Good evening everyone,

like everyone else in this forum, I have also been part of the Closed Alpha and do want to give an insight of my personal impressions of the game, as well as some feedback.

First I want to give you some information about how much I played and what I played, so that you can get a better impression of my views. Afterwards I will give feedback to the played heroes, gamemodes and some general things.

My playtime is barely scratching the 10 hour mark, as I have only gotten access to the Closed Alpha via a friend on friday night and have not been able to enjoy the entire Alpha. During this time I have been able to enjoy both 2v2 Brawl as a solo player, as well as in a duo team. Against bots as well as against other players. Dominion is the other game mode I have been playing, again with and without a friend, against bots and players.
The heroes that I have been using for these games have primarily consisted of the Kensei and the Conqueror, while I have been trying out the Raider, Orochi and Warden as well. The Berserker is a hero that I have just touched once, but did not like to play at all.

Heroes

As I have mentioned before, I have tried to get a look at every hero in the game so far. While testing the different heroes I have experienced the different skill-levels each hero requires to be played at an acceptable niveau. I do like that some heroes take more skill than others to play, as long as their balancing feels right.

The Orochi is the hero that I have seen the most throughout my playtime in the For Honor closed alpha. He is a counter-attack heavy hero that relies on waiting for the opponent to strike first, to either dodge it to get a free hit, or either block it to be able to break your opponents guard and hit him with a follow up attack.
While I do like the idea of the hero being a counter-attack heavy type, I found that the block/parry move (which does require a bit of timing on the guard) is a bit strong, since it is pulled off quite easily and deals a decent amount of damage. Reducing the damage might do the trick for Orochi, as I feel that he is otherwise a well balanced skill based hero.

The hero that I played the least, because I did not find him very useful, is the Berserker. The Berserker appears to be a movement based hero that, similar to the Orochi, works with counters. While I do get the concept of the Hero, I find his attacks to be rather weak. Even when I encountered a Berserker on the opponent team it felt like their attacks did significantly less damage than any other class. Of course, the Berserker can hit faster, but this is also reliant on the opponent not blocking correctly, as your stamina runs out quite fast. The Berserker may need a bit more damage, even if it would come with a trade off in attack speed. I am looking forward to see where the Berserker will end up.

The other heroes appeared to be well balanced and individual duels as well as grouped fights did play out very well, I do not have any idea for improvement on them.

Game Modes

When I first saw the E3 Trailer for For Honor in 2015 I did think that For Honor would be a very cool dueling game, but that might be it, but the game modes that I have experienced in the Closed Alpha have shown me something else. While the Duel Mode (which I did not play) and the Brawl mode are based on actual dueling, Dominion is a very refined strategy based approach at the game.

First off, I would like to give some feedback about the Brawl mode.
The Brawl mode is a 2v2 dueling mode, which you can either join as a single individual player, or join alongside a friend. I really like that it does not force you to play with a set teammate, but allows for a dynamic queue.
Winning in the brawl mode is based upon a best of five series of 2v2 matches. The matches start out as 2 individual 1v1 fights and turn out to be a 2v1 as soon as one team kills off one of their opponents. I do like that the game mode is a best of 3, I also like individual 1v1 fights, but I would also like to see actual 2v2 battles, taking place in a bigger fighting area. These fights might take a lot more strategy than just pure dueling skill and could turn out quite interesting.

The other game mode that I have played and enjoyed a lot is Dominion. It is a very strategical approach at For Honor, which I enjoy a lot. As I said before, I did imagine For Honor to be a game about individual duels, just like the Duel and Brawl mode provide, but having a map with minions as well as capture zones opens up the field for bigger strategies and a possible integration into esports.
The Dominion mode is well balanced and all the maps I have played it on appear to be well crafted and are fun to play, keep going into this direction and hopefully provide a few more maps in the future to keep the game refreshing, since seeing the 3 maps over and over again can get stale quite fast.
I also do enjoy the leveling aspect of the Dominion game mode, as it gives you an advantage if you play well, but doesn't give you too much of a disadvantage when you play fairly bad. The skills are well balanced and allow for refreshing moves

Equipment/Level Ups

The equipment and level up system for the individual heroes is a very interesting approach to give the game just a little bit more replayability. While the equipment does enhance a bunch of stats and I did not think those too be too powerful, except for an extended charge with the Raider, as his charges could become unpredictably long and thus a bit unfair. While the equipment feature makes the visuals a bit more interesting, the additional stats could also be linked to level ups, making the system less random.
The level up system for the heroes is a nice touch, as you unlock new feats for the respective slots, which leads to a bit of customization, which I did enjoy a lot. It makes duels feel even more unique.

Network

While playing the For Honor Closed Alpha I have experienced a few issues with the Network as well as Group Lobbies.

As for network issues, I have found myself in a situation where the game would pause and post a message of "migrating host", which took several seconds, before it continued - but after it continued I have been at a very different position, as well as the opponents. I sometimes got into a series of 2-3 of those messages, until I found myself being pushed off a cliff by a bot, even though I wasn't near one before. This is something that did only happen on a few occasions, but I still wanted to adress it.

The Group Lobby system has been a bigger issue during my time with the Closed Alpha. A lot of the times when I invited a friend and he accepted the invite, nothing happened. His game as well as uplay didn't give him a message saying he couldn't connect or anything alike, the invite just disappeared after him having accepted and nothing would happen. This happened a few times in a row, before the invitation worked, it did re-appear several other times as well.
Another issue with the group lobby was, that whenever my friend did invite me and we ended up in a group lobby together, something went severely wrong. Upon entering the matchmaking queue everything appeared to be fine, but soon after he would tell me "Hey, I'm in a game without you." while my screen did still show up to be in matchmaking queue. We decided that he would just play his game and I would wait to find one on my own and we'd try again.. But nothing happened. I was stuck in the matchmaking queue for a while, before I decided to Alt+F4 and get back into the game. We did try time and time again for him to invite me and join a game together, but it did not work. It only ever worked when I invited him. This issue also appeared when he invited a friend into a game lobby that I hosted. (Situation: I invited him, he invited a friend) I would join the matchmaking queue, and as we found a game, only my friend and I have been in the game, while his friend (that he invited) was stuck in the matchmaking queue.

Bugs

I have only encountered a single bug while playing the Alpha, which did appear regularly and without any apparent reason.
The bug I mentioned was, that my mouse cursor would disappear in the menues after a match, or simply do not show up even just after starting the game. This went as far as me not using the mouse in the menues anymore, even when it showed up. I found this as rather inconvenient, even though the menues are easily accessible with just a keyboard.


This concludes my impressions of the game as well as a bunch of feedback.
I appreciate your work on this game and am looking forward to take a look at future builds of it.

Farewell,

AngryCowCuddler