For Honor Beta Impressions

For Honor, the action fighting game from Ubisoft that is officially released today, recently held a closed beta which ran from the 26th to the 30th of January.  I managed to get an invite and spent around 15-20 hours with the game, and these are some of the details I have learned about the full release of the game, as well as my initial impressions of the beta test.  First of all, I’d like to briefly outline the premise of the game and the story, though the beta mainly consisted of online multiplayer to stress the servers and provided little in the way of single player.  The game allows players to play the roles of historical soldiers such as Medieval Knights, Samurai, and Vikings within a medieval fantasy setting.  The campaign was detailed in one of the cinematic trailers for the game, in which natural disasters ravage the landscape, leaving the three factions warring over the scarce resources.  The bloodthirsty warlord, Apollyon, believes the Knights, Samurai and Vikings to have grown weak, and thus manipulates them and sparks conflict between them which lasts for millennia.  I don’t know whether each faction has a separate campaign, or if you change perspective as you play, but I’m hopeful that there are three unique campaigns for each of the three groups.The beta introduced us to how the multiplayer works, with each player joining one of the three respective factions and battling to take control of the world map.  The game is set up so that there are rounds in which the factions fight against each other to advance their territories in the world map.  These rounds lasted 6 hours and progression depended on which faction was winning more matches in each territory.  Each faction started out with 20 territories and gained or lost these depending on their performance.  Personally, I played in the Vikings faction and at one stage we controlled 33 territories, while the Samurai controlled 16 and the Knights a mere 11.  However, momentum would often swing, and 6 hours later the Vikings were reduced to 27 territories.  This element added a nice dynamic to the multiplayer, as I was often choosing to fight in territories where we were losing in order to help my Viking brethren seize control - though often times one would need to concede defeat in order to spare resources.  The game also allocates war assets depending on your performance in individual matches, which you can then deploy to territories on the world map to help your faction.  These rounds accumulate to form larger seasons, which last 3 months, and I believe the winner at the end of each season receives various rewards, be it experience or loot.  The game’s DLC plan is also tied into these seasons as new content, be it heroes, game modes or maps, releases at the start of each season.  Heroes and maps are free, but there is a season pass which provides bonus experience as well as boosts to gear and cosmetic items.  I’m glad to see that players won’t be divided into season pass and non-season pass holders, as splitting the player base is one way to insure a game loses traction quickly.  The gameplay of For Honor felt fluid and accessible, yet challenging.  It is almost like Tekken or Mortal Kombat in that each character has their own moveset for you to learn off.  The game is centred on one key feature, in that players use the right stick on their controller to control their character’s offensive and defensive stance.  Players with quick reflexes and the ability to vary the direction of their attacks will see more success than one-dimensional approaches.  As such, there appears to be a high skill ceiling, so that players who are skilled may seem insurmountable at first, and weaker players are easy to brush aside, but even the most skilful of players may be overcome when faced by two or three teammates.  Thus I found it better when playing with friends who were in my party chat, as we were able to co-ordinate when we would attack and which points on the map we were going to defend.  I am concerned with the longevity of the game, as the game modes may become tedious and repetitive due to the same objectives in each round.  There were three game types in the beta, a 4v4 mode with AI minions for you to slaughter and points to capture, a 2v2 and 1v1 mode which purely consist of killing the enemy players with no AI interference.  These game modes are enjoyable, but I am concerned with their repetitive nature and I hope more modes are added in later seasons.  The levelling system also seems quite daunting, as I spent most of my 20 hours with one of the 9 characters available in the beta yet there was a long road of levelling left ahead of me.  It works like Call of Duty’s prestige system, or Titanfall 2’s regeneration, where you start off at Reputation 0 Level 1, and once you reach Level 20 you progress to Reputation 1 Level 1, then progress to Reputation 1 Level 20 and so on until you get to a maximum of Reputation 10.  I managed to reach Reputation 1 Level 11 on my one character that I spent almost 20 hours with, so there seems to be a lot of grinding involved if you want to reach max level on more than one character, and there are 12 characters in the full game, with that climbing to 21 with proposed DLC.  The game launches on Valentine’s Day (which is the day this paper is supposed to come out), and there is also going to be an open beta running from February 9th to the 12th, to give more people the chance to try the game.  This will include more content than the closed beta, though I am unsure whether that means more maps, more characters or both.  Overall, I enjoyed the time I spent with the closed beta and I am looking forward to playing some more in the open beta, although I still have doubts over the longevity of the game, and so I advise waiting for reviews and feedback before making any decisions on whether to purchase the full game.