‘For Honor’ Players Discover All Unlocks Would Cost over $700 – or 2.5 Years of Playtime

The developers of the flawed but original medieval brawler For Honor are getting a lot of heat from the game’s player base over its progression system and microtransactions.

When Redditor bystander007 calculated that unlocking everything in the game would require either over $730 in microtransactions or 2.5 years of gameplay, the community effectively burst into flame. Most people would frown on spending $60 in microtransactions for a free-to-play title; spending over $700 in a title that already cost $60-$220 — depending on which edition was bought — wasn’t received particularly well, to say the least.

For Honor Director Damien Kieken responded to the concern in an interview on Ubisoft’s Warrior’s Den Weekly Livestream (at the 24 minute mark). His answer? Players were never supposed to unlock everything in the game in the first place.

Kieken said that the team “never had an intention for you to unlock everything in the game,” adding that it “doesn’t really make any sense.” He described For Honor as a PvP fighting game with “RPG mechanics” layered on. He then compared the dynamic to MMORPG World of Warcraft, asserting that “you would never try to unlock everything for all the characters.”

There are problems with this analogy. First, that is neither how most RPGs nor most fighting games work. Second, For Honor is hardly an MMO like World of Warcraft in all but the broadest definition of the term.

Kieken went further: “We forecasted that most players would play one to three characters. And that’s what we see today in our game. Most players focus on one character, one hero, and others go up to two or three heroes. All of the design is based around that.”

But all that really tells consumers is that the pricing structure has been arranged to make each unlockable item as expensive as possible within the time they spend playing.

Kieken went so far as to compare the cosmetic items to endgame content, like the rewards for World of Warcraft’s max-level activities. If you don’t like it, Kieken suggests you simply change your expectations. “Completionist” players could focus less on their ability to gain tangible rewards or progression and more on reaching “reputation one” level on all heroes and working from there.

The For Honor community remains less than impressed by the response. While the game is certainly fun to play, it has committed the cardinal sin of pushing successively more elaborate pre-orders and then stuffing the game full of microtransactions to supplement its otherwise glacial progression.

Follow Nate Church @Get2Church on Twitter for the latest news in gaming and technology, and snarky opinions on both.