Paid content, or short-cutting game unlocks with money, are no strange things in mainstream video games–though it’s not something that’s a good fit for most fighting games. There’s an interesting intersection of design principles in For Honor, a quasi-MOBA/fighting game/RPG. Ubisoft recently came under fire, as a reddit user put their math skills to practical use.
bystander007 calculated exactly how much money is needed to unlock everything in the launch version of Ubisoft’s medieval fighter. Steel is the in-game currency, and among emotes, new execution types, effects, outfits, and more, it takes 91500 to unlock everything for one hero. Multiply that by twelve heroes, and you get 1,098,000.
The poster did some further calculations for how many hours a player would have to grind to get those. About 1,200 Steel a day is a fair estimate, depending on what Contracts (daily quests, but they actually become available every other day, which slows the gain) the player gets. Doing 1,200 a day equals 915 days–about two and a half years. A hardcore player could get it in about 326 days.
If you take the real money route, buying 150,000 Steel with $100 packs, it will take $732.
Ubisoft responded to this situation:
“We never had an intention for you to unlock everything in the game. For us that doesn’t really make any sense,” Damien Kieken, game director, said. “We applied RPG mechanics on top of a fighting game in a PvP environment. Let’s say in World of Warcraft, you would never try to unlock everything for all the characters. Same thing in any MOBA.”
“We forecasted that most players would play one to three characters–and that’s what we see today in our game. Most players focus on one character, one hero, and others go up to two or three heroes. All of the design is based around that. The cosmetic items… for us, are endgame content.”
It’s an interesting clash of mechanics, as the genre mix in Ubisoft’s title brings various audiences into the fray. bystander007 goes further into explaining their opinion on the matter and what Ubisoft could do about this. Read up on that on the For Honor reddit.
Which route would you take with For Honor? Do you prefer to fork over a few dollars, or are you a vehement grinder?
Sources: For Honor reddit; wccftech; GameSpot
