For Honor Starter Edition includes six playable heroes for $15

Ubisoft is now offering a For Honor Starter Edition, a scaled-back edition of the game that will include the full story campaign and all multiplayer modes, with three fully-unlocked Vanguard heroes—Warden, Raider, and Kensai—plus three more playable heroes from the faction chosen at the start of the game. 

The three faction heroes won't be customizable until they're unlocked, which will cost 8000 Steel, For Honor's in-game currency. The remaining heroes that were included with the game at launch will be unlockable and customizable for 8000 Steel, while post-release heroes will cost 15,000 Steel—the standard going rate for DLC characters. 

The For Honor Starter Edition is available now and sells for $15, compared to $60 for the standard release. That's quite a discount, the trade-off being that you'll need to invest a lot more time in the game to get to all the good stuff. Grinding for Steel is, well, a grind, as we noted here. Ubisoft increased the Steel payouts shortly after that analysis went up, but it will still take a lot of time to earn the necessary currency through gameplay. Steel can also be purchased, but it's not cheap: You'll have to fork over roughly $40 to unlock the remaining heroes included with the base game, and more if you want the DLC characters.   

That's maybe a little less extreme than the Rainbow Six Siege Starter Edition, which we recently declared a "do not buy," but at the very least it's something to be aware of: If you want the full For Honor and don't feel like grinding your face off, you might be better off springing for the standard release.
 

Andy Chalk

Andy has been gaming on PCs from the very beginning, starting as a youngster with text adventures and primitive action games on a cassette-based TRS80. From there he graduated to the glory days of Sierra Online adventures and Microprose sims, ran a local BBS, learned how to build PCs, and developed a longstanding love of RPGs, immersive sims, and shooters. He began writing videogame news in 2007 for The Escapist and somehow managed to avoid getting fired until 2014, when he joined the storied ranks of PC Gamer. He covers all aspects of the industry, from new game announcements and patch notes to legal disputes, Twitch beefs, esports, and Henry Cavill. Lots of Henry Cavill.