Today Ubisoft announced its brand new IP For Honor, and after the conference, they released a full press kit for the game.

We get the box art for all platforms, plenty screenshots and artwork (which you can see at the bottom of the post), and some official data, including an extensive FAQ.

Product Description

Carve a path of destruction through the battlefield in For Honor, a brand-new game developed by the renowned Ubisoft Montreal studio.

Enter the chaos of a raging war as a bold knight, brutal viking, or mysterious samurai, three of the greatest warrior legacies. For Honor is a fast-paced, competitive experience mixing skill, strategy, and team play with visceral melee combat.

The Art of Battle, For Honor’s innovative control system, puts you in total control of your heroes, each with distinct skills and weapons, as you fight for land, glory, and honor. As a skilled warrior on an intense, believable battleground, you annihilate all soldiers, archers, and opposing heroes who stand in your way.

Key Features

UNIQUE WARRIORS TO MASTER

For each battle, choose among three warrior legacies: samurai, vikings, or knights. Able to turn the tide of battle and make their faction victorious, each warrior comes with their own weapon set and play style.

CONQUER FOES ALONE OR WITH FRIENDS

For Honor offers an engaging single-player, offline campaign and thrilling multiplayer. Enjoy the full experience with friends, or alone against AI.

GROUNDBREAKING MULTIPLAYER

With brutal battles and duels, teamwork is the key to victory. In the heat of battle, coordination and communication within your band of warriors will make all the difference as you support allies, capture control points, and slaughter enemies.

INNOVATIVE ART OF BATTLE CONTROL SYSTEM

Wield the weight of your weapon and feel the power and impact of every strike. Precise and accessible, the Art of Battle system has been designed with the objective of putting you in total control of your actions.

YOUR WARRIOR, YOUR COLORS

Express your personality and inspire fear in your enemies by customizing each facet of your warrior, including your chest, shoulders, and helmet. The opportunities for your character and team to look unique are endless.

E3 Q&A

1. What is For Honor?

For Honor is a brand new IP developed by Ubisoft Montréal. Our vision with For Honor is to create a raw and visceral experience that immerses players in a believable battle amongst skilled and deadly elite fighters from the 3 greatest legacies of warriors – Knights, Vikings and Samurai.

Our goal was to generate in our players the true emotions of sword fighting and melee combat, where courage, skill, strategy and teamwork are the best paths to victory. We believe that our new gameplay system (which we call the Art of Battle) and our modern multiplayer mechanics generate a never-before-seen style of gameplay that does exactly that.

2. What are For Honor’s main innovations?

Our first major breakthrough is the Art of Battle, our new control scheme that gives players unprecedented immersion and control over their actions on the battlefield.

We also use a completely new approach to animation, which heavily relies on motion capture and allows us to create more realistic and fluid animations that drop gamers in the middle of the battlefield, while still remaining fully input-driven.

3. What exactly is the Art of Battle?

The Art of Battle is a control scheme that delivers the feeling of real dueling without sacrificing comfort and simplicity. What we’ve done is take the most important parts of actual melee fighting, boil them down to their emotional essence, and map that onto a controller. In For Honor, players are in direct control of their weapon and their defense: you choose where to block, you choose where to attack. You can bluff, you can strategize, and you can adapt on the fly.

Through the Art of Battle system, your controller inputs are connected directly to the moves,the guard, and the attacks your Hero makes on screen. When you move the right stick to the

left, to the right, or to the top, your Hero will move their weapon (their ‘guard’) to that sideof their body. That direct control means that when you attack, you feel more directly the

power of your strike, the strength of the impact, the weight of the weapon in your hands.

That system creates an incredibly immersive and emotional experience.

4. How and why is teamwork important in For Honor?

On an actual battlefield, you will always face many enemies. Likewise, in For Honor you need to rely on your teammates to watch your back at all times. You’ll also want to divide and conquer to strategically gain an advantage on the battlefield. If you want to take control of the Front Line for instance, a team effort will be far more likely to succeed than going it alone. You have multiple objectives to manage in a match of For Honor, it’s only as a team that you can achieve them all and take control of the battle.

So communication and coordination is key if you want to get the upper hand against the other team of Heroes you’re facing. Winning in For Honor is not only a question of brutal force and skill, it is as a team that you can best claim victory on the battlefield.

5. Who are the playable characters in For Honor?

In For Honor players take the role of Heroes who are either part of the Legions (Knights), the Chosen (Samurai) or the Warborn (Vikings). Those Heroes are not random footmen, you could consider them as medieval Spec-Ops: they are the most skilled and powerful warriors on the battlefield and each of them can really make the difference in the battle. They all have their unique weapon set and playstyle but whatever the one players pick, they will always have this possibility to turn the tides of the battle.

6. Are there classes in For Honor?

Each Hero has a unique fighting style that is linked to their weapon, their armor, and their physical attributes. For example, the Warden (Knight) or the Raider (Viking) are good Jackof-all-trades Heroes, very balanced and able to adapt to any situation. The Oni (Samurai), in contrast, is a more duel-oriented character, faster, deadlier but also more fragile. You will still be able to defend a point or support an ally when playing as an Oni, but that kind of thing will be more challenging with that Hero than as a Warden.

What was important to us was to be sure that players would be able to pick the style of Hero they prefer in each and every match they play. You’re never obliged to choose a defined Hero when entering the battle.

7. How many characters will be playable in For Honor?

We will have multiple Heroes in each faction at launch, each one with their own set of weapons and playstyle. In fact, it’s as if each of our Heroes was the main character of a game: they are all very distinct, with their specific fight mechanics and animations.

8. Could you tell us more about the factions in For Honor?

In For Honor, each Hero belongs to one of three factions: the Legions (Knights), the Chosen (Samurai) or the Warborn (Vikings). The way that all three factions are depicted in For Honor is based on facts and popular legends, they are inspired by history but clearly history never saw a war between Samurai and Vikings.

Apart from their differences in appearance and weaponry, each of the 3 factions brings its own representations of what is a warrior: Warrior of passion and fire for the Warborn; Warrior of skill and focus for the Chosen; Warrior of knowledge, people and gear for the Legions.

9. Could you please tell us more about the Warden?

The playable Hero in our E3 hands-on demo is the Warden, a Knight, part of the Legions faction, who can be of either gender. The Warden’s weapon is a two-handed longsword and he is clad in armor that is a mix of plates and chainmail. The Warden is a kind of Jack-of-all-trades, good in all key aspects such as survivability, damage and blocking.

The Warden’s fighting style is directly inspired by an actual historical style called German longsword. It’s a straight-forward and efficient style that was very popular amongst European warriors of the 14th and 15th centuries and has recently seen a renaissance in modern interest. The two-handed longsword is used for blocking and attacking with simple and direct moves.

10. How will progression work in For Honor?

There will be progression in our game, more information