Ubisoft on For Honor’s microtransaction controversy: ‘We never had an intention for you to unlock everything in the game’

Typically, when you think about a developer releasing a game that they've poured hundreds, if not thousands of hours of their life into making, you wouldn't expect them not to have player completion be at least one of their goals. As it turns out, that is exactly the case with For Honor, which came straight from the horse's mouth in a recent Q&A session. For Honor's Game Director, Damien Kieken was responding a thread on Reddit where someone took the time to calculate the amount of money players would have to spend on top of the base game purchase if they wanted to unlock everything for every single character without grinding.

He said:

"We never had an intention for you to unlock everything in the game.

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.

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."

One of the biggest criticisms going on with For Honor right now is the incredibly steep grind that players would have to go on to unlock everything, which the Redditor estimated would take most players about 2.5 years. For a lot of players, they feel as though it is a rather useless endeavor, as we'll likely see a For Honor 2 released before then.

To circumvent the grind, Ubisoft has microtransactions for players to purchase packs of Steel ranging from $5 to $100. The Redditor estimates that it takes about $732 in real world money's worth of Steel to unlock everything for every single character on top of the $60-$100 you pay for the base game.

Microtransactions are always a hotbed for controversy whether you are talking about a free-to-play game or a full priced game, but it's certainly an interesting conversation to have and something worth considering when you decide to invest in a game for full price.

Sources: [YouTube, PC Gamer, Gamespot]