Beginning as an experimental idea for a fresh approach to melee combat, For Honor has grown in the 15 months since launch to serve a player base more than 7.5 million strong. Keeping them all happy has meant delivering a continual stream of updates, additions, and improvements, shaping For Honor to become everything its community wants it to be.
“Being a live game brings a whole set of different challenges,” says Brand Director Luc Duchaine, who compares the old model of making games to making movies. “We were making a game, launching it, and then just witnessing the reaction. Now, it’s an amusement park.”
Like any good amusement park, For Honor keeps updating and adding to its attractions. Now in its sixth season of post-launch content, For Honor has added more than 5,000 new pieces of content since release, including six new Heroes, 10 new maps, four major limited-time events, and countless customization items. And more are delivered every week.
“It’s constant shipping, constant working,” says Game Director Damien Kieken. “It’s a big challenge, but in the end [we’re] never bored, and [we’re] constantly surprised by the reaction of your players. And that’s really enlightening.”
Input from players has been instrumental in getting the game where it is today, says Kieken. “We learned a lot from the community. We made some mistakes; we fixed most of those.”
One of the first steps involved learning how to improve the game’s balance. “Balancing means something really tough in the world of For Honor,” says Creative Director Roman Campos Oriola. “Today, we start to have the correct tools in terms of evaluating characters, in terms of collecting the community feedback.” Some of those tools include test workshops at the studio with top players, as well as the Rapid Iteration Fight Test (RIFT) and the Warrior’s Den, a weekly livestream every Thursday at 9AM PT on Twitch.
“We can speak with our community, present what we’re working on, and what’s coming out, but also what will be coming in the future,” Kieken says of the Warrior’s Den. “I think our job evolved from game developers to entertainers.”
The feedback has led to major additions to For Honor as well, like the recently added Arena Mode, which gives players a chance to practice, take their time, and really hone their skills with or against specific Heroes and attacks. Adding dedicated servers for online play was a huge step as well, one that pushed the team to rebuild the game’s underlying architecture, and that has greatly improved stability and the overall quality of the multiplayer experience.
“We reached a ceiling with our previous architecture; now it’s our floor,” says Duchaine. “So we can just improve, and the team keeps working to improve it over and over again.”
It’s been a successful first year, and more big changes and additions are afoot in the near future. Big surprises are in store during E3, so be sure to tune in during the Ubisoft E3 2018 press event, beginning at 1PM PT on June 11.
