The Finals surprised launched during The Game Awards on Thursday night and its popularity has picked up where last month’s open beta left off. There has been some negative feedback, however, from players upset that player movement is now slower than it was during the beta.

Except, it’s not slower, say the developers – there have been no changes to the movement system at all. Instead they’re investigating why it apparently feels slower, and say they’ve found the culprits.

“We have been investigating your feedback on the feel of the movement from Open Beta to now. It’s been hard to pinpoint because there was no change in the movement system or the movement speed between the two tests. But in our research, we believe we may have found the problem,” says an Embark Studios community manager on The Finals Discord server.

“We have identified a few things that might be causing everyone to experience the gameplay differently. In the past month, we have made small adjustments to animations, sounds, and settings that, in combination, may be giving the feeling of slower movement — especially in light and medium archetypes. Settings were reset as well, so FOV is defaulted to 71, which can have a huge impact on how the game feels. “

Embark recommend checking and changing your FOV settings, but are also working on “rebalancing some of the changes” to make movement feel as it once did.

It’s quite common for player feedback to mis-identify the cause of an issue, and for audio and visual elements to have a big impact in first-person shooters especially.

There’s a fairly famous example of this from Enemy Territory: Wolfenstein in which players reported that one team’s machinegun was more powerful than the enemy’s equivalent. It wasn’t – the stats for each weapon were identical – but Splash Damage checked the kill stats and found that players were getting more kills with the weapon they thought was more powerful. The issue turned out to be with the sound effect. One of the weapons sounded more powerful than the other, causing players using it to fight more aggressively and thus get more kills.

The Finals has had some other launch quirks including server issues preventing players from matchmaking or causing disconnects during matches, and an ongoing issue with error code TFLA0004 that leaves players “locked out of gameplay”. Embark are “feverishly” investigating the causes, they say.

We’ll have a review of The Finals up later this week, I hope. (It depends how long it takes me to write it.)