THE FINALS Season 12 Prime Time: Solo Showdown Ditches Teams for Elimination

Embark Studios has unveiled Season 12 of THE FINALS, branded Prime Time, and the headline change is a format the arena shooter has never had: a mode with no teams. The studio announced the season in a post on Steam titled "Welcome to a New Era of THE FINALS" on October 20, 2026.

Solo Showdown trades trios for elimination rounds

THE FINALS is built around Cashout, a mode where teams of three race to open a vault and deliver it to a cashout box. Solo Showdown breaks from that structure entirely: 12 players enter, matches run across three rounds of mini-games, and the bottom four players on the scoreboard are eliminated at the end of each round. In a hands-on preview with developer interviews, DualShockers reports that each round is built around one particular build and archetype, so the mini-games double as fresh looks at loadouts players might otherwise skip.

One example mode is Boom Brawl, where every contestant is a sword-wielding Light who drops throwable bombs on death. The season also adds the Prime Time gameplay trailer's game-show flourishes to matches themselves: announcer Scotty now calls out contestant names as they make plays in the arena. Fellow host June does not have the feature yet.

A new Light playstyle and flatter class balance

Solo Showdown's Light-heavy modes arrive alongside a real Light expansion. A new Light playstyle brings True Sight, a reworked version of Thermal Vision that dulls the world and highlights enemies in their team's color through any non-solid object without granting full wall hacks, plus two new gadgets. The Translocator swaps the player's position with an object while keeping that object's momentum, and the Mimic Device lets a player become an object and take on its properties, meaning they can be thrown or exploded like any other prop.

Health pools shift as well. Light builds gain 25 health and Heavy builds lose 25, pulling the two outer classes closer to Medium and compressing a balance gap that has defined the roster since launch. Destruction is deeper this season too: breaking a wall or floor now spawns cracks that spiderweb outward, and individual debris pieces carry their own physics, so a damaged structure can collapse from footsteps or rumble rather than a scripted pattern.

Embark Studios released the Prime Time gameplay trailer on October 15, 2026. THE FINALS is free to play on Windows via Steam and launched in December 2023.

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