Six Months Later, Here’s What We Can Expect from For Honor Going Forward
For Honor launched earlier this year with many prospects. One of them was to create a bustling community of online gamers who enjoy medieval-themed competitive combat. While there’s still an active community, it’s dropped off by more than 90 percent. Here’s how Ubisoft intends to change that.
It looks like For Honor is getting a revamp. As seasons three and four arrive, the game will undergo a series of drastic changes. These include changes in support, new content, and even some tinkering with the gameplay.
Among the changes implemented since launch was an increase to XP gain and Steel. This will help players on the path to gaining new legendary gear that arrives down the line. And make no mistake, there will be loads of new content.
But what about connectivity improvements? According to Creative Director Roman Campos-Oriola, the team is migrating to dedicated servers for “many different reasons”:
“So basically, since we launched the game, we’ve faced new online challenges. We saw that we had connectivity and stability problems, mostly on 4v4 modes, so it’s one of the things we’ve looked at and worked on a lot since the game launched. And during that process, we decided to do an analysis of the whole online infrastructure we have and compare it to other existing ones. And in the end, based on all the data we gathered … we decided to do the move and to migrate to a dedicated server technology, for many, many different reasons.
“One of them, and the main reason for us, is that we want to improve the stability of the matches on 4v4, and we want to have an architecture that is more long-term, that could help us more in the future for the things we want to do next. And then you have some very simple examples; with dedicated servers, you don’t have session host migration anymore, so there is no game pausing when somebody leaves the session. You won’t have to manage your NATs. You don’t have to check your NAT if you want to play with a friend or things like that. So it will also help greatly the overall experience of the player, from matchmaking to the game session itself, to playing with friends, and things like that.”
According to Campos, many of the studios’ priorities changed with community feedback. Hence, they’re currently working to solve issues and improve upon every element of the experience. Along with better connectivity, there will be changes to combat. One of the major changes deals with players who parry all the time:
“So for example, every time you attack or have one of your attacks parried, you lose stamina,” Campos continued,”– and today in the game, being out of stamina does not make players vulnerable enough. So that’s something we are targeting, and we want to make players who are out of stamina more vulnerable. In the same way, we are buffing chip damage. So every time you block, you take a small percentage of damage, which used to be around 5 to 10%. And we bumped it to 18%. So if you are too defensive, if you’re blocking too many attacks, you’re gonna take more damage.”
Essentially, Ubisoft’s goal is to change the way players battle without upsetting the class balance. Additionally, the team is taking into consideration the difference in 1v1, 2v2, and 4v4 combat. The goal is to affect combat without making one mode less viable.
On a final note, For Honor shall start witnessing ranked play. Participating in tournaments can improve player loot, as well as increase rank. This goes along with the season and resets after every Faction War. For the full interview with creative director Roman Campos-Oriola, you can visit the Ubiblog here.
With all these changes happening to For Honor, will you be getting back in the game?