I have to say, what has led me to finally start writing here is upcoming medieval melee fighter by Ubisoft, "For Honor", and I will be writing a series of opinion pieces on this upcoming title.
When it was first revealed about a year ago, I was less than enthusiastic about it (more on that later), but I must say, Ubisoft has been running a really great advertising effort and using gaming events and youtubers really well for their game's promotion. Couple that with my very, very strong interest on medieval weaponry, armour and fighting techniques, eventually I got very anticipating towards the game.
Swords of all kinds, and European ones in particular, as well as the armour they share armouries with, have always been a big interest of mine even back when I was a kid. In fact, I am working on a book, detailing the existance of sword from it's rise to fall, across eras and cultures, though it will take many years before I can complete it. I did also practice German Longsword for a few years, and have a few articles published on my native language on one of historical fencing groups active in Turkey. This is a subject I am really, very keen on.
Swords and swordsmanship has been a mythical thing in people's minds, for both good and ill. It harkens back to times where life was much different to our day, it came to symbolise concepts like strength, honor, finesse, freedom, but sometimes also less appealing ones like violence, oppression, conquest etc. Even today, holding a sword in hand gives a special feeling even to most uninterested people. Though, it also has been under the weight of many myths and misconceptions. Whether through, cinema, tv, video games, a lot of misinformation have surrounded swords and their use. Nowadays, with rise of HEMA (Historical European Martial Arts) and the internet, most of these misconceptions are being dissolved to a degree, but alas, not entirely.
One of my inital thoughts when it was announced, was that "this looks like yet another title that will play on all those old misconceptions about swordsmanship and the cultures it portray". Another issue is, I always maintain that it is simply impossible to do justice to all the intricacies of armed melee fighting in a video game with either a controller or keyboard / mouse type of man-machine interface. Not even with motion controllers and VR can you do full justice to it. Though, this doesn't mean you can't do nice things with concept. A game doesn't always need to be a realistic portrayal of the subject in order to be a fun and enjoyable experience, not in every genre anyway. Over the period of months, the more I see, the more I began to like the idea game seem to present. It became one of two most anticipated games for me to look forward to early next year.
For Honor is a game that is centered around competitive PvP gameplay, as well as competitiveness among factions in a single player campaign. It is first and foremost an action game, not necessarily a "simuation of melee combat", but with a new and intricate mechanic that introduce some of the concepts that are relevant to cores of real life weapon based martial arts like timing, different openings / blocks / attack directions, judging of distance, and even grappling to a degree in form of guard breaks. From what I can see in gameplay videos and developer interviews so far, it does seem to be an intriguing new system that may indeed turn out highly deep, enjoyable, and competitive. The father of the idea, and creative director of the project, Jason VandenBerghe has also taken a course on German Longsword, so this alone was encouraging for thinking we'll see less of the misconceptions tied to European knights and the longsword.
So, with so much to look forward to, I have decided to take a look at what we have seen so far, and share my thoughts and observations on them. I never had access to game itself, and have seen only the publicly available promotional material like everyone else. However, I tend to look into things and analyze them, and train my eyes to look beyond the mist of hype, and into the real thing underlying. As a gamer of more than two decades of gaming history, and a small-time game designer, and finally as a historical fencing enthusiast, this game is just the sort of thing I'd love to analyze.
I will first share my thoughs on art related aspects we have seen so far. They will mostly include some thoughts from a historical accuracy point of view.
The Artwork :
For Honor is a historically inspired game, not necessarily historically based, rather inspired. The game has it's own universe and mythology, and is focusing on "cool" aspects of each culture represented. Game needs to please the masses regarding how they have these warriors in their minds, but is also appearing mostly realistic aside from some artisctic licence. So far from what we see, the team has done a pretty decent job at that.Cultures, their structures and characters are easily recognizable for history nuts and and just "warrior fans" alike. Knights do mostly look like knights, Samurai also, Vikings, well a bit less so but still pretty good. Each class of heroes certainly has lots of coolness attached to them, and animations as well as modeling / texturing / design of characters are really great. But their weapons and armour, as well as their martial traits does not necessarily align completely with their historical, real world counterparts (which, again, is not really a necessity).
As stated, artwork is generally very, very well done with we have seen so far. I will still share a few of my personal pet-peeves about design choices on some characters though :
The Berserker looks more of a parkour practioner than what one thinks of as a Berserker. I personally think Raider and Berserker should both have their names be switched between one another. Though, idea of fast, light, twin axed assassing class is nice to have from a gameplay standpoint, and I do look forward to playing as Berserker every now and then. What I don't quite like however, is the "helmet" they wear. It looks like a zorro mask made of metal, rather a normal viking helmet cut into a mask. It just makes no sense, and historically helmet has been the most important, and first bought piece of armour for all warriors. As it is depicted, it just adds deadweight to Berserker's face, but gives little protection. A simple skullcap type of light metal helmet or even a piece of hardened leather helmet would have both looked better, and be more plausible piece of equipment in my opinion.
