Member
Hope this post finds you all well and good, I'd first and foremost like to give a little info.
I took some quick notes on things that are good, things that aren't so great , and then some story time from my experience within the community and how not only this Alpha but other things to do with For Honor appear to myself. (Things like the website, release of information, timeline stuff, it'll make sense.)
So I'll first be replying with things I felt were good, then bad in another post, then get to the weirdness in another , and finally have a recap because I'm aware I tend to trail off on ideas and a condensed version might be able to be looked at more assertively.
My time restraints today are just going to make this difficult so I'll update as the day goes on.
Member
I want to say congratulations on such an awesome new IP. I'm very rarely drawn to new video games because of a multitude of reasons but I'd say the biggest issue is many games tend to feel very much the same within the same genre. Speaking of genre, For Honor is a rather ambitious game that blurs lines between many genres.
Part fighting game in combat, part 3rd person slasher in travel and environment, part MOBA in how characters level in domion and play differently, part lots of things. There doesn't seem to be just one name to place on For Honor and the fact that it tries to incorporate so many very different things in one title... that's pretty impressive and very well executed so congratulations and thank you!
The balance is shaping up nice and fights feel like the more skilled, opportunistic, aware, and knowledgeable player is more often times the Victor with just a dash of luck thrown in that gives the battlefield a subtle realistic flavor.
The connectivity issues are fewer and farer between, I experienced less dropped games and fewer host migration errors as well as less lag. That was one of my bigger worries and while it has a way to go we have 5ish months before release. The progress I witnessed makes me more confident that with more time there will be even less issues. So kudos to whoever is on that.
Member
As far as alphas go I think this was pretty good. You showed off quite a lot of your game to a lot of folks across 3 platforms.
So while I'd love to say it's 'perfect' if it were then we wouldn't be testing it, right?
So, the bad consists mostly of just issues and opinions that I'm sure will most likely be repeats of myself and others.
Kensei techs guard breaks with his dash. Also keeps his head during beheading animation. (Maybe his helmet just gives +10 against executions? :P)
Berzerker dauntless is stacked by both weapons, the one being used for whichever animation and the one not being used, if either collides with the environment it can trigger dauntless. The garunteed guardbreak after deflect seems very powerful because guardbreak leads to throw and his throw distance is decent and if that throw makes you hit a wall he gets a garunteed heavy overhead that does an incredible amount of damage...I'm not one to make the call on if that's "OP" but if you guys play test on the job, check it out, see how you feel.
Ladders offer strange obstacles when 2 people engage it at the same time.
The ranged feats Kunai and Longbow...
Longbow can strike a player standing behind you/beside you if they're extremely close. I'm guessing tha ts a hitbox issue? Also, the lock-on distance is a tad shorter than I remember for initiating combat but that's how you "aim" these feats, so something to look at.
The game mode dominion is a lot easier with communication but if you don't have a microphone or aren't on another voice chat, the game is so fast that you rarely have time to text chat. Maybe while you're being executed or while dead but then to have a reply that person has to die... I'm really not sure how that could be approached.
The tutorial does a good job of covering the very basics of dominion. The "learn more" option in my opinion shouldn't be an option, it should be mandatory for the benefit of the players. They should learn their character's entire moveset, they should learn how their class scores better and how to decide if helping a vanguard or assassin is the better choice or if they should back off and help elsewhere.
Defense stat doesn't seem to make a difference.
Member
I've been really enjoying my time within the For Honor community. From Reddit, to these forums, the discord, the twitch chats, everyone was welcoming and promoted a lot of great information. From guessing games as to who all the characters would be, to what kind of maps we would see we spent a run of time just coming up with new ideas until new information would get released. There are a few subjects I'd like to cover just to provide insight to one fan's view on how this game is unfolding.
I understand not everyone's questions will get answered and when I read threads I try and address not only the thread's question but also misinformation from people and questions that are getting buried. There are, however, reoccurring questions that no one in the community will be able to answer but also aren't addressed publicly by mods or dev-folk.
For instance: the p2p connections, will there be dedicated servers? Will we have ranked match making/player rank? Will there be separate solo queue for Dominion? What are the details of the season pass?
Perhaps this info isn't ready to be released but in my brief experience with For Honor's release of information I will say that it gets disappointing at times.
On a timeline we had first interviews with Creative Director stating time and time again "Customization" "play who you want to be" so on and so forth, after that we had the E3 Masterclass where a question was asked http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZO4iyF51f0&t=38m20s "Can you choose your gender?" the reply was "Of course your can, you can choose your gender and skin color, we have this nice thing on the team where the female word for warrior is warrior." Now, this is before all the classes had been announced at gamescom. We as a community helped each other find out that this customization actually only applies to 50% of the final release character roster (every character we have yet to play) because the only place we could find someone correcting this information was Bio-Jade on a twitter Q&A session 2 months after the masterclass at E3.
