For Honor and its Inspirations
Since its announcement in 2015, we’ve been scratching our heads in fascination over Ubisoft’s For Honor. In many ways, it’s a game that has never been attempted by a AAA publisher like Ubisoft–a multiplayer-focused game with an intricately-designed combat system based on directional blocks and attacks.
But across the board, For Honor’s brand of combat is not all that new. And despite its comparisons to traditional fighting games and even the ever-popular Dark Souls relation, there is a grip of niche PC games that pioneered the mechanics For Honor is built on, some of which are still great fun if you’re looking for the same style of combat with higher stakes. Let’s take a look.
Mount & Blade
It would be a complete disservice to discuss directional melee combat mechanics without talking about Mount & Blade. This is the series that, for all intents and purposes, pioneered the style alongside the Age of Chivalry Source mod in 2007. Mount & Blade has always been a game about large-scale conflict, sporting battles that supported up to hundreds littering the same battlefield at once. It’s pretty awesome.
The game’s single-player component tasks players with exploring a large open-world, building up an army, going on quests, and taking over whatever castle behooves you. It’s a game about freedom of choice in its purest sense, with no real story quest to propel the player in a certain direction. You make your own stories, like “the time you took on the largest army in the land in the bloodiest fight of your life” or “that time you sieged the same castle for three hours.”
But when you aren’t making political decisions or commanding armies around, Mount & Blade is a great tactical combat simulator. Attacks must be read through animations and blocked in the corresponding direction, and the same care and caution must be taken with attacks. Though, at the same time, M&B is a lot more… raw. There is no directional graphic that tells you where to expect an attack to come from and you can only survive one to two hits depending on where they land. It can be pretty frustrating, but incredibly rewarding when you get the hang of it.
Because of how quickly fights can go, you really do have to rely on your own skill, so much so that someone skilled with a sword can take on 3 or 4 enemies at once without fear. It’s a wonderful series that is getting a third sequel soon, so there has never been a better time to give the older games a try on Steam, and especially check out the equally awesome Napoleonic Wars expansion for Mount & Blade: Warband, because my 230 hours are 99 percent spent in that.
Chivalry: Medieval Warfare
Chivalry: Medieval Warfare began life as a Source mod called Age of Chivalry, which was released in 2007 (around the same time as Mount & Blade, funny enough). Later on, the same studio began work on what eventually became Chivalry: Medieval Warfare, a class-based medieval multiplayer combat game successfully funded on Kickstarter and released in 2012.
Chivalry represents somewhat a refinement of the same combat found in the likes of Mount & Blade, but with a far more multiplayer-focused model that tries to balance things out. In that way, it truly feels like the precursor to For Honor, except in first-person and with some rougher edges. But the formula is all there, deep and challenging combat made harder by a lack of visual assistants, a wealth of classes with gear sets that play completely differently, and a highly-competitive setup with traditional multiplayer game modes like Team Deathmatch and Capture The Flag.
The game did a lot to propel a very new and strange genre into new players’ hands as it gained a consistent player base and garnered some notoriety because of its gore and Let’s Play-able nature. In that way, it’s hard to imagine that Ubisoft didn’t look at the game’s potential when deciding to move forward with For Honor.
War of the Roses
War of the Roses functioned more as an answer to Chivalry’s multiplayer focus from the publisher who also released Mount & Blade (Paradox Interactive), right down to the curious timing of releasing right before Chivalry. But at the same time, the game had its own unique prospects that set it apart.
For one, War of the Roses takes place during the actual War of the Roses conflict of the 15th century between houses Lancaster and York (the long-standing feud which inspired the conflicts of House Lannister and House Stark in Game of Thrones). Apart from the multiplayer similarities to Chivalry (the customization, game modes, etc) the game played with a slightly different pace. Combat was a bit slower because swings with weapons would be cocked back and charged for additional time to be more powerful when unleashed. However, it was largely ignored once it was outshined by the more polished Chivalry later on.
Unfortunately, earlier this year the developers announced that the game would be shutting down at the end of February. It has already been removed from Steam. Rest in peace.
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