Speaking of the Raider, dane axe is a weapon I really like, though Raider's axe looks more like a later period axe, even a poll axe almost, it is still nice. Big burly fellow idea is nice too. However, I don't particularly like the choice of making him a more or less naked fellow that wear little armour. A maille hauberk would have been nice, or at least some padding or leather armour. Whether leather armour historically used prominently or not is a debated subject, but at least some armour even if semi-fictional (which is ok for the game) would be nicer and more representative in my opinion. It seems the team has chosen to rather go for the image of huge, axe wielding, naked fanatic, which does not necessarily align well with what Vikings usually looked like. This is why I think he'd carry the berserker name better. It is just wrong that, among the 3 vanguard classes, Warden, Kensei and Raider, Raider is by far the worst armoured, and yet by far the tankiest.
Than comes my favorite character, the Warden. Knight with longsword is what I'd love to play in such a game, and Warden seems to be just that. However, there seems to be an air of "default character" surrounding the Warden, which is unfortunate. While his light attacks seem to be very fast, heavy attacks are very slow, and this is both a visual and gameplay related choice I find disappointing, which is tied with another artwork related choice : the appearance of the longsword. In game longsword is modeled like a thick, huge chunk of metal, with a spatulate tip. It has more in common with much later Scottish two handed claymores. While the longsword is indeed a primarily two handed weapon, average longsword tends to be around 1.3 kgs. For optimal cutting performance, their blades tend to be rather thin, unless they are more thrusting specialized types, and in that case while they'd be thicker, they would also be narrower to balance out. Longswords are some of the best balanced sword designs ever, and at least in open spaces, they are about as agile as an average katana, but with considerably better reach. Kensei's nodachi looks slender in game, while longsword is looking like a chubby bar of metal. This does not reflect reality of these swords. It is a both artistic and gameplay balance decision, but I find it disappointing never the less. Depiction of half swording techniques is a very welcome sight. However, light attacks against minions seem to be depicted mostly as halfswording, which is strange. Halfswording is what you do against heavily armoured folks, like hero characters, or when you are in extreme close quarters. Against minios soldier's it kind of makes Warden's attacks appear more clumsy compared to other vanguards, or indeed most other heroes.
Another knight character, the Conqueror, looks and plays pretty nice from what I've seen in closed alpha videos. I was originally thinking it would be one of my less favortie characters but, I'm pretty much sold after seeing the videos. My issue is, Conqueror is the heavy character of knights faction, and is the tankiest one, even the trailers and developer interviews say so. This kind of flies in face of Conqueror's artwork : from the looks, he is the least well armoured of the knights, and his armour looks like it's from an older period than Lawbringer and Warden. Helmet is proto-great helm of sorts, and later more advanced great helm is available to Warden. Rest of it seem to be maille under a surcoat, which is 1200s-1300s kind of armour. He does look great alright! It's just, not quite the correct look for "tankiest knight hero".
The two Samurai characters in current build, Orochi and Kensei, have armours look quite like Japanese armour in first glance, but in closer look, they aren't quite. They seem to be primarily composed of wood and leather, with occational bits of maille (kusari). Normally, Japanese armour tends to include a good bit of metal in form of metal plates, or even full plate breast armour. This choice seem to be made for supporting the "samurai are very fast" cliche. While later period Japanese armour are indeed quite light and well balanced, for us to talk about that kind of armour, we need to talk about age of firearms, and vaning days of samurai class. Earlier O-Yoroi were as heavy, usually heavier than contemporary European armour, wasn't exactly as protective, and most of it's weight was born on wearer's shoulders, which was tiring and a bit unbalancing. But again, at least from general looks, I have found Orochi and Kensei's artwork to be one of the nicest depiction of samurai in gaming so far! It's just, their armour could use a bit more metal.
The remaining 6 heroes haven't been shown in as much detail so far, therefor only things I have to say about them are just impressions based on images and video apperances. With that said, I hope Peacemaker uses sword + dagger rather than two daggers, some material appears that way, but can't be sure yet. Sword and dagger wass a combination that has seen use in various settings. Double daggers, at least in Europe, is not really documented much, and feels more like a video game / hollywood theme. Sword & dagger combination's video game debut would be nice to see! This will probably the thing that will decide whether the Peacemaker be highly interesting for me, or just not interesting at all, but that's just me anyway. The most iconic viking is the sword & shield viking, and both viking era sword and shield are highly agile types of equipment, so I would think they would be vanguard but it seems the class using them, Warlord, is the heavy for vikings, I am curious to see how it will play, and it will probably one of my mains. Also, Warlord's shield looks too small (for once, something is embellished the wrong way :)). Valkrie, well, she, and other vikings in general, have way too much horns on helmets for my taste :) but otherwise spear and shield is a very welcome addition, as such combination was the most common equipment in both ancient and medieval warfare. Lawbringer and Nobushi will also be very interesting for me, both wielding very powerful and versatile polearms like halberd and naginata. One seem agile, and the other seem to have, at least in appearance, most advanced armour in all game. Looking forward to finding out more about them too. Shugoki looks good enough, big guy in armour and using a kanabo, but it is the only class I am not interested in at all. But "big guy with big stick" is a popular video game theme, and many people like it, so I can see him having his place in game.
Well, this will probably be a long series on For Honor, so let me conclude this one here after a brief look at character art on heroes, and hope you've enjoyed the read. Despite my potential issues, my hype for the game still pretty real! :)
Have a good one, and hope to see you all in next article!
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