For Honor

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  For Honor drops players into third-person melee duels as a Knight, a Viking, a Samurai, a Wu-lin warrior, or a member of a fifth faction called the Outlanders. Ubisoft Montreal built its combat around a single promise: players should feel "the weight of the weapon in their hand." The game launched worldwide for PlayStation 4, Windows, and Xbox One in 2017. What makes a duel built on blocking three directions of attack so hard to master, and how did critics receive it? Why did a warlord called Apollyon believe an endless war would make warriors stronger? And how did a launch roster of three factions grow, season by season, into a saga fought across a shifting map called Heathmoor?

• 2. The Art of Battle

  ›

  The Vanguard is called "well-balanced" in the game's own class descriptions, built to trade blows with strong offense and defense alike. The Assassin trades that balance for speed, cutting down single opponents fast while dealing far less damage to groups. Heavies, also called Tanks, shrug off punishment and hold capture points, though their attacks land slowly. A fourth class, the Hybrid, blends two of those three profiles and unlocks uncommon skills the pure classes cannot use.

  Killing multiple enemies in quick succession earns a Feat, a perk that can call in a barrage of arrows, summon a catapult strike, or heal the player outright. Every Hero carries a unique weapon and fighting style into that fight. AI minions fill out most missions, but they are far weaker than any player character and rarely pose a real threat.

  A tactical system called Art of Battle activates whenever a player meets another player, or a higher-health AI, in combat. Locked into that dueling stance, players aim their weapon and choose to guard left, right, or top, reading on-screen cues and an opponent's stance to block the next strike. Class-specific tools, like shoulder barges and back-stepping swipes, add options beyond simple guarding, and players decide how hard each attack lands. That same one-on-one logic, a single guard against a single strike, would need to scale up once For Honor moved from lone duels to four-versus-four battlefields.

• 3. A Shooter With Swords

  ›

  The game's own creative director once summed up its multiplayer in four words: "a shooter with swords." Dominion, the mode that shows that idea best, pits two four-player teams against each other on a map split into zones marked A, B, and C. Holding zone A or C for a stretch grants a team 100 temporary points, and every held zone adds one more point each second, doubling if a team stays inside it. Zone B usually swarms with minions instead, worth 2 points per kill, and changes hands only once three minions cross into the enemy's side. Whichever team reaches 1000 points first forces the other into a "breaking" state, unable to respawn without a teammate's help, and a four-minute clock then decides the match.

  Brawl strips that down to two-versus-two, best of five rounds, while Duel puts one player against another for five minutes, also settled over a best-of-five series. Ranked Duel repeats that same format but opens with an "unranked" qualifying run of 8 matches before sorting players into one of seven tiers: Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, Diamond, Master, and Grand Master. A player's wins, losses, and prior season rank decide that placement, and every tier resets when a new season begins. Ranked play still carries a "beta" label years after launch, even as each season hands out unique Ornaments for heroes released up through the Year 4 Marching Fire update.

  Skirmish sends two four-player teams chasing points from kills until one side has scored enough to force a final push, wiping out whoever remains. Elimination cuts straight to that finish, four against four, with the last team holding a living player declared the winner. Tribute has both squads racing to gather three offerings for a shrine, each one unlocking its own power-up, won by claiming all three or holding the most when the timer ends. Breach turns four attackers loose with a battering ram they must drive through two gates before facing a boss called "The Commander," while four defenders try to break the ram, protect the Commander, or run out the clock.

  The Marching Fire expansion added an Arcade mode built for solo play or two-player co-op, folded into every copy of the game once patch 2.50.0 shipped. Arcade sends players through chapters inside a quest, facing one to three AI enemies across five difficulty tiers tied to a recommended gear score. That score starts at 0 for the easiest quests and climbs by 36 points per tier, reaching 144 at the legendary level, while the highest score any player can reach caps at 180, six gear pieces all leveled to 30. A separate Weekly Quest locks in one fixed difficulty, story, and map for everyone until the week resets. Every match played across these modes, win or lose, feeds a separate contest that stretches far beyond any single battlefield.

