Ubisoft is no stranger to games dabbling in Alternate History, though they’re most famous for their use of it in the Assassin’s Creed franchise. Other franchises of theirs that utilize the concept, like Anno, go a little looser with it. No matter how much they play with historical events and time periods, there is an attempt at depicting details with as much accuracy as the setting and gameplay can allow. Today’s game is, as a result, a very bizarre beast because it’s going for insane historical accuracy while, at the exact same time, depicting something completely fantastical.
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If knights and samurai fought at some point in our long History, I'm sure it's never to the extent that they do here. |
Developed by Ubisoft Montreal and released on February 14, 2017, For Honor’s genre is hard to pin down. At its core, it’s a third-person melee fighter, which sees you mowing down weak enemies and using strategy to take down stronger ones. Like a 3D beat’em-up with swords. While the game includes a single-player campaign, it puts a lot more focus on its multiplayer options. There, you can take part in fights as a member of one of the available factions, earn points for your group, and help conquer territories in this endless war.
For, yes, this game is about war. War never changes... Wait, wrong studio. But the spirit is the same. I’m not huge on multiplayer, but I’ll do my due diligence and discuss that part before focusing on the single-player campaign. I’d usually do this in the opposite order, but I’ll probably spend a lot more time on the campaign, so multiplayer first. Or, wait, no. First, I guess I’d better explain the setting.
Fighting Spirits
The base concept of this endless war is that multiple warrior races live next door to each other at the same time and, since that’s all they really know, try taking over each other’s territories. At launch, only three “clans” existed: The Legion (medieval knights), the Warborn (Vikings), and the Chosen (Samurai). Later updates add two new clans: The Wu Lin (based on Ancient Chinese warriors) first, then the Outlanders, travelers from other cultures, who don’t fit the other four and chose to team up against them.
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There's probably an entire thesis to be written about every bit of equipment worn by every member of every character class. I shall not be the one who writes it. |
An interesting aspect of these clans is that they all span several centuries of our world’s History, and it’s reflected in their various classes. And yet, at the same time, classes are about all as time-displaced as can get; an example would be the knights, who feature Centurions and Gladiators based off Ancient Rome fighting on the same side as multiple types of knights who existed anywhere from the twelfth to sixteenth centuries. The same goes for armors and weapons, as most if not all of them are inspired by very real equipment worn by each class, to say nothing of techniques and strategies co-existing despite having been invented several centuries apart. Anachronisms is the name of the game, not just within clans, but sometimes within a single character class. I’d probably need a few years of historical studies to understand everything that’s featured here and all the ways in which they shouldn’t make sense when put together.
These anachronisms fly by so easily because the setting is blatantly fantastic. Either way, you’ve at least got to hand that to Ubisoft Montreal, they put in the work.