I haven't bought a new game in quite a while, for several reasons, but every time I watch gameplay from For Honor, I seriously begin contemplating buying it. It comes out on Valentine's Day, and looks like a ton of fun. There are a few things for this, I think -
Subject matter. The name of the game is not random. There's basically a factional war going on between knights, vikings, and samurai, all of whom have very strong ideals centered on "honor" in some form or another. There's even a campaign based around it, which I got to see about an hour of on one of the videos put out by Achievement Hunter.
Teamwork-based. The two main game modes appear to be an intimate 2v2 battle with no other characters/NPCs, and 4v4 Dominion, which is like a "capture and hold the points" type game you see in something like Battlefield One, with some NPC minions milling about as well. I like teamwork-oriented games, although getting a team actually working together is typically an issue. My hope is that with a relatively small team, it should be easy to communicate and work together effectively.
Visceral PvP combat. What I mean by this is that the PvP elements are very meaty. So in something like BF1, you're running around, and you sprint into a building, and you bump into and enemy soldier. This kind of fight is typically over in 1-2 seconds, as one or the other of the two of you die, and the surviving person moves on doing whatever. Compare this to something like Dark Souls, where most of the fight is spent evaluating each other, circling around and trying to poke at potential openings. This can go on for several seconds before any committed moves are even made. For Honor seems to work in the same way, where a typical fight will likely take at least 10 seconds before one of you die, and only if you're really dominating and clearly kicking butt right from the get-go.
Depth of combat. From what I understand of the system, there's a fair bit of depth here with the fighting. There's a stamina system (always neat in a hand-to-hand combat game), and when you are attempting to guard/attack, you have to pick one of three directions - left, right, and overhead, and guard the appropriate way for the attack. This reminds me of the system in Mount and Blade, which is basically the same. You also have guard breaks, feints, and unique skills for each class to throw into the mix too.
If you're interested in seeing a video on the subject, you can find one with the Let's Play crew here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOtQrDXtwOU
It looks extremely fun just from watching all this though, and so I'm starting to read a bit more into detail on the game itself. But I was wondering if any other Phukers had seen it yet or considered getting it so far.
I tried the beta. Pretty briefly. I didn't enjoy it. It looks cool. I thought I would love it because it looked so cool. It felt too clunky for me. I felt like I would react to block in time but the attack still seemed to get through. The winning strategy seems to be mob attacking. You just outnumber someone and then win the fight.
I dunno. I love medieval times stuff. Love the style of the game. But something about the gameplay. I just didn't enjoy it.
Is there not a beta going on right now? You should try to get into that before it comes out. Not sure if thats still going on. See if you enjoy the feel of the game.