For Honor looks a little bit like War of the Vikings, Chivalry: Medieval Warfare, and Dynasty Warriors all got together and had a baby. And what a good-looking baby!
Ubisoft's multiplayer game of martial player-vs-player combat looks terrific, though I haven't actually tried it yet. Players team up against one another from one of three factions: the Vikings, the Knights, or the Samurai. Each faction has its own special abilities, pros and cons, etc. and each comes with a host of goons to fill the field. While there may only be four players on each team, the battlefield itself is quite populated, though the bots are just mobs to hack through.
Players are another matter, and employ Ubisoft's "The Art of Battle" control scheme, which looks pretty great in this gameplay video:
“Wherever you’re holding your weapon, that’s where you’re safe,” explains Creative Director Jason Vandenberghe in a blog post. “You’re automatically blocking in that direction. So if I’m holding my sword to my left and you attack me on my left side, I’m going to block it. But if you attack me from the right or from above, I’m going to get hit. It takes time to change my stance, so I need to anticipate what you’re going to do.”
You can see how the players have quite a lot of control over the direction of their weapon using the right thumbstick, something we've seen in both the War of the Roses/Vikings games and Chivalry, among others, though this system sounds like it has its own unique twist, and hopefully somewhat more intuitive controls. (Also, I'm very happy it's in third-person, as first-person is often just very unwieldy to me.)
I'm pretty excited about the game, to be honest. It's cool to see a major studio like Ubisoft Montreal take a crack at this genre, and I love the mixture of factions. We just need pirates and maybe Aztec Warriors or something as DLC.
The graphics also look great. I love playing any game with realistic looking knights in it---and surprisingly few games actually give you that opportunity.
“For Honor is really about what it means to be a Knight or a Samurai or a Viking,” Vandenberghe adds at the Ubi blog. “I think once players get their hands on it they will see that it’s about the warriors. They will pick up the controller and move their character around and it will instantly bring their warrior fantasies to life. This is our chance to bring the emotional experience of being on a medieval battlefield to the players. For Honor is a game for the warrior that lives inside of everybody. We want those warriors to come out and play.”
Sounds like a power fantasy to me. For men and women alike with aspirations of battle and glory.
Color me stoked, and more stoked even because while all we've seen so far is a multiplayer campaign, the game will actually have a single-player campaign as well. That's kind of amazing these days, and very welcome news to solo gamers like your curmudgeonly narrator.
The game is very much structured around shooter concepts, like capturing control points, match-making, and so forth. In one mode, you have to score enough points to stop the other team from respawning---this is referred to as "breaking" the other team---whereupon you can then wipe them out one by one. Of course, they could still come back for a win if they play well.
For Honor (I would have called it Vikings, Knights & Samurais! because why bury the lede?) is slated for a 2016 release. Check out the image gallery below:
