For Honor discussion
For Honor is having a free week(end on August 3rd) and have also released a new hero, the Ocelotl.
The Ocelotl comes equipped with a Macuahuitl club and Tepoztopilli spear, using these to have infinite chained attacks, and a few bash attacks. He is a hybrid, described as a ganker and disabled. His feats makes it so at tier 1 when he dies, he can move in spirit form and respawn wherever after 10 seconds, but with very little health. The longer you wait to respawn, the more health you have. The tier 2 is a complement to this, so the enemy that killed you is marked, and tier 3 increases attack speed and damage done, after you kill someone. Tier 4 is a spear attack, which drags an enemy towards you and inflict bleed.
I have tried the new hero out and overall, finds him relatively balanced. While his feats adds a new form of stress, his actual moveset is okay. It isn't stupidly OP, nor is it weak. It's pretty smackdabb in the middle, imo. Also, his feats are an inderect buff to heavy heroes, as boosting a zone is important, so the Ocelotl doesn't respawn in you back zones. This makes it so heavies can more easily build up renown (they gain extra renown from boosting), while also adding surprise attacks. All in all, I like playing against the Ocelotl (as I main Warlord, and like boosting) and I also like playing a Ocelotl.
I played a lot during release but havent followed any development. I remember there being an issue with the game where it was all defensive due to the power of parries, so nobody would want to attack. Of course that was a high level player issue and not my own, but curious how the game has changed over the years.
It really wasn't even traditional "high level" player problem and really just "anyone trying to get into competitive" issue.
To give some context, i've been playing fighting games, FOREVER, but i've never been great (Platinum in SFV after some work, did get very good at rising thunder so I can get there if i've got motivation). Point is, I know my stuff, and i've got an ok grasp on hard/not hard. Especially since i've taken very long breaks from the genre and had to once again relearn how hard it can be to do things that feel "simple" to someone who's been playing forever.
I give this background, because i thought For Honor was fascinating from a "oh my god I can't believe we're still making this mistake" issue (in fact it's got several major issues that I can't believe are in a modern game). I looked hard into For Honor because I think it could've been smash bros level of popular (doing a great job of letting casuals have fun, but also giving those who cared to learn lots to explore) and it failed at that phenomenally.
I'm not going into the full theory of fighting game triangles here (he lied..), but the short version is that 99% of fighting games revolve around conditional rock paper scissors. Generally attacks beat a throw, blocking beats attacks, and throwing beats blocking. This is then further modified by things like spacing (can't threaten a throw if you're too far away, so blocking is much safer), blockstun (your attack might not beat their attack if you're still recovering from blocking the last one), and recovery (if you miss your attack your opponent can punish you).
The point is, you can't ever have the game devolve into a "solved" state. Tic Tac Toe for example isn't a fun game once you learn how to play it, because if both people know what they're doing it's always a tie. There's no "game" just a knowledge check of "do you know the proper way to play". Likewise, there are fighting games (mostly older ones) that had issues where it was never to either palyers advantage to attack. If you can just wait and react to everything your opponent does (like say in a game like dark souls), you can always punish the attempt, or at least get away safely. This is why fighting games have tons of moves that are too fast to react to, often balanced by the previous issues (usually short range or getting you tremendously punished if you miss them).
For Honor blew this SPECTACULARLY on launch, which was odd because myself and many others in the beta, and supposedly even alpha, were pointing it out (and they had known members of the fighting game community on the design team who would've known better, so likely a Ubisoft focus group thing).
The issue is the aforementioned triangle doesn't exist for half the cast. Attacks beat throws, in that they can interrupt them. Great. Blocking however, beats almost ALL attacks. Not "well at the right spacing it's this or that". Just straight up, it's way better to block. You can react to almost every single attack in the game and block it And then the worst part, throws don't beat block.
Throws in For Honor are the most react-able throws out there. I am a mediocre player, especially when it comes to throw breaks, and I got to the point where I was breaking throws 100% of the time. It took maybe a week. Further you get nothing for attempting the throw if broken, you just go back to neutral. This is a major problem, because now if I decide to just "turtle up" and never attack, my opponent can never damage me. Even worse, i can PARRY attacks which will net me a throw or hit. Throws could lead to absurd damage or straight up kill. In theory they could feint the attack I tried to parry, but I don't have to try if i've got the life lead, and due to how parries worked, I could just feint the whiffed parry (since it makes you attack) and now my opponent can't punish me.
So if throws don't beat block what do they beat? Dodge. If you throw when your opponent dodges, there's nothing they can do about it, so that's great. Huge punishes for calling out a dodge.....but why would they dodge? We have now established that the opponent reading your dodge could do a ton of damage, but that if you just sit there and block, you'll never open yourself up to a throw, and you can react to anything they attack you with.
