Are you ready for a story of hardship and triumps? One of true determination and a lesson to all developers out there to listen to your community (sometimes)? Because here lies For Honor, a game that was so hyped it made every one (especially me) to go nuts when It was first announced.
Why, you ask? Because it involves MEDIVAL KNIGHTS, VIKINGS AND SAMURAI!
Now, I’m a huge Medival knight buff and just hearing that there would be knights already made me want to buy the game, but it doesn’t stop there because the absolute madmen at Ubisoft decided to add in Vikings and Samurai in a 3 way winner take all fight! When the E3 announcement was first made, Ubisoft debuted the combat stances as well and it was supposed to be a competitive medieval fighting game.
So what went wrong? OH BOY.
Well for starters, Ubisoft underestimated the number of players that would be interested in the game and during release servers were just crashing left and right (annoying right?)
The game was also plagued by intense lag as there were no dedicated servers so players depended on P2P (Peer to Peer) that means that if you’re playing from Malaysia and someone else was playing from the other side of the world, good luck having a good match as you’ll both experience input lag.
There were also a ton of bugs that just made the game look silly.
Not to mention there was that time the winner of Ubisoft’s first official for honor tournament admitted to cheating by using an exploit and instead of penalizing him, he still got to go home with the prize money of USD 10,000 ( about RM 40,000).
Imagine the outrage!
And so, For Honor was plagued by issues since day 1 which was evident by their numbers of dwindling playerbase.
With no improvements in sight many players moved on and tried to ask for refunds, Players also started calling For Honor a “dead game” on many forums and they’re not wrong, because you’d fight the same person over and over and most likely disconnect in between because of the poor server connection as there is no dedicated servers!
So what changed?
To better understand and establish communication between players and developers, For Honor’s development team started a podcast called Warriors Den that runs every week and announced on Twitter.
Source: Google
Well Ubisoft has actually been steadily churning out seasons that added new maps and 2 new characters every season, this drew the attention of the small amount of players who remained even though they called for more drastic changes, such as rework of characters and dedicated servers.
So Ubisoft did just that- out of nowhere they just hit us with rework after rework, the most recent one being the warden, which was very well received.
And just when you think things couldn’t get any better, Ubisoft’s For Honor decided to listen to the community and finally get dedicated servers after a year of waiting! That means NO MORE DISCONNECTS AND LAG ( well, most of it at least).
And with those changes, surprise surprise, the game started coming back from the dead! They even hit their highest peak at season 5! When they first announced that they had implemented dedicated servers.
Well, For honor still has a long way to go, but with these changes its safe to say that they’re here to stay as their numbers have really shot up!
I for one am really glad that the development team decided to listen to the community and implement these changes. Here’s to a long life for the game and hopefully for the next few years we can continue to fight, For Honor.
Header Image Source: wallpaperflare
