Hi folks. I would like to leave a few words of a feedback, even though most of the highlights must have been already mentioned a million times here during the mast three days of the open beta, I think it is just decent, given a chance to try the product for free. I did not sort the issues by weight, some of the are minor, some more frustrating, some cosmetic, and many may be quite subjective, naturally.

First of all, to put everything into a proper context:

1) I was trying out the game for the first time (no prior impression, have not participated in the previous alpha/beta/closed/whatever tests);

2) I played the PC version of the game:

2.1) The system meets, I suppose, the 'recommended' requirements;

2.2) Keyboard + mouse, for controls, no gamepad;

3) According to the profile, I have spent about 28 hours in the game this weekend (please do not tell my mom, she is an old lady, these kind of news may hit her hard);

Let us go from the very beginning, as a player launches the game: this may be your company's policy but personally I find the inability of skipping the intro titles/movies/advertisement rather annoying - for the first one or two times it is fine, but with time it grows to bore. May be it is necessary - the game uses this time to load/prepare assets, or may be nVidia payed for their name to appear during the start of the game, but subjectively a pretty screen of a raging battle with a 'loading' progress in the bottom would be aesthetically more pleasing. Though it is not a big deal: one can always launch the game and go make a cup of tea.

When you actually get into the main screen of the game - the first time you do it, you are quite overwhelmed: "What is going on?". The map, the different regions, who are all these people and what are they doing? May be in the release version there will be a better tutorial which will explain in more detail on this screen during the first run what are the modes, how they a different, how can you influence the progress of defense/conquering of the lands and how does this actually benefit your faction and in particular you as a player? Do you get anything out of it? If your faction conquers more patches of land on the map - do you get more "bells & whistles"? More gold/crystals/gas/oil/etc.? Who knows - may be you can build a hot springs retreat somewhere there on one of those patches of land, for all I care, but the player is not explained anything about it.

Since we are already in this main menu/global overview, we have started talking about the UI in general, and I must say, even after these three days, I am still convinced: this UI was designed by the Aliens to be used by the Predators (from the respective movies). It is not just buggy - it is just awkward.. inconvenient. May be on a console it makes sense, I can believe that, especially with these menus on the left/right sides which are hotkey-ed by default to 'q/e' respectively - I suppose on a gamepad they are on the L/R-triggers and for people who live in a console world, where the grass is greener and the trees are taller, this is an industry-wide standard, but the impression on a PC is: looks alien and uncomfortable to use.

A bit less of hand-waving arguments and a bit more of concrete things:

1) Annoying notifications: you have started searching for a game to join, in the top middle of the screen there already is a status abut it, why do one requires an additional notification popup in the left bottom corner?

2) When you are joining a game - you get the notifications about different people joining the game, all of them popup one after another in the bottom left section of the screen. Why? Is this important information to the player? Not really. Once you join the game you see a list of players, if it is a fresh game and people are in the process of joining - they will be gradually appearing in the list of the participants - this is enough. Or each of the player-record-s in the list could have an status line 'joining/joined/disconnected'.

3) Annoying bugs happen quite often: you click to find a game, search begins, you decide to cancel it and hit Esc - and nothing happens - no dialog 'hit space to confirm', you may press (if I recall correctly) F1 after which the Esc button starts to work as intended again and you can cancel the search (actually this helps with many similar glitches with the UI, e.g. when after some action some elements of the menu are not displayed for some reason, but if you remember some shortcuts you can fix this problem).

4) Another 'not-a-bug-but-still-an-annoying-feature': when you have finally joined a game it is time for you to choose your character/hero/avatar/class/whatever. Have you ever thought how many clicks one must do to simply select a character and join the fray? Let us count: select the character (1), click ready (2), confirm you are ready (3). Later it will grow to (4) because right after the character selection there will be another confirmation for a 'load out'. Four confirmations to simply start another game is a bit too much, do not you think? Yes, if the choice would matter for another hour or more, for a really long and wearisome battle, you may wont to spend a bit more time in this selection phase. But when the matches are not really that long (what is it? at best fifteen minutes tops in the 4x4 domination?) and you are flying from one battle and into another, a 'confirmation for a confirmation' seems unnecessary, will you not agree? This is not KERBEROS with a 'here is a ticket for a ticket'. "I am ready, why are you asking again if I am sure that I am ready?!". If I do not click to change something in the character/loadout menus, why not to assume I would like to play the very same character/gear once again?