• 4. The Faction War

  ›

  Every online multiplayer match pays War Assets to a player's faction, based on the outcome and how that player performed. Those assets get poured into an ongoing Faction War spanning every platform, where the side that deploys the most assets in a territory claims it. Territories change hands on a six-hour update cycle, each round lasts two weeks, and five rounds make up a ten-week season. As the front line shifts, the maps themselves change appearance depending on whether Knights, Vikings, or Samurai currently hold that ground, and players who help their faction gain or defend territory earn better gear once the round, and later the season, ends. A new season starts after a short off-season, though the story carries forward whatever the previous season's fighting decided.

  Knights, Vikings, and Samurai were the only three factions available at launch. The Wu Lin, drawing on Chinese culture, joined with the Marching Fire expansion, and a fifth faction called the Outlanders arrived in Y5S4 with no cultural ties to any other faction, or even to each other. Counting every faction, For Honor now fields 38 playable Heroes: 9 Knights, 8 Vikings, 9 Samurai, 6 Wu Lin, and 6 Outlanders. That fragile peace between the factions is exactly where the single-player campaign begins, with a warlord named Apollyon already at work.

• 5. Apollyon's War

  ›

  Apollyon seizes control of the Blackstone Legion's knights in the land of Ashfeld by murdering her own rivals, clearing her path to endless war. When the Legion moves to punish a lord-turned-mercenary named Hervis Daubeny, his second-in-command, a knight known only as the Warden, breaks the siege and duels the Blackstone champion. After defeating a captain named Ademar, the Warden is knighted into the Legion by Apollyon's lieutenant, Holden Cross, and joins his ranks. Fighting alongside Holden Cross and fellow lieutenants Stone and Mercy against Viking raiders, the Warden slowly realizes Apollyon cares nothing for the people she claims to protect.

  Apollyon's forces sack Viking strongholds across the northern land of Valkenheim, leaving just enough food behind to force survivors to fight each other for it. Out of that chaos, a warrior called Raider descends from the mountains and starts uniting the scattered clans under the Warborn banner. Raider kills two rivals first, a scavenger named Ragnar and a warlord named Siv the Ruthless, with help from Stigandr, the Valkyrie warrior Runa, and the Berserker Helvar. His growing army retakes a Warborn stronghold from Apollyon's knights, then marches into the land of the Myre to raid the Samurai of the Dawn Empire for supplies.

  Raider's raid kills the Samurai General, Tozen, and sends the Dawn Empire retreating to its greatest city. Apollyon uses the confusion to kill the Empire's ruler and any daimyos who refuse to fight for her. A powerful Orochi warrior known as the Emperor's Champion, freed from prison during the chaos for once speaking out of turn, pushes the Vikings back but cannot stop Apollyon from murdering the Imperial family, leaving the surviving daimyos to fight each other for the crown.

  The Champion, alongside the samurai Ayu, the Shugoki Okuma, and the Nobushi Momiji, sets out to reunite the daimyos against their common enemy. Infiltrating the Emperor's palace with Momiji, the Champion defeats a daimyo named Seijuro, who had accepted Apollyon's offer of the throne, and convinces him to switch sides. Learning the full scope of Apollyon's manipulation, the Champion invades Ashfeld and lays siege to Blackstone Fortress alongside the Warden, now commanding a rebel Iron Legion. Searching the battlefield for Apollyon, the Champion finally kills her, only to learn she wanted exactly this: an age of bloodthirsty wolves bred by endless war.

  Despite Apollyon's death, the three armies besieging Blackstone Fortress turn on one another, dragging the factions into a war that lasts seven years. Recognizing the fight's futility, the Warden sends Holden Cross to meet the Viking jarl Stigandr and the samurai Ayu, and the three agree that peace is still worth pursuing. The story that multiplayer players would inherit season after season starts exactly there, in the exhausted quiet after Apollyon's death.

