Ubisoft responds to For Honor microtransaction controversy

News
By published

You're not meant to grind for every single cosmetic, basically.

For Honor attracted the wrong kind of attention last week when a reddit user did the math on the game's cosmetic microtransactions. Basically, if you want to unlock every piece of kit available in-game, you'll need to pay $732 on top of the base game price, or grind for a very long time. That's in order to buy or acquire the requisite amount of "steel", which is used to unlock the items in-game.

In theory, cosmetics don't give you an advantage: they're designed to make you look a little bit nicer. Also, according to For Honor game director Damien Kieken, speaking on the weekly 'Warrior's Den' livestream, you're not meant to want them all anyway.

"We never had an intention for you to unlock everything in the game," he said. "First, that doesn't truly make any sense. We applied RPG mechanics on top of a fighting game, in a PVP environment, but it's like in an RPG, like in World of Warcraft: you would never try to unlock everything for all the characters of the whole game. Same for any MOBA, you're not trying to unlock all the content for all the characters in the game."

He continued: "What we forecasted was that most players would play one, or one to three characters, and that's what we're seeing in the game: most players focus on one character, one hero, and others go up to three. The design is based around that. The cosmetic items are really for us the end-game content: the things we want you to unlock after playing for several weeks."

So basically, you're not meant to buy and / or unlock everything. Kieken uses the analogy that when you go to the shop you don't want to, or intend to, buy everything.

Here's the full video below. The discussion starts at around the 24 minute mark.

Shaun Prescott
Shaun Prescott
Australian Editor

Shaun Prescott is the Australian editor of PC Gamer. With over ten years experience covering the games industry, his work has appeared on GamesRadar+, TechRadar, The Guardian, PLAY Magazine, the Sydney Morning Herald, and more. Specific interests include indie games, obscure Metroidvanias, speedrunning, experimental games and FPSs. He thinks Lulu by Metallica and Lou Reed is an all-time classic that will receive its due critical reappraisal one day.