5) The screen which follows the character selection/readiness confirmation is great - you see the four (in the case of dominion) brave newbies ready for slaughter (by the way, I would have added here a feature so that with the mouse scrolled up/down the heroes would move the one/other way, so that you could have each one in a focus, to take a better look at how awesome are these ready-to-be-chopped-to-pieces folks are) .. what was I at?.. ah, yes, pardon my sclerosis.. so there they are, the four heroes, ready for battle.. but the battle does not start - somebody from the bloody lowly foes is still thinking, devising strategy, reading tactics in hopes to change the inevitable .. or is just away from keyboard. Some kind of per-player status would help a bit here, to understand what is taking the time.

5.1) By the by, it is strange that once you confirm the confirmation that 'yes I am truly ready thank you very much', you can not alter your choice of a character. Why? Well, many people want to play what they want and they do not care what the others have selected, and you end up in a team of three or four characters of the very same class, which may not be the best thing to do. Yes, you do not want to play anything else but your lovely nobushi-chan or orochi-san, fine, then I shall select something else to have a better balance, just let me do it, please?

6) O.k, so we clicked and clicked, and waited, and drank the tea, and now the battle is but in a heart beat away from the bloodthirsty viking/noble knight/tranquil samurai, we are mesmerised (every here and there you are welcome to imagine a slight <sarcasm> tag) with an epic canvas of the eight brave warriors, ready to cross their tools of trade.. sometimes we are mesmerised for a bit tool long: 30 seconds.. a minutes... longer nothing is happening. Is it an incognito savior of the world, who will change the outcome of the battle which is about to begin, joining the game in the place of a bot? Or is it the game server being prepared? Or ...? You see my point: some status would help to understand why is it sometimes taking so long to start the game after everyone has already done all the selections and double-confirmations.

7) There is not much of interaction with the UI during the matches, so to finilise my ranting here: in the end of the matches (if they were happening in the territory for which your faction is fighting for) you may support the fight on the 'global map' with some resources/reinforcements (I am sorry I forgot how the option is actually called in the game). I discovered that I quite often forgot to do that. It would not hurt to somehow either remind or emphasise this option.

Aside of the UI-related nagging, the networking part feels rather unpolished. I am sure there are many threads with complaints about error messages such as 'could not join a match - game already full', nameless errors 'unable to join' or 'oops-daisy, something went wrong' in the middle of the game, welcome to the main menu. May be the devs were playing around to test load balancing, or tweaking servers, or doing some other wicked black magic in preparation for the release, and if it was the case, then it is fine. But if not, then the networking would appreciate a bit more love and care.

Another thing which feels strange: when a match is created - is there a player-independent instance created or one of the players is some-how a host? Because quite often when somebody decides to leave a match (and oh-my-god this leaving right after someone was killed once or twice, do not start me on those matches, ruined because of 'leavers', for the sake of those who will be playing this game - I hope you will introduce some kind of a penalty for leaving an ongoing match) there is a several seconds pause. Feels like this is happening when a 'host' player is leaving. If it is the case - it is a strange decision to link so hard a match-instance to a specific player.

What else? Ah, the controls.. I think I have mentioned I was playing with a keyboard and a mouse. The first impression of the controls was frustrating. As in 'very frustrating'. I remember after spending half an hour in the game my friend asked 'how is it? any good?', the answer was 'they have made a game for the consoles but in the end decided to repackage it also for PCs'. My friend's fortitude lasted only a couple of hours, the combat mechanics, the controls... the game lost a good would-be-swordsman. I am a bit more stubborn (or on a more honest note - there is nothing new to play right now), so I asked my neighbours not to pay attention to my constant swearing and somehow survived getting used to how you stir in this game. Thought I would mention the following two moments:

1) You switch the direction of you guard with a mouse. Now, when you are in a fight and you are constantly circling/strafing around your opponent, getting closer, moving away - together with all of the motion it is very hard to keep the guard direction where you want it. Any slightest mouse displacement - and you are hugging a blow because the guard direction has changed. I tried to bind the guard front/left/right to some keys in the configuration, but it did not really help (by the way - why the limit to bind a single key per action?!).

