FOUR NEW HEROES FROM THE FAR EAST ENTER THE BATTLEFIELD IN FOR HONOR® MARCHING FIRE, LAUNCHING OCTOBER 16
Includes New Faction, 4v4 Game Mode, Unlimited PvE Content, Significant Graphical Enhancements and more on dedicated Australian servers
SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA — June 13, 2018 —Ubisoft has announced Marching Fire, a new update coming to For Honor®. Marching Fire introduces the game’s largest post-launch content update and includes the new Wu Lin faction, a new 4v4 PvP mode, unlimited PvE content and more. The update will be available October 16 on PlayStation®4 computer entertainment system, the Xbox One family of devices including Xbox One X and Windows PC.
Available as part of the Marching Fire update are four new heroes of the Wu Lin – a new faction inspired by ancient Chinese martial arts. The four new heroes include the Tiandi, the Jiang Jun, the Nuxia and the Shaolin, who have traveled from the east to escape a civil war that has consumed their homeland following the cataclysm. Each consumed by their own motivations, ranging from betrayal to personal tragedies, these Wu Lin heroes bring a brand-new set of weaponry and fighting styles to add more versatility to the battlefield. All Wu Lin heroes can be recruited using in-game Steel following an initial exclusivity period.
Players will have access to the four warriors of the Wu Lin, alongside the existing roster of 18 heroes in a brand-new 4v4 PvP game mode, Breach. The mode will be free for all players and is playable across three new maps, allowing players to live the fantasy of storming or protecting a well-fortified castle armed with ballistae and cauldrons of fire as well as archers and a heavily armoured ruler looking to protect his land. Attackers and defenders must strategically maneuver the battlefield as they escort or attempt to destroy a battering ram to gain access to the castle.
Marching Fire will also introduce new unlimited PvE content playable in single-player and two-player online co-op. This new PvE mode will be available as part of the paid bundle, which also includes the Wu Lin heroes. More details about the PvE content and the paid bundle will be revealed soon.
Finally, all players will also benefit from free graphical enhancements that will improve the in-game textures, introduce a revamped lighting system and new sky gradients and also provide further quality of life improvements including an updated user interface
In celebration of the Marching Fire announcement, all PC players can get the For Honor PC Starter Edition for free via Uplay or from the Ubisoft Store June 11–18. The PC Starter Edition gives players full access to all multiplayer game modes and the campaign mode, as well as the three Vanguard heroes with additional heroes being recruitable using in-game Steel. All PC versions of the game will also be on sale for up to 75% off through June 18. Console players can take advantage of the up-to-75% discount on For Honor on Xbox One until June 17 and PlayStation®4 system until June 19.
Developed by Ubisoft Montreal in collaboration with other Ubisoft studios,* For Honor offers an engaging campaign and thrilling multiplayer modes. Players embody warriors of the three Great Factions – the bold Knights, the brutal Vikings and the deadly Samurai – fighting to the death on intense and believable melee battlefields. The Art of Battle, the game’s innovative combat system that puts players in total control of their warriors, allows them to utilise the unique skills and combat style of each hero to vanquish all enemies who stand in their way. With new training modes and dedicated servers, there has never been a better time to play For Honor.
For more information about For Honor, please visit forhonorgame.com and follow us on Facebook at facebook.com/ForHonorGame and on Twitter at twitter.com/ForHonorGame.
For the latest about For Honor and other Ubisoft games, please visit news.ubisoft.com.
*Associate Ubisoft studios include Quebec, Toronto and Blue Byte. Additional development from Studio Gobo.
About Ubisoft
Ubisoft is a leading creator, publisher and distributor of interactive entertainment and services, with a rich portfolio of world-renowned brands, including Assassin’s Creed, Just Dance, Tom Clancy’s video game series, Rayman, Far Cry and Watch Dogs. The teams throughout Ubisoft’s worldwide network of studios and business offices are committed to delivering original and memorable gaming experiences across all popular platforms, including consoles, mobile phones, tablets and PCs. For the 2017–18 fiscal year Ubisoft generated sales of €1,732 million. To learn more, please visit www.ubisoft.com.
© 2018 Ubisoft Entertainment. All Rights Reserved. The For Honor logo, Ubisoft, and the Ubisoft logo are registered or unregistered trademarks of Ubisoft Entertainment in the US and/or other countries.
You see, androids have begun turning “deviant” and turning against their programming and players are first introduced to this concept through Connor, a prototype detective android designed by CyberLife to track down these deviant androids. Alongside Connor we see the struggle of the androids through the eyes of Kara, a housekeeping android who is abused by her owner, a drug-using single father, and Markus who happens to be a caretaker android that assists an elderly famous artist with his day to day life.
