A Closed Beta Story

Over the weekend I had the pleasure experiencing beta play of  For Honor.

I am significantly impressed with Ubisoft’s new creation.   The tutorial was thorough enough to get a grasp on control schemes.  After basics the learning curve sky rockets. You’ll have a long road ahead of you mastering battle techniques to execute your foes. It’s recommended to train before jumping into a game against other players, but that is subjective. I set up quite a few custom games against a level 2 bot just to learn not only my techniques, but that of the opponent as well. It started to become easy once I became aware of the opponents methods. As it is in any player vs player game you need to be aware of not only your skill but the skills of whom oppose you. It’s difficult to play without basic knowledge of how a certain character fights.

Receiving enough silver I decided to purchase the best available warrior for my faction ‘The Orochi” The first time I played against the A.I. I was getting destroyed every match. It was difficult to win a round. Seemed impossible to properly block attacks while figuring when to strike yourself. Eventually somewhere down the line I started to get used to the mechanics.

Hacking and slashing my way through soldiers while playing Dominion I won the first battle.  I felt the weight of my last battle carry onto the next match.  Some people early on would just shred through my health due to my incomprehension of the blocking | parry system.  I had no choice but to learn or get left behind.  It took some time, and as of the end of recent beta I have not mastered.  Not even close.  That will make this game extremely competitive for those willing to learn.  Tactics are needed in not only fights, but capturing bases for points will have their own strategies teams will need to learn.

I’ve seen complaints about how the controller was set up, but personally I found it easy to grow accustomed to.  With every beta there are issues with servers, things go wrong, it happens.  Fortunately in game you are notified when issues arrive and they are forced to make changes to the game.   Most of the issues were five or ten minutes long.  There was one I believe in the middle of the night that was thirty minutes, but they would still notify players with a pop up conveniently located n the bottom right corner.   The game felt smooth online to me, I had no issues playing.  That’s it for now, stay tuned for more information on For Honor

There is another beta coming in Feb. 9-12.  So if your looking to play before you buy you’ll have one more chance before its release February 14.