2) An often prelude to a fight is sprinting towards a target and exercising a blow - after this combo you have to switch to the 'guard stance' (or whatever it is called) to 'lock' on the target. Why not to make an option: if you are exercising such a combo, sprint + attack, and the blow lands, you automatically switch to the guard stance, locked on the target you have just hit (as long as it is a player). Though when you are chasing somebody and after every scratch the prey is still making away, you would not want this...

Not much complaining about the classes in the game. I suppose they will balance out with time. One thing which really had my eyebrows up all the time is this possibility of some classes to block everything from any direction at once. Here you are, trying to play a mind game (honestly - on a level of rock-scissors-paper) which sequence to execute, from which directions to land the blows.. and that thing is standing there saying: "Yeah, pal, go ahead, I'll just counter everything from all the sides at once, but you take your time to plan". Seriously (here be the picture with captain Picard's /facepalm). This is a strange thing to have in a game where you ask a player not to mindlessly hack-n-slash to left and right, but to think in which direction to do so, even if there are only three options.

Additionally I could mention a slight concern on the ability of rogues (pardon my RPG jargon, peace keepers they are?) to disappear from the radar (minimap) and you do not see their names/health bars in the field unless you lock on them? Or was it a bug? If it was a 'feature', then on one hand it is quite interesting - suits a stealthy character quite well. But on the other hand I found the things are quite deadly even without this camouflage - in dominion mode it is a pain. We played one dominion-mode game with such a foe - it was past the 'sudden death', three out of the four foes were down, with no option to return to rain vengeance on us.. and this last peace keeper of a jerk was hiding on the map for.. I have no idea how long.. wasting everybody's time.. sitting in a corner until his/her own teammates grew tired of waiting. Awesome, but in the end the mode is not about hide-n-seek.

I suppose I could rant more about the fighting mechanics here, about 'too much of stun-locks', 'unclear sequencing/queuing of actions' or more like 'unintuitive understanding how much time is required to performing an action', or the excessive time a character is staggering from a light blow, which leads to inability to sidestep/roll back from a constant fan of light blows (happened with peace keepers often), feelings of some classes have too much stamina or their abilities are too 'cheap' stamina-wise (e.g. spam of shield bashes). But it is too late to change these things, and I suppose the more statistically significant ones will be balanced out eventually.

I would conclude with a suggestion. Though I suppose this was not the whole of the game's content which was shown during this open beta and in the release people will see a bit more. On one hand, for a competitive mode the game could use more epic battles - at least 10 vs. 10, with a real siege, catapults/ballistas/sieging towers/canons/walls scaling/walls demolition/etc. On the other hand - the competitive mode is not for everybody. I would suggest thinking about some co-op modes, like the infamous 'horde mode' in other competitive games, for a starter. We all know there is no such thing as a 'perfect matchmaking algorithm' and for some of us, who are potentially interested in this game, the frustration brought by decimation in most of the skirmishes against real players, with next to zero chance of raising a decent opposition, becomes a stopper. I have miserably failed in convincing my long-time-online-gaming partners not even to consider buying the game, but simply to overcome the rejection of the uncomfortable UI, awkward controls and combat mechanics to try and learn at least until the end of the open beta. And those are the folks with who we struggled and evolved as a team in silly Overwatch, in DotA 2, with all the unfriendliness and griefing towards casual players which communities of those games offer. We enjoyed the Mass Effect 3 co-op multiplayer, mastered Vermintide, which means the old folks like us can learn a few new tricks. So if in the future you will introduce some interesting co-op modes, e.g. a lengthy mission (with an adjustable level of difficulty easy/hard/impossible) in which several brave heroes venture into the enemy territory, have to cross plains and rivers, woods, caverns, mountains, to reach and infiltrate an enemy's fortress, to find and assassinate the enemy faction's general or/and steal the secret plans... Then you may very well find an even wider audience! By the way, where do I put a 'copyright' mark on these ideas for a DLC? =)

All in all, thanks for the open beta, you have done a great job and may be the voiced criticism mostly means that it is really hard to make a great swords-fighting game - it is obviously incomparably harder than a first person pew-pew-pew.

All the best for the future of For Honor and cheers!

P.S. Sorry, forgot to mention: I love Nobushi-chan, I am terrible at playing her, but she is my favourite! Do not nerf her - whatever the blue meanies complain about her - she is cute and it was not her fault! =D