General: The Game Modes were by far the most disappointing thing about the For Honor alpha. The way the game modes are handled will affect whether or not I buy the game come February.

Dominion: This was the game mode I played the most and have mixed feelings about. I will start out with a pro/con thing,

Pros
1: Map access, it feels good to roam around the entire map.
2: Different types of engagements, From 1v1 to 4v4 to someone’s outnumbered and probably going to die. The different engagements dynamic is a fun experience.
3: Breaking, I really like the idea behind breaking where the winning team finishes of the enemy team.
4: Tug of War dynamic, making the game mode a kind of tug of war adds a fun dynamic to the experience. You may be breaking but you come back and put the other team into breaking is a fun tug of war experience.

Cons
1: Uninspiring, playing dominion feels uninspiring most of the time you run back and forth between points assess engagements and decide whether to run or attack. I think the idea behind the game mode is to try and give both a kind of “epic” battle feel with 4v4 +soldiers but also provide potential intense 1v1 type fights over points. I do not think it succeeds at either enough.
2: Does not seem to take adequate advantage of the best part of For Honor, the combat system. What happened in my experience was that usually combat consisted of hit and run tactics or gank tactics. In both cases there was usually very little use of the complex combat system.

The dominion mode seems like a fun thing to mess around in every once in awhile however it doesn’t seem to do the combat system justice. Thinking about how one might “fix” dominion there are following ideas
1: Limit player count at some control points. Say that at the outside(left/right) control points there can be only a maximum of two players from each team at any given time. This would encourage more team strategy and potentially greater use of combat.
2: Create a locked environment for the side points, piggybacking off the first idea perhaps initiate a locked environment for the point once the maximum number of players has entered a point forcing the 4 players to fight it out. This would alleviate a possible issue where the gankers are just waiting outside and all your have to do is run to them instead of fighting over the point.
3: Create dynamic points throughout the map. Instead of the static 3 points perhaps create dynamic points throughout the map with maybe the center battlefield as static. To incentivize teams to go after static points make their point value greater compared to the static center.
4: Bounties, this could go several directions. It could be in relation to a player who is dominating and he gets a bounty placed on him where you score more for killing him than a normal hero kill. Also there could be random bounty events where a player is randomly marked for bounty for more point than normal, this may stir up the game play a bit more where if the whole team goes for the bounty then their point may be vulnerable and maybe they ignore bounty because they figure some trap is going to occur with all the enemy players.

In short there are two general issues with Dominion, 1: It doesn’t utilize the combat system well, and 2: It is not exciting enough as is.

Brawl: This was my favorite game mode in the alpha. This was so for two reasons 1: It allowed the combat system to shine, 2: The areas were larger than the Duel mode.

I have two problems with Brawl, environmental kills and revenge mode.

Environmental Kills: Although sometimes better than some of the Duel environments there were still very many places to environment kill someone. Sometimes all the environmental kill possibilities is a fun option however I do not think I would like to always have to worry about an instakill. I’m not sure what the best option would be but I know I would like brawl to be able to be played without worrying about environmental kills. Either having a map pool that had some non-environmental kill elements in brawl or being about to disable environmental kills would seem to be possible options.

Revenge Mode: I think revenge in brawl should be reworked. First, I think no one should gain any revenge meter while all 4 players are alive. Second, the revenge mode should probably be reworked for each class/character so that appropriate buffs are given for each class/character as it is revenge tends to not be very useful for assassin characters in my experience. Third, if the outnumbered person is able to kill one of the two then revenge should be disabled unless it is already activated. Last, there should probably be some strict procing rules for revenge when out numbered, something like revenge procs only when the two opponents combined life totals are about 50% their combined life totals when at full health (so say each has 100hp then combined life total at full health would be 200, revenge would only proc when their combined total health was above 100 hitpoints)

Duel: Basically same as Brawl however I enjoyed it less due to the area restrictions and seemingly even higher environmental kill possibilities. Revenge mode should be completely disabled in duel mode.

Matchmaking: Match making was a seeming nightmare for alpha. Some hopes are that in the final release matchmaking will be better. Additionally I would like competitive and “quickplay” options (as in Overwatch).

Additional Modes: Many ideas have been posted already and can be seen in other games. The single player campaign footage I’ve seen suggests that there might be some ready maps for a kind of assault/objective mode with phases etc. Ideally the game modes should be able to utilize the combat system effectively and bring in interesting mechanics/situations. Bringing these together is difficult and I don't think dominion does it well enough at the moment. Given that one issue for dominion is that its open and chaotic nature makes the utilization of the combat system difficult to implement well. Restricting how engagements can occur seems like one of the only ways to ensure the combat system properly shines.

As I said in the beginning I think game modes are this game achilles heel at the moment. The game modes will need some either need some revamping or the addition of other game modes that mitigate the issues that seem problematic for this title to warrant a purchase from me.