Think about the video game industry in 2017. Now consider this: a niche, full-priced Ubisoft fighting game called For Honor released that year and is still receiving regular updates, maintaining fast matchmaking, and surviving company wide restructurings nearly a decade later. Somehow, For Honor has defied expectations and continues to thrive.
When this title originally hit the market, it fell flat on its face. The player base tanked rapidly, mostly because the publisher charged $60 for a game with an aggressive in game store and absolutely no dedicated servers. Yet, nearly a decade later, it breathes. To understand how it pulled off this massive comeback, we have to look at the messy history behind its creation, its near death experience, and the smart moves that brought it back from the brink.
The core concept didn't come from a boardroom, it came from physical exertion. Creator Jason Vandenberg took a course in German longsword combat and wanted to capture the heavy, adrenaline fueled tension of holding a weapon and staring down an opponent. The main hurdle was figuring out how to map the raw physical tension of swordplay onto a standard gamepad.
Vandenberg pitched the idea for roughly ten years. Despite his industry connections at major publishers, the idea sat on the shelf until Ubisoft Montreal finally gave it a green light. Thus began a stressful development cycle in 2013. The goal was to pit historical warriors Knights, Vikings, and Samurai against each other in a gritty, unending war.
However, building a brand new type of multiplayer game took a massive psychological toll on the team. The stress was so high that close to release, the game's producer abruptly left the studio to recover on a farm due to severe burnout. Meanwhile, Vandenberg, the original ideas guy, found his creative control slipping away as the team ballooned in size. His responsibilities shrank until he was effectively edged out of his own project by launch day.
What makes the game tick is a highly original combat system. Instead of mashing buttons to memorize fighting game combos, players lock onto an enemy and choose between three directional stances. You have to match your opponent's stance to block, or time a heavy attack perfectly to parry. It feels a bit like Dark Souls, but strictly tailored for competitive player versus player fights.
While 1v1 and 2v2 modes exist, the main attraction is a 4v4 mode focused on capturing three zones to rack up points and eventually eliminate the enemy team's ability to respawn. Because it's a team game, getting grouped up on by multiple enemies is a frequent hazard. To balance this, the developers added a Revenge
meter. Taking hits or blocking multiple attackers fills the meter, eventually allowing the isolated player to trigger a temporary shield, infinite stamina, and auto parries to level the playing field.
Despite heavy hype at E3 2015 and a massive marketing budget, the 2017 release was heavily criticized. Highly requested features, like split screen co op, were scrapped right before launch. Worse, players paying the $60 entry fee found themselves staring at a very thin package.
The single player campaign was painfully average. Lasting only about six hours, it felt more like an extended tutorial for the multiplayer than a fully realized story. But the real disaster was the online infrastructure. Instead of paying for dedicated servers, the studio used a peer to peer networking system where the whole lobby shared hosting duties.
This was a catastrophic choice. If one person got angry and quit the match, the entire game would freeze to re establish the connection, replacing the quitter with an AI bot. Unpunished rage quitting became the meta. Furthermore, the networking relied heavily on players' strict NAT types. If your router settings clashed with someone else's, matchmaking was nearly impossible.
Because the combat mechanics were entirely unprecedented, players quickly found ways to break them. Early on, top tier play was dominated by frustrating exploits. Players figured out how to unlock their camera from an opponent to throw lightning fast attacks that were literally impossible to parry. In fact, a major early competitive tournament was won by a player using these exact exploits, which made the game look terrible on a public stage.
Additionally, the monetization caused a massive uproar. The in game currency, Steel
, could be bought with real money and used to buy loot crates containing gear. At the time, gear provided raw statistical advantages meaning you could technically pay for better damage or defense. This sparked accusations of pay to win mechanics and led to a wave of players setting up scripts to AFK farm currency while they slept.
Rather than abandoning the sinking ship, the developers dug in. The turning point arrived in 2018. They finally implemented dedicated servers, completely fixing the horrible peer to peer freezing issues. They also introduced a massive balance patch that stopped players from getting a free, highly punishing grab attack every time they landed a parry. This single change encouraged players to actually attack rather than staring at each other waiting for a mistake.
To bring players back, they offered heavily discounted (and sometimes free) Starter Editions
, which limited character unlocks but allowed access to the full game. This laid the groundwork for a massive expansion that completely revived the title.
The expansion introduced a Chinese warrior faction, a graphical overhaul, a cooperative PvE mode, and a large scale siege mode where teams protect or attack a moving battering ram. Importantly, they also scrapped the stat boosting gear system, replacing it with a much fairer perk
system that provided minor situational buffs rather than raw damage increases.
The main reason this game survives is simple: nobody else makes anything like it. It operates in a genre of one. If you want this specific type of medieval melee combat, you have no alternative.
But credit must also go to the development team. They regularly communicate with the player base, host weekly streams, and even fly top players out to the studio to ask for direct feedback. They lean into the game's rocky history rather than hiding from it, creating a strong bond with the community.
That doesn't mean everything is perfect today. The developers eventually pushed a massive combat update aimed at stopping light attack spam
. It shifted the entire flow of combat from reacting to visual cues to predicting what your opponent will do next. While this raised the skill ceiling, it left many casual players confused and frustrated.
New character releases also follow a tiring industry trend: they usually launch completely overpowered. Because new characters are locked behind a real money paywall for the first two weeks, players who pay get an easy advantage until the inevitable nerf arrives later.
Finally, the game is incredibly hostile to beginners. The tutorial is severely outdated and fails to teach newcomers about the actual tactics used in real online matches. New players step into multiplayer thinking they know the basics, only to get completely destroyed by mechanics the game never bothered to explain.
Despite these flaws, the game found its footing. It doesn’t need to be the biggest game in the world; it just needs to keep its dedicated audience happy. It stands as rare proof that a failed live service game can be saved provided the core gameplay is actually unique and the developers are willing to put in the hard work to fix their mistakes.
