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For Honor - Endless War - Robert Lashley at MMORPG.com
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
For Honor - Endless War - Robert Lashley at MMORPG.com
Not sure what to expect Rob jumped into the For Honor Beta. He survived long enough to send back this report.
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Try to be excellent to everyone you meet. You never know what someone else has seen or endured.
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all hype nothing more..
after seeing the twicht streams you fall asleep due to its boring gameplay
I agree with you and Robert on the price tag. 40$ maybe. This game might end up suffering the same fate as Battleborn.
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Exactly my thoughts.
Originally posted by Arskaaa
"when players learned tacticks in dungeon/raids, its bread".
From there the repetition sets in and you put it away to "give it another go some time later on...", but never really get in the mood to do so.
Imagine this game had 50vs50 on a giant map, ranged classes, siege, etc...
This have been a good conversation
$60 is really pricey but nobody knows what the single player campaigns are like.
There hasn't been a skill-based melee combat game like this, that I'm aware of. Some similar games but none recently.
Oh and p2p servers....yuck.......why no dedicated servers??
Most Single-Player Action games rarely have a campaign over 8 hours, and sell for $60. They're a combo Single/Multiplayer game with Campaign and PvP options, and have been like this for years. I don't know why people are only just getting up in arms about this now - this has been the trend since 2007. And yes, it would be nice if campaigns were 20 hours or so - but we've given the industry the message that "all is well" for 10 years now. Outside of RPG's it'll be hard to push for more than single-sitting campaign plays.
As for the game itself, I actually enjoyed For Honor a fair amount. Viking Raider was a lot of fun to play, though I mostly played Knight. I'm interested to see if the game will receive expansions and additional classes over time, maybe even large scale War Modes that take place on a massive battlefield - I'd be all over that.
Surely no stranger than Overwatch, CoD etc?
I also have the feeling that the PVE "campaign" won't be very good, so I wouldn't get my hopes up for that. Imo they should have just concentrated resources into further fleshing out the pvp.
Jedi Academy, Blade Symphony, Chivalry, & even Assassins Creed all come to mind for various similarities to FH's combat mechanics. And yet somehow, the combat feels clunkier (static combat animations) in FH than even an older Arena fighting game like Jedi Academy.
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
When compared to Chivalry: Medieval Warfare, For Honor is clearly superior in graphics and animation, but For Honor is focused more on 1v1 duels than group battling. I find that Chivalry: Medieval Warfare does a better job of handling groups in a battle, with sweeping strikes that cleave through multiple foes at the same time in an intuitive way. In For Honor, you actually need to "lock on" to your primary target, and then can hit additional targets based on what you do vs the primary target. This actually doesn't work that well, mostly because the whole engine seems to have been built from the ground up with 1v1 in mind. There's all kinds of actions and counters you can do in 1v1, but your strategic options vs groups are limited to blocking, and activating your universal AoE ability hoping to hit people around you. In Chivalry: Medieval Warfare you can custom guide each choice of swing to perfectly cater to whatever group scenario you're facing, at the perfect angle needed for both defense and offense vs what's happening right in front of you. This makes For Honor feel inferior to Chivalry: Medieval Warfare from a group combat perspective, and it's why I think the Dominion mode in For Honor doesn't do a great job of demonstrating the strengths of this game.
With that said, the 1v1 dueling is AMAZING. The subtlety of timings, variety of attacks, stance system, combos, environmental usage, staggers, stamina, are all great. I am so impressed with this game. I feel it will have great longevity for fighting game fans out there, and for people who played games like Chivalry: Medieval Warfare but were more interested in 1v1 duels. The variety of weapon styles is fantastic, and each character feels very different than the other. It's the kind of game that I personally don't get too upset at when losing a game, because you feel you're always learning as you keep playing. If you lost a game, it's easy to see it's because you have more to learn, rather than because some guy keeps spamming Akuma fireballs while jumping backwards, with no actual mechanics available to counter the cheese strategy other than crawling forward inch by inch, parry after parry, until Akuma teleports to other side of the stage (Street Fighter series).
Also worth mentioning is that the game has no frame cap on PC (was running at 120 fps in the 1v1 duels, and 70-120 fps in Dominion), and I never ran into a bug through all three days of constant play. There is also an INCREDIBLE bot system where you can train against bots at different difficulty levels. It is very helpful to train against bots when you first start playing, to practice all kinds of techniques, and then you can go out to face real players. The bots are available in all the game modes, as well, so if you like 1v1 or Dominion, bots are available for both modes and have good intelligence. The highest level bot is actually challenging to face.
Regarding microtransactions, there aren't any that I saw in the beta. You can purchase boxes of random items for your characters with in-game currency that you generate when playing, but no mention of actual real purchases. The items are for Dominion mode, and always have a positive and negative effect in equal measure. I.e. a chest piece that adds faster stamina recovery will equally detract from damage reduction when blocking hits on the stat bar shown in-game. After playing the beta I got about 60 items to drop in three days without "buying" a single loot chest with the in-game currency (they randomly drop after playing matches), but I don't play Dominion much so the item stats don't mean much to me. The items drop in all game modes and can be worn in 1v1 for cosmetic purposes, so I was mostly interested in the item drops for customizing the look of my character.
My assessment of the game is based on three days of beta, with a focus on playing 1v1 duel mode. It's possible that I might learn to love Dominion more after understanding more about the game mechanics, but this has been my current experience. Right now I'd recommend the game to fighting game fans, and fans of 1v1 duels in games like Chivalry: Medieval Warfare. I feel that this game is a real gem, and it would take a really good game for me to tolerate both Ubisoft and Uplay.
The repetition and limited gameplay in a lot of games is why I can only really PvP in MMORPG's.
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson