How For Honor lost 95% of its Playerbase

You may want to resharpen that blade,Ubisoft


Things are looking grim for “For Honor” after it has suffered a terrible illness called “not having many players”. 
After For Honor has been released on May 16th, Ubisoft’s multiplayer game about dueling warriors with swords and axes has lost around 95 percent of its playerbase on Steam, according to the statistics.
At launch, the game was boasting 45k concurrent players, down from over 71k during the beta test. Since then, the game somehow slipped and fell down so badly that even the  Season 2, with its new maps and heroes, couldn’t stop the fall. 

Intense medieval action game...too bad others don't see it that way

Why it flopped?

We believe the game failed because it suffered a bad case of connection problems. Also many users protested against the items and skills since they introduce great advantage.
Many players didn't like the fighting system too.
Here is a quote from the forum user masu84:
"Never seen such combos. Assassins are spamming a bit. Okay. 
Most other characters are playing like this: 
Guard Break+Heavy Attack
Block everything
Guard Break+Heavy Attack
Block everything
Amazing! Defending is too easy. Even the biggest idiot is able to block most attacks and due to the stupid guard break, which is winning the game due to the awful map design, its just impossible to use combos. The first blocked attack will result in a guard break and a guaranteed hit.
Due to the stupid guard break mechanic, most duels are just based on luck: Which player pressed guard break first.... he will win. Amazing. NOT. Add the connection problems and its 100% luck."

A blue knight

The DLC

After the launch of Shadow and Might DLC, there was a teeny tiny jump, according to the analytics site, GitHyp, with almost 5k concurrent users, but that figure has dwindled again, back to the numbers before the DLC.
As of last weekend, it’s peaking at a miserable 3.4k. 
Steamspy confirms this claim, showing that peak concurrent users were down to 3.1k yesterday.
Keep in mind, however that this is just on Steam, so it doesn‘t include anyone who is playing directly from Ubisoft’s Uplay platform, but still, it’s really embarrassing for Ubisoft.

Conclusion

It’s really a shame though.
In his For Honor review, Andy from PCGamer called the game a ”tense, tactical medieval brawler that will reward anyone with the patience and will to master it”, and we think the same.
The game is blessed with a cracking combat system and heroes that not only feel but are powerful. Not to mention the interesting array of weapons.
What do you think Ubisoft has to do to bring back its playerbase back to the arenas?

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Coming from the cold and unforgiving Skyrim I have taught all of my horses how to climb over a mountain by being Spider-horses. I love to hunt vampires and shout in the middle of Riften.
Gamer Since: 2007
Favorite Genre: RPG
Currently Playing: Binding of Isaac: Rebirth
Top 3 Favorite Games:The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim - Dragonborn, Don't Starve, NEO Scavenger


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the3rdletter's picture

the3rdletter 3 years 6 months ago

This article is both saddening and encouraging to read, as a player who stuck with the game all the way from Beta until now. Encouraging because the game is so much better now, saddening because it could be doing so much better now if it hadn't gotten off to such a bad start.