Enter, the unblockable. The few viable classes at the launch of the game had mostly unblockable moves that started up quick. Conqueror and Warlord being the main two. They had quick, nearly unreactable shield bash that couldn't be blocked. So if you got close enough to your opponent, you put them in the mixup of "am i going to shield bash you or am i going to grab you?" To beat the shield bash, you need to dodge, to beat the grab, you need to sit there and react. Unfortunately this is shallow as hell, and since the shield bash usually just got you a little bit of damage, and the grab got you a heavy hit, it was still a lot of dancing around and dodging. I am in fact so passionate about this niche subject, I have some examples pinned in my bookmarks for anyone who's eyes haven't glazed over yet-
Some riveting 1v1 footage - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhKzC7w3os8
Some season 1 tourney footage - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dRa3T0q0I3c
Some breakdowns - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_cP9GhVuo1s
You'll notice one other common thing that was viable in there, which was unreactable attacks based around things like nobushi unlocked zone attack. I don't want to go down the entire rabbit hole there, but suffice it to say, that if you were a character who had a "fair" movelist, then you were screwed becuase there was no way to ever open up a half decent opponent. Games would literally stalemate online between decent players not playing characters with unblockable/unreactable options as no one could damage the other. The few mistakes that would happen, being canceled out by the low HP regen feature as well (if you're almost dead but don't get hit, you recover to a little bit more hp, meaning both players could hit this state and stalemate).
Now they did, eventually, start to fix some of this. Parries no longer gave throw punishes, health no longer regenerated, and a lot of frame data was reworked. Still though, for whatever reason, they never cleaned up the core problem. Last time i looked into the game a year ago, everyone was complain about the "blue and orange" meta. Basically meaning that all characters who had gotten reworked or added had an orange attack (unblockable) or a blue one (undodgeable)...so they've just backdoored their way in to having a real threat, but lost variety in the process.
Even more annoying to me, but arguably unrelated, is the number of useless moves on most characters move lists. In the 90s/00s, you had plenty of games and characters who could have 20 + moves, and only use about 3 of them (tekken is a pretty notorious example with its huge movelists that are mostly fluff in the early games). The genre as a whole has gotten better at this, because why spend time coding a move that no one is supposed to actually use. Things that are useless often get buffs to make them better. For honor is annoying with this because characters already have so few moves, and yet so many of them aren't even close to being good. What little character depth they could have is stripped away because the "concept" of a move doesn't actually work vs a half decent player (many combo's are supposed to be mixups, but rarely actually do that because you can just react and block them freely, and there's not much blockstun in the game to punish this).
Clearly, I could go on. I wanted so badly to love the game. I love the aesthetic, and I love the concept. It's so so frustrating that I believe there was a real working model probably at some point, and yet it reeks of focus groups getting back to developers who then make bad decisions. It can makes sense to say "well throws feel cheap so make sure people can break out of them" in the moment, but it destroys the actual gameplay and turns it into tic tac toe unless you have some unplanned for interaction. I'm not even getting into the stamina system, which ought to be a cool thing, and is also a huge reason why any aggressive/mixup gameplay is punished, and instead defensive play is the optimal, so you wind up with two people staring at each other.
This whole novel aside, I haven't looked in about a year, so I'll probably look into it again. I loved the theory behind conq (shield bash/heavy shield bash/charge strike/counter mixups), but i've found the game to frequently just feel unexciting to play for the reasons above. It still feels like most movelists are for messing around vs the CPU, and the core combat is extremely shallow.
Edit-
And in diving back into it I went straight to freeze, who has extremely high quality content for people who are more serious about the game, and he's got a wonderful video talking about the current state of 1v1 (and a brief mention of what a dumpster fire season 1 was for that )
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFcUd_CQmXE
Excellent analysis! But I will add that For Honor never was a traditional fighting game, which is good. Let me explain. For Honor tried to be a bit more grounded in it's fighting from other fighting games. Compared to the likes of Smash Bros and Tekken, For Honor have characters with more "realistic" moves. This meant that you can't have these over powered finishing moves that you build up to. Much like real life sparring, For Honor centers around making your opponent fuck up. Here we have the true power of unblockables; they serve as 50/50s. You either parry or dodge the unblockable, or you prepare for it being a bluff. If you are wrong, you take a hit. If you dodge and the unblockable was a bluff, you get guardbroken and hurt real bad. This is the core of For Honor. It is much more about strategy than learning moves. Sure, at top level it is all about the meta. But for 90% of players it's about trying to outsmart an opponent. The most popular gamemode is Dominion (4v4), which adds another layer of strategy, cappung zones to win. You can get 15 kills, but still lose because you didn't play the objectives. Fighting is just a mean to achieve victory of the objectives, but the objectives are the goal. For Honor is unique in this regard, and while it isn't a very good fighting game, and I wouldn't call it a good game, it is fun. It still is alive seven years later, with more to come. I have a hate/love relationship with it, since it is a broken, buggy, and unbalanced mess, but by the gods do I have fun. With 1280 hours in game, I can't say I hate it, just that I hate myself for loving it. It is the imperfect synthesis of games like Chivalry and Mordhau, and games like Tekken and Smash Bros. This is why it isn't a good fighting game, and neither should it be, because it isn't a true fighting game. It is its own beast.
I have played on and off since release, and the defensive meta is gone. Against some characters it is better to try and turtle against, but generally most characters benefit from attacking rather than defending. A year after release they made it so parrying didn't guarantee a guard break, but rather parrying a heavy attack confirmed a light attack, and parrying a light attack guaranteed a heavy attack. This along with changes to some characters made it more viable to attack in a lot of scenarios. The game is better in that regard today I would say. But yeah, the first year was...interesting.
Great, thank you for answering. I'm glad they addressed that early on. Maybe I'll have to dust it off and reinstall to see I'd it still grabs me, I'll file it away father up the backlog!