Let me first explain that 1. I couldn't personally care less about who is what gender in a fighting game, we all bleed and die the same and personally I couldn't tell a male conq from a female conq or the other classes except for the small variations in character portraits during the character selection screen. 2. If the reasoning is "Well Valkyries are female so the class is female" "Only females use naginata" "Ubi probably has <insert budget issue idea here>" again; irrelevant. The issue is that we were mislead from a trusted source; be that on accident or on purpose, that hurts relations with fans/customers. Again in the Twitch livestream before the Alpha we heard that "The female word for warrior is warrior" mantra and the temptation to respond "The female word for shugoki is nonexistent" crossed my mind a time or two. Really did enjoy the stream though, there was a lot of info explained to the players and everyone did a great job of introducing a lot of the mechanics of the game. That being said, Dominion has a lot going on that I don't recall being explained. The game explains it in the "How to play" section and shows the special rules on how each class plays different but after reading these forums I couldn't tell you how many times someone's question could be answered by the information on that page. After playing the Alpha and watching people ignore tactics that would benefit their character more it's easy to see they haven't given that page a look. That information would be great to throw out in a video so word can spread while folks aren't super busy trying to play your game.
Anyhow, I digress. My issue with the customization miscommunication on genderlocked characters has to do with this. It feeds into negative suspicions of questions that remain unanswered. If someone asked months ago if you could choose the gender of your character (like they did ask at E3) anyone in the community would tell them yes (like Eric Pope, Geoff Eleanor, and Gaelic Simard did at E3) and that would be misinformation. Transparency would be appreciated from now until at least release because honestly there's not much you could do to fix it. There are people wanting to know if there will be dedicated servers, This info could be shared. Because of the above misinformation on one topic, I'm already assuming p2p is the direction ya'll have chosen to go with and until someone comes out and says otherwise in black and white I'll continue to think this. People want to know about the season pass, that could be disclosed. I'm not letting my imagination run wild with the possibilities that "1-year of expansions" could entail and until someone comes out and says otherwise in black and white what all it includes I'll continue to not bother with it. People want to know about Ranked Matchmaking and Player Ranks. Due to the above misinformation I assume that if you haven't told us about it yet that it isn't in the game, until someone comes out and says otherwise in black and white I'll continue to be disappointed that there isn't ranked. That's what really puts a damper on my spirits as we continue to get closer to the release date, that the release of information isn't always correct as it gets released to the public so now I'm erring on the side that doesn't get my hopes up which sucks because I've been excited for this game for a long time and I know everyone working on it is also extremely excited for it as well.
Let's move away from that. The community. This community is great, I'm not sure how many players you guys are looking to win over with your game but I hope you surpass your goals and wish you luck on all that. As it stands, this community is small enough now that one day I could start up a game play a few rounds with some folks, then come back the next day and see the same usernames but when engaging them you could feel how they progressed and learned and improved. That's pretty rad, you don't see that often in games any more, the games I last recall having that kind of experience with were made by extremely small companies that maybe made 2 games in their lifetimes; definitely not a Ubisoft quality company. That being said I expected some things from For Honor that I won't be seeing. At Gamescom the final release game modes were announced. 1v1 duels, 2v2 duels, 4v4 duels, Dominion, and 4v4 Team Death Match. To many of the regulars on a few Discord channels, and even long time followers on these forums, we all were very underwhelmed. In interviews with the creative director he mentions how For Honor has been this brain baby he has had for over a decade. Over a decade and Duels of varying player numbers, Dominion, and TDM are all that could be finalized? Quality over quantity for sure but I would mention now that these game modes are so different that you have players who aren't interested in certain ones at all. Some folks don't like dominion or other players joining their fight. Their options to get what they want are 1v1, and 2v2 with a friend. Some people don't like the pacing of Duels or the fact you can't use feats or some other mechanics not present, their options are... dominion. So again, nothing can really be done about it now unless you guys plan on making new games modes after the game is released.
Should that route be chosen, your community is filled to the brim with wonderful ideas. It's this glorious think tank and probably my favorite part of the forums to see people go "Wouldn't it be cool if...". There are ideas for all kinds of aspects on the game. From adding Leg customization, to new game modes, to execution previews before purchasing, to customizable UI, just absolutely anything you could think of someone has offered an interesting way for how it could be different. That will keep my faith in For Honor.
The Forhonorgame.ubisoft.com website has been awesome. I love the updates as new information gets released , the Myth History on weapons segments, how good of a resource for information it is. That's good stuff and done well.
I look forward to continuing helping out in the forums, look forward to maybe getting to do the Beta test and provide more feedback, and I can't wait for February! Thanks for reading, I hope you have a wonderful day.