Moving on from that we have the third lead, Connor who ends up being the most moldable of the three protagonists. Designed to track down deviant androids Connor follows his orders to the letter with players initially not even having options regarding some of the early instances in the game. That changes overtime however as his interactions with his human partner, Lieutenant Hank Anderson, and the player’s own choices can lead to him growing more human throughout the story. That being said, with his core directive being to track down deviants he will often be at odds when it comes to Marcus and Kara, with a few scenes quickly shifting control between two characters during some events.
Player choice plays a large role in how events will play out and even unlock various routes depending on how certain variables are met. As you play the game not only will each character either raise or lower the “affection” of side characters in the story but they can also change the public’s view on androids as a whole. Alongside these factors come new dialogue options or branches that can only be unlocked if you have seen or committed certain acts in previous chapters.
It is also worth noting that although some worldbuilding is directly handled through televisions and side conversations with characters, there is a wealth of extra information in magazines that are scattered throughout the world. Often these little collectibles tend to simply be bonuses in games but in Detroit: Become Human they can offer extremely interesting information about how the world actually came to be in its current state adding a large amount of depth to the world itself, especially when your own actions start to make headlines.
Talking with characters is done through a series of face button prompts that are occasionally timed and depending on what you say you may gain or lose reputation with characters around you and the public perception of androids as a whole. These dialogue options range from being simple to being incredibly important and some of these may not even be hinted as being as important as they are until later in the story. This means that you will always need to be careful of what you say if you want to keep your storyline moving smoothly without it taking a drastic turn.
It is interesting to note that the game does display a flowchart of events that occur during your time in any given chapter. These will show various things that you may have examined and how your own actions or dialogue choices have sent you down branching paths. Sometimes these branches will usually merge together at the end but it is incredibly interesting to see just how diverse a chapter can be played and what you may have not unlocked, especially when you see just how many ways a chapter might have ended. Players can even compare their choices with percentages of the player base, something that ends up being quite intriguing to see at the end of every chapter.
Again outside of certain side characters that appear to mostly fill in cliche roles and oddly enough the young child ward Alice who is voiced pretty terribly even for a child actress, the voice acting in this game is impeccable. Marcus, Kara, and Connor are all handled incredibly well with their voice actors fitting their personalities perfectly for these scenes. In fact, a wide range of the main side-characters who accompany these characters tend to be voiced quite well as well, really pulling players into the experience. That being said, thanks to numerous hamfisted dialogue elements and certain visuals being as subtle as a sledgehammer, be prepared for some incredibly poorly handled segments that focus on the most obvious themes on portrayal here.
All is not lost however as a capable soldier and a experienced doctor have stayed behind and are more than willing to help out your pair. This is a bigger boon than one may initially think as your partner quickly is infected with the brand new “blood plague” that is always fatal, only this doctor has managed to learn a way to cure the disease. Joining with this pair, your small group of survivors finds themselves on the road with three choices of locales and a hope for survival.
Unfortunately these character missions can glitch rather frequently, either not triggering when swapping to that character, vanishing randomly with plenty of time left to complete said mission, and often occur at inappropriate times, occasionally locking players to a character that is either incredibly tired, injured, or even sick unless they opt out of the mission entirely to swap to a fresh character from their group of survivors.
This means that most of your time in the game players will need to be on the move with a number of improvements made to the scavenging systems. If you aren’t playing with others in the game’s new co-op system that allows up to four players to play on a game at the same time, you can now ask a fellow member of your survivors to travel with you while scavenging the world, allowing players to carry twice as many resources (by swapping to that character when your previous one has filled up) and have an AI companion watching their back while looting or taking down a small group of zombies.
It is worth noting that while the risk of permanent death for members of your group is always a possibility, the actual threat of such an instance tends to be rather low unless you end up coming across a special zombie such as a Juggernaut, Feral, or forget what a Bloater does and happen to run into it with your car while being unprepared or take on a plague heart destruction. Wounded survivors can heal over time in an infirmary and even those that contract the blood plague can be cured if you have enough resources. In fact, unless you find yourself woefully undersupplied, your base can even defend itself against higher level hoard threats drawn in by noise caused by large groups of survivors, various facilities or modifications made to facilities, and other factors.
It is unfortunate however that despite how great combat can feel and the improved nature of scavenging for resources that the game does suffer a surprisingly large number of bugs. Even with the most recent patch for the game, a shockingly large number of issues will come into play even during a single gameplay session. Whether it is as simple, albeit annoying, as having your UI flicker constantly or miss entire words in descriptions to bothersome with environment objects spawning too late, causing a vehicular crash, to disastrous as your character and partner completely ignore a ladder they were meant to climb down and cripple both of them. These issues come into play far too often and are still a problem with the game as of the time of this writing and can quickly become annoying when various other bugs rear their heads to add to the frustration.
The game has an overall eerie feeling to the world with the way that the soundtrack and voice work has been handled. The quiet nature of the environment ruined by screams or groans of the undead makes for a great feeling of dread. The voice work is decent enough for the randomly generated characters though the best voice actors happen to come in the form of a friendly voice on the radio reporting on the state of the world and a familiar voice that fans of the first game will remember.