonus XP and Fans!

Whether you’re catching up or charging ahead, this is the boost you’ve been waiting for. Stack those rewards and finish strong!

On your mark, get set, DASH!

Fight for the Right to Rebrand!

The season is approaching its final stretch, and that can only mean one thing for the World Tour: Sponsor Showdown! OSPUZE, ENGIMO, and ALFA ACTA have battled for your loyalty all season. Now it’s your chance to show where you stand and fight for your sponsor’s rise to the top.

Every match you play in any Mode contributes to your sponsor’s daily standings. As one pulls ahead, their influence spreads across the Arena. From billboards to walls to full visual takeovers, each map becomes a live battleground for brand control!

At the end of each day, the top-performing sponsor claims dominance over chosen maps. By season’s end, only one name will tower above the rest!

The Arena is waiting. The CEOs are watching.

Who are you fighting for?

New Twitch Drops

We’ve got a whole new set of drops to set your loadout ablaze! Watch any stream of THE FINALS on Twitch and unlock the all-new Broadcast Blaze weapon skins.

Whether you’re here for the plays or the style, don’t miss the chance to claim them all!

Watch your favorite Contestant and cheer them on from the bleachers!

Arena News

The tides have shifted:

The water in Kyoto won’t be slowing you down anymore! Move freely through the water like the aquatic creatures you’ve always wanted to be!

P.E.A.C.E. was always an Option:

Into the woods without delay, but careful not to lose the way. The P.E.A.C.E. Center has been officially added to Team Deathmatch! Time to jump back in and answer the age-old question: If a Contestant falls in a forest and no one is around, do they make a sound? (Yes they do. It sounds like coins.)

The End of Endless Effects

We’ve finally tracked down and eradicated the root cause to one of the most persistent and annoying bugs in the game: a complicated but infuriatingly common series of events (only sometimes) could cause the cue states of effects to persist forever. It took nearly six whole seasons to pinpoint the catalyst but we’ve finally cracked the case! This issue caused all sorts of visual irritants to be “stuck” to players, like burning, Invincibility (just the visual state), Detection (AKA opponents constantly being tracked) and all the rest! Game-breaking? Occasionally. Annoying? Always.

We’re so relieved to introduce this fix, so no enemies are permanently tracked through walls, and no more teammates constantly on fire!

Here are the “no-longer-lingering” effects:

• Sonar pings
• Tracking dart
• Motion detector
• Burning
• Gas
• Invulnerable (respawn)
• Invisibility
• Nullifier

It’s Sledgehammer Time!

In honor of Heavy Hitters, you’ll find a host of hammers for you to choose from! Make sure to equip one on a selected Heavy contestant before entering the event to spawn into the Arena with your personal favorite!

OSPUZE Tiger Juice also has a few more accessories that’ll help you release your inner predator and remember this event forever!

And of course, there are plenty of Balance changes, fixes, and content updates to read about below:

Balance Changes

Maps

Kyoto

• Removed the slow movement effect when running through water

Weapons

ARN-220

• Updated the recoil pattern to be the same for both magazines, making the weapon feel more consistent to aim

FAMAS

• Decreased the amount of visual recoil when firing the FAMAS, making it slightly less shaky

KS-23

• Increased accuracy by decreasing bullet dispersion when firing from the hip while crouch moving
• Increased accuracy by decreasing bullet dispersion when aiming down sights while crouch moving
• Increased accuracy by decreasing bullet dispersion when firing from the hip while standing still
• Increased accuracy by decreasing bullet dispersion when aiming down sights while standing still
• Increased accuracy by decreasing bullet dispersion when firing from the hip while running
• Increased accuracy by decreasing bullet dispersion when aiming down sights while running

Dev Note: These changes make the KS-23 much more accurate while in various movement states, hopefully increasing its viability

M11

• Decreased the jitter at the end of the weapon’s recoil pattern, making it smoother and easier to use at the end of long bursts of firing
• Decreased the amount of visual recoil when firing the M11, making it slightly less shaky

Melee Weapons

• Improved hit sweeps across all melee weapons, to make them more reliable. As a result, it should feel like fewer sweeps get lost to collision with world objects or geometry

Dev Note: We believe this change significantly improves the reliability of melee combat, but we’ll continue to monitor melee and make further improvements based on what we see.

XP-54

• Decreased damage from 17 to 16
• Increased rate of fire from 850RPM to 860RPM Dev Note: XP-54 has been performing exceptionally well since our last buff, with its effectiveness sitting well above all other weapons now. To bring it back in line with most of the other weapons, we want to try to get it to a place somewhere between what it was before and what it has been most recently. To do this we’ve lowered the damage back to its old value, but increased the fire rate slightly to offset that

Content and Bug Fixes

Animation

• Fixed an issue where your lower body could sometimes block your aim after launching off a Jump Pad and aiming down sights
• Fixed an issue where bullets on the M60 Lid Lifter were visible when they should be hidden while reloading from empty
• Fixed a case of animation culling where melee strike animations were missing for other players viewing the action in third person
• Fixed an A-pose visual glitch when looking down while in the Nullified state
• Fixed ladder animation syncing issues when using Dual Blades or the Riot Shield
• Fixed broken hand poses in the Vanish Bomb inspect animation
• Fixed melee actions (of the Winch-user) not displaying correctly for contestants being winched
• Fixed a clipping issue when exiting ladders at certain angles

Audio

• Set the mixer to lower the pitch and mute the game audio when paused in spectator mode
• Fixed an issue where some inspect sounds, such as the Katana skin on the sword, were not played for spectators

