In The Finals, I’ve worked on implementing various destruction concepts, including impact damage, moving structures, and sinking buildings. See images below for examples.
Impact damage
Moving buildings
Sinking buildings
I design destruction systems with gameplay balance in mind, ensuring fair combat across all maps.
In one case, an area collapsed too easily—removing key play space and flooding the environment with debris. To solve it, I introduced a system that balances structural strength across floors. This preserved important areas, controlled debris, and maintained dynamic gameplay throughout the match.
My Role
I design destruction behavior in maps—how structures collapse, what remains, and how that impacts player movement and combat flow. Since everything in The Finals can be destroyed, every change in the environment needs to feel believable and retain a good gameplay environment.
Challenges
One of the biggest challenges was ensuring that destruction consistently created interesting and playable spaces across thousands of possible scenarios. Unlike traditional level design, where the environment is static, designing for a fully dynamic destruction system meant I had to account for how every part of a building might break and how that would impact movement, cover, sightlines, and combat flow.
Another key challenge was meeting our different gameplay pillars within destructible environments. We needed destruction to enhance freedom, creativity, and tactical opportunities without breaking gameplay. This often required solving problems like maintaining navigation to critical areas and preventing spaces from becoming too cluttered or chaotic.
