ARC Raiders may be the most significant game to come out of Embark Studios so far, but that doesn't mean the team has forgotten about its first-person, free-to-play shooter from 2023, The Finals. Today, Embark is kicking off the game's third year after it was shadow-dropped at The Game Awards 2023, with Season 9: Dragon Rising, an update that Embark says is "focused on growth, accessibility and renewed competitive momentum."
With that focus, on top of Season 9 introducing a new megacity map called Fangwai City, a new battle pass, and several new quality of life and balance improvements - all things you might expect from a seasonal update - it's also introducing a new 8v8 gameplay mode, Point Break, and key updates to its ranked system.
Point Break is the clear highlight in Season 9, though not just because it's a new, bigger mode compared to other modes offered in The Finals. You may recall that Embark Studios was initially founded by former Battlefield developers who wanted to return to a shooter that emphasized destructability in its matches, and to hear Embark describe the new mode in today's Season 9 reveal sounds like the team is getting back to their Battlefield roots in a way that makes sense for The Finals.
Point Break puts players as either attackers or defenders, with the lines of the battlefield constantly shifting, with attackers looking to destroy objectives that the defenders are charged with protecting. It's a large-scale game mode (well, large-scale for The Finals) that Embark describes as "a mode where you always know where the action is headed, and what your team needs from you," which could work just as well as a description for some game modes in Battlefield 6.
Point Break, the new Fangwei City map, the extra optimization work done by Embark, and all of the other quality of life improvements Embark discusses in the video above really do hammer home the point that Embark is trying to inject some life back into The Finals. "Season 9 isn't just new content, it's a stronger, more flexible version of The Finals, from top to bottom," Embark says in its Season 9 reveal video.
And it couldn't have come at a better time, with all eyes back on Embark thanks to ARC Raiders. While SteamDB numbers are never the full picture, it still doesn't exactly look great to see that The Finals hasn't had more than 50K concurrent players on Steam since January 2024. While it's impressive that The Finals has been able to stick around long enough to reach its third year, which is more than can be said for some other recent free-to-play multiplayer first-person shooters, it can't exactly continue to survive if its numbers don't start improving.
We'll see if Season 9: Dragon Rising is the adrenaline shot that the game needed, or if it's another whiff, bringing the game closer to its demise.
About the author: David has been writing about videogames, technology, and culture since 2020, with a focus on reporting daily news across multiple publications, including GameDaily.Biz, GameSkinny, and PlayStation Universe before joining Wccftech in 2025. David started contributing as Canada/US reporter for Wccftech's gaming section in 2025. Besides being up-to-date on the industry's movements, he loves interviewing developers, reviewing games, and writing intricate essays about the symbolism and layered meanings to be found in rich narratives as he's done for publications like GamesIndustry.Biz, LostInCult, and others. Outside of games he loves movies, music, theatre, his hometown, and his family, though not necessarily in that order.
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