Everything Wrong with For Honor, The Most Original fighter in 15 years

When For Honor was first shown at E3 2015, I fell in love. The combination between medieval combat and strategic warfare looked to be a polished version of what Lord of the Rings: Conquest was attempting to pull off. Ubisoft brought their A game and in 2017 delivered a product that did everything it promised to do. But, nearing the 2nd birthday of the game, For Honor is starting to show its cracks, many of which had been there since release but were easier to ignore when the game was newer and less competitive.

For the uninitiated, let’s talk about the gameplay. For Honor, at its core, is a fighting game. It’s flashy, gory, and highly strategic, but it’s still a fighter. The main gameplay centers around 1v1 combat in a battlefield. Each playable character, divided into classes heavy, medium, and light, is able to pull off a variety of moves after locking onto an opponent. After this lock-on is engaged, the two combatants (each taking inspiration from ancient warriors) may block or attack in one of three directions and the last man standing is the victor.

These duels take place in the context of a greater 4v4 battle in which two teams and their allied NPCs struggle for dominance over a battlefield with 3 areas of control: two capturable bases familiar to anyone who has played Battlefield or Battlefront before and a center area where the NPC armies of each team clash, attempting to push each other back.

Despite its simplicity on the outset (block, dodge, light attack, heavy attack, guard break) the game quickly reveals that its combat is much deeper than it first appears. Parrying, unblockable attacks, infinite chains, stamina management, buffs and debuffs, feat usage, mind games, stunning, gimping, and ambushes are all par for the course during a standard 15 minute game. Combine that with the breathtaking art design, and the brutal finishing moves that would make Mortal Kombat giggle with delight you’ve got yourself a recipe for a great game.

But all is not well in the kingdom. For Honor, despite all its enviable qualities, has a dark side. Questionable servers, a boring single-player mode, insta-kill combos, tons of pay-wall unlocks, a bewildering meta-game a la Chrome Hounds, bothersome equipment management, poor sportsmanship, and an in-game rating system that seems to do nothing. For Honor is a game that’s almost as easy to hate as it is to like, and that’s not a good thing.

So let’s break down the worst of For Honor’s issues and get to the root of what Ubisoft could do to fix their most interesting franchise.

The three biggest problems with For Honor are map size, the tech, and poor sportsmanship. For the sake of my own sanity, let’s start with what I consider to be the single biggest problem with the game. The maps.

EVERYBODY’S AT C WHAT A SURPRISE!

Now don’t get me wrong, the art design and heck, even the lay out of most of the varied multiplayer maps are awesome. I have no issues with either of those things. And for the most parts the maps aren’t glitchy either. But they’re way too small!

The central cause of almost every balance related issue in the game is due almost entirely to the game’s relatively small maps. Even the largest battlefields only take about 20 seconds to run from one end to the other, assuming you’re not attacked along the way, this number shrinks even smaller if you’re playing as a light-class character or have a speed buff.

In a game like Call of Duty or Halo small maps present a nice change of pace to the larger maps where traversing the battlefield is a somewhat tedious affair. But these games have ranged weapons, a very short time-to-kill, and much quicker respawns. In Halo, spawning is usually 5 seconds, sometimes as low as 3. In CoD? It’s instant in most game modes. For Honor has a default respawn timer of 12 seconds and a max timer of 15, which is an eternity in a multiplayer game.

The problem with having the maps smaller, is that the objective points are scrunched together, and there is always 1 less object than player in a 4v4 match. Meaning that in the best-case scenario 1 person on each team is going to get ganged up on and murdered by a pair of opponents. In other cases, both entire teams might swarm a single or pair of points and stay there the majority of the game resulting a frustrating cycle of backstabbing and cheesing.

A reenactment of me getting poked to death by a pair of Orochis.

Now being double-teamed isn’t the worst thing that could happen, and some classes are built around tolerating it, but it does feel pretty crappy when you had a really good duel with someone and right as you’re about to strike the final blow you get cheesed from behind and stabbed in the head or pushed off a cliff.

The game has built-in features to encourage players not to bunch up. Team damage is low, but present and you’re able to interrupt your teammates attacks if you bump them or hit them during a move, which could turn the tables against you in a potentially crucial part of the game. But it’s not enough. The dominant strategy in many games ends up roving around with your team, moving from point to point, gimping the enemy as they respawn, and attempting to desync their spawns with their teams, allowing for easy kills.

This entire strategy would be nerfed if the maps were 50% bigger. Optional or timed secondary objectives could be added to make the maps not feels barren. For example: a keep could open up half-way through the game and buff the team that controls it. Or a ballista could be constructed by controlling a point for long enough in a row to give your team access to a siege weapon.

Having larger battlefields also potentially solves the issue of players not understanding what their characters do. Heavy characters are slow, hard to interrupt, and often deal high amounts of damage. They’re designed for taking and holding objectives. If the maps were bigger, this would dissuade players playing heavy or hybrid character classes from charging around the map getting lost or swarmed with NPCs.

Before we talk about For Honor’s technical issues, let’s dip our toes into it’s player base. Like many games, there is much discussion on forums, youtube, and social media about the games “toxic community”. Some think that you should be able to play the game however you like and that the most effective strategy should always be employed, regardless of how fun it is. Some think otherwise. And those people are correct.