Clubs

• Improved the club filter reset so that it now properly clears all active filters

Customization & Cosmetics

• Fixed clipping between the Bout Blanket boxing robe and some facewear items
• Fixed the position of the Beating Badge Emblem
• Fixed the Nyabyte Top to work better with pets
• Player-created outfits now properly reflect changes when equipping items directly from the store
• Fixed sticker clipping issues on the ‘Fowl Fury’ skin for the Smoke Grenade
• Emerald Flamethrower skin now shows the correct material on dropped tanks
• Fixed an issue where the Heavy body type appeared slimmed down on low/medium settings when wearing the Beanie
• Fixed stretching and visual issues on several shoe items (Geta, Arch Rival Geta, Tradition Treaders, Lace-Up Kickers, Valor Shift Boots) when worn by the muscular body type
• Holograms now display correctly on the Heavy Muscular body type
• Fixed clipping between football shoes (cleats) and pants
• Fixed the camera angle when zooming in on Tattoos in store offers
• Fixed clipping issues between the bun hairstyle and the Backwards Baseball Cap
• Adjusted Wildlands Vest to prevent clipping with bandoliers and emblems
• Vinerunner Cargos no longer clip with shoes
• Season 3 Ruby rewards are being added
• Dev note: Thank you to all the S3 Ruby players who signed the petition! You should start to see your rewards show up (Player Card background and Emblem) and then a Player Card badge in the next big update! Thanks to a very good egg, Newton!
• Minor art fixes on several hairstyles
• Fixed an issue where “Highlight Reel” and “Holtow Fine Print” did not display the player name correctly
• Fixed stretching and jittering on the “Trail Blazer” backpack’s physics assets

Gadgets

• Optimized the visual fidelity on the Barricade panels to eliminate visible gaps on low graphics settings and fix clipping issues

Game Modes

Cashout Modes

• Fixed a bug where the Game Show Event widget disappeared after a cashout

Power Shift

• Fixed an issue where, if the platform was centered during overtime, the wrong team could be presented as the winner
• In overtime, the winning team now correctly receives $25K in cash, replacing the previous behavior where no cash was awarded

Quick Cash

• Fixed the “respawn timer extended” message sometimes displaying incorrectly

Team Deathmatch

• Fixed an issue where environment self-kills were not being penalized
• Self-kills now give the enemy team $25 if the player hadn’t taken any damage beforehand

Terminal Attack

• Fixed an issue where health regeneration was not working as intended, restoring proper healing behavior

Gameplay

• Fixed an issue where Dummy health bars in the Practice Range would stop displaying
• Fixed an issue where initial player spawns could be unfairly skewed toward objectives instead of using proper symmetric spawn locations
• Fixed an issue where friendly player outlines were not visible in the beginning of rounds
• Fixed a core issue that caused effects like sonar, burning, Dash, Jump Pad and invisibility to get stuck permanently, and prevented new effects like tracking dart from being applied
• Fixed a rare issue where players would be unable to move or shoot when spawning into the game
• Fixed an issue where ziplines could be launched unintentionally

Maps

General

• Vegetation: Fixed an issue with multiple trees that sometimes could trigger a vault unexpectedly
• Adjusted health values of multiple assets to allow for more consistency in traversal and cover
• Fixed issue where the floor in the Practice Range building would hover mid-air after destruction
• Fixed a rare issue where ziplines would fail to load in the level

Kyoto

• Added missing destruction on several smaller props

Seoul

• Fix an issue where players were able to accidentally vault on pipes underneath catwalks
• Fixed missing collision on pillar in staircases

Performance & Stability

• Minor optimization to shader pipeline precompilation
• Crash fixes
• Optimized the amount of network data needed for destruction events
• Improved animation performance

Rendering

• Fixed missing Contestants in reflections during tournament intros
• Fixed rare issue causing corrupted landscape textures
• Change DLSS CNN model option to use preset E instead of the default preset

Settings

• Fixed unresponsive gamepad keybindings for text chat
• Fixed an issue with video settings not saving properly in the Xbox PC version of the game

Specializations

Cloaking Device

• Prevented invisibility from being canceled by emotes, and ensured Cloaking Device activation is not interrupted when holding an environmental prop

UI

• Fixed a font inconsistency in the Private Matches screen
• Implemented a new layout for loading screen rules
• Added filters to the Expression screen
• Body types are now categorized as common rarity in the Filters menu
• Fixed a bug where the pointer would go missing for the first 3.5 seconds of the Post-round results screen
• Fixed an issue causing new markers to appear on game mode selection every time the game booted
• Players can no longer bypass archetype locks by double-clicking tiles in the ‘Create Contestant’ page
• Outfit packs in the lobby select screen now follow the same order as the ‘My Outfit’ tab
• Added missing weapon category labels to Season 6 weapons in the equipment screen
• Added a bespoke HUD element for incoming and active Game Show Events
• Club messages will no longer appear in-game when the ‘Show Club Channel’ option is turned off
• Improved gamepad navigation in the customization filter popup

VFX

• Fixed the missing VFX effects in a certain spot when using the Dematerializer in the Las Vegas Parking Garage.

Weapons

Melee Weapons

• Fixed an issue where players could hit other players through walls when standing very close to them when initiating an attack

Dev Note: This fix also means that Riot Shields now more reliably block melee attacks, although the first person perspective can make it hard for players to tell when a swing hit them from the side versus directly hitting the shield. We’re hoping to further improve that issue in future.

Minigun

• Fixed an issue where the Minigun could wind up while being pulled by the Winch Claw