• 6. Seasons of Heathmoor

  ›

  Season 1, called Apollyon, opens by revisiting the campaign's own events, and shows the temporary truce between the factions falling apart the moment their shared enemy is gone. Heathmoor slides back into open conflict with no threat left to hold anyone together.

  Season 2, Shadow & Might, has the Samurai calling on the Shinobi, covert fighters trained in stealth, while the Knights revive the Centurions, disciplined officers from a long-gone empire known for battlefield precision. Season 3, Grudge & Glory, brings in Gladiators for the Knights, arena fighters more used to duels than open war, while the Vikings answer with the Highlanders, oath-bound warriors returning to back their allies. Season 4, Order & Havoc, adds the Samurai's masterless Aramusha and the Vikings' feral Shamans, a sign of how far each faction will go as the war drags on.

  Year 2 opens with Age of Wolfs, a season built around gameplay tuning and balance changes rather than new story. Heroes March follows, built around word of new champions rising to steady the rank and file through the long war. Reigning Inferno turns to Heathmoor itself, with volcanoes erupting and storms worsening until every faction starts blaming the others for the upheaval, leaving the land open to a threat none of them saw coming.

  By the fourth season, Marching Fire, the Wu Lin arrive after fleeing the collapse of their own empire, and under a leader named Gao Lei they carve out a foothold in Heathmoor fast enough to make clear they intend to stay.

• 7. Building Heathmoor

  ›

  Development on For Honor began in 2012, marking Ubisoft's first attempt at a strategy-action game rather than a straightforward brawler. Ubisoft Montreal led the project, with the studio Blue Byte handling the PC version, and the whole structure drew on shooter games for its shape.

  Ubisoft first showed the game at its E3 2015 press conference, pairing a CGI trailer with a live gameplay demo. The finished game reached players on the 14th of February 2017, arriving alongside a 20-track original score.

  That score came from film composers Danny Bensi, Saunder Jurriaans, and Owen Wallis, mixed into a soundtrack presented in Dolby Atmos.

  On the 27th of July 2018, Ubisoft announced For Honor was joining the Xbox Games with Gold program. A documentary titled Playing Hard traces the game's whole development arc, from an idea by Jason Vandenberghe up through release.

  The Warden crossed over into SNK's 2019 fighting game Samurai Shodown as playable downloadable content on the 24th of June 2020. From the 21st of October 2021 to the 11th of November 2021, a crossover called Survivors of the Fog brought Dead by Daylight-themed items into the game, along with a limited-time mode that placed the Trapper into the fight as an AI-controlled enemy. All of that build-up would soon be measured against a single number: the score critics and Metacritic would give the finished game.

• 8. Reception and Records

  ›

  Metacritic logged For Honor's critical reception as "generally favorable" at launch. PC Gamer scored it 74 out of 100, writing that it was "a tense, tactical medieval brawler that will reward anyone with the patience and will to master it." Eurogamer placed it 25th on its list of the Top 50 Games of 2017, and IGN handed it the People's Choice Award for Best Fighting Game in its Best of 2017 Awards.

  For Honor topped Japan's sales chart during its first week on sale, from the 13th to the 19th of February 2017, selling 40,062 copies according to Media Create. It was the top-selling video game in the United States that February, according to the NPD Group, and the best-selling game in the United Kingdom for the week ending the 18th of February 2017, according to Chart-Track data that excludes digital sales. SuperData Research ranked it seventh worldwide in digital console sales for that month, with over 700,000 digital copies sold across all three platforms.

  At Gamescom 2016, For Honor was named across five categories: Best PC Game, Best PlayStation 4 Game, Best Xbox One Game, Best Action Game, and Best Multiplayer Game. In 2018, it appeared in the Outstanding Achievement in Animation category at the 21st Annual D.I.C.E. Awards, at the Italian Video Game Awards, and at the Game Critics Awards, where its category was Best Ongoing Game. That last label, Best Ongoing Game, was already the truest way to describe a game still adding factions, modes, and seasons years after two hundred and some players first picked up a blade in Heathmoor.