Now hold your horses, I know I wrote an entire article about how stupid the idea of a toxic player base is, and I stand by that idea, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t exceptions to the rule.

One of For Honor’s major issues is that there seems to be a schism among the player base as to how the game is meant to be played. There are the casuals and the hardcore. Generally, the casual players care little for the role-playing or immersive aspects of the game. For them, winning is all that matters. These are the people that are almost always responsible for gimping and backstabbing, which is just as frustrating to your teammates as it is to the player getting stabbed. (Note that there is no class that benefits or is encouraged to cheap-shot opponents)

Now, this isn’t a Call of Duty situation where I think that anyone who uses a certain gun or gun-class is a “try-hard”. It’s less specific than that. I’m not asking everyone to play a certain way, or only use certain feats or equipment. I’m just asking that we have a little decorum for goodness sake.

If there there of my teammates hammering away at some poor soul, I don’t jump on it to try to snake that last hit and score a kill for myself. I play defense.

If I’m in the dueling mode, I don’t run away from my opponent and make him chase me all over the arena, trying to kick him off a ledge. I fight him, and if I’m feeling friendly, maybe I’ll throw him an emote.

Hiyah.

There’s so much personality packed into the game, and it’s clear that the developers were hoping players would fight with honor. Bow to each other, and finish off their opponents with flashy execution moves. But most players just go for the fastest, spammiest combos. There reason why even now, two years after launch, the Orochi is still the most played character, is because he’s fast as hell, and has a three hit light attack combo. The Orochi isn’t a bad character class, an people who can really play him are awesome. But most players pick him as soon as they realize that he can cheese out almost every other class with limited effort. They treat him like a vulture, not a dragon and that’s a huge bummer.

The reason the Viking vanguard, Warlord, and the Shugoki classes are so rare online is because they’re the worst at cheesing. The only people who play Warlords and Shugoki either are terrifyingly good or have never played before. There is no middle ground.

Unfortunately, this problem doesn’t have a great solution like the map issue. It’s largely up to Ubisoft’s community management and the community itself to self-regulate. Nerfing characters will simply result in another character becoming the spammer’s choice. The worst part about this kind of play is that it’s all consuming. If two players or more in a lobby are playing this way, it’s often not long before the rest follow, which is usually the point in the game I leave and watch netflix instead.

The only solution I can suggest is to have two lobbies for multiplayer. A quick-match lobby that matches you with whoever very quickly, at the expense of player quality and a traditional lobby, that is meant for players who want to enjoy the finer mechanics of the game and not just spam right bumper over and over and over and over.

Okay, we made it. Now let’s talk about something decidedly less political, the servers.

Online games are no stranger to connectivity problems. Even the biggest, and best maintained games in the industry suffer from connection failures and lag. But For Honor is unique in how bad the problem is.

I actually quit playing For Honor about a month after I bought it, for over a year. Why? Because my games would drop connection or soft lock almost every time I played. In a single play session, I joined 12 games over the course of a little over an hour. 5 of them dropped me out of the game mid-session. 1 soft locked behind the load screen. And 1 hard crashed, booting me back to the Xbox dashboard. This is unacceptable.

For those keeping track at home, this is a 58% failure rate. Most games have a drop rate of 1 in 20, not 1 in 2.

Even when you get into a lobby, you have a mighty good chance of dealing with lagging opponents and jumpy AI. In a game that requires such precise timing, this kind of issue is infuriating and suck all the fun out of the game. The only thing less fun than losing to someone being cheap, is losing because your character keeps missing the opponent because of network connectivity issues.

And this isn’t just an Xbox Live issue, both PC and PS4 servers are equally shaky and it’s been this way since launch.

Combine this with the clunky menus, the fact that you can’t check or modify your character during load screens, and the totally opaque three army meta-game the game just feels incomplete. Adding to this is the push towards the free-to-play. Pay coins for everything from costumes, to new characters, and emotes (which in today’s age is par for the course), but gold is sold at such a preposterous premium it would make no sense to buy it, even when it’s on sale.

The best deal you can get in the game is 100,000 gold coins for $100. But each emote/execution is 7000 gold coins. Meaning for twice the price of the base game, you could buy 14 animations.

Can you believe it?

For Honor isn’t just a good game, it’s an original one. Original games are worth their weight in gold. For every hundred samey shooters there’s a Titanfall. For every 1000 garbage simulator games, there’s a Zoo Tycoon.

Right now, there’s only one game like For Honor, and if Ubisoft doesn’t play it right, this rare new breed might go extinct before it even has a chance to evolve. With the upcoming release of the second wave of DLC characters, this time all coming from mainland Asia, there is still hope for the game. Balance patches and new animations are also apparently inbound but only time will tell if this is just For Honor’s tail or if the new content is being spurred on by the success of the game.

Let’s hope it’s the latter.

Oh and PS. minor nitpick, but why do all the Chinese characters have their faces out? The original designs for every character had masks, helmets, or hats obscuring their faces. Now every Chinese character totally violates this trend? I mean the Highlander and the Witch Doctor, already kind of did this, but the masks have way more character than a generic man face.

Cmon’ Ubisoft, stick to your guns. Don’t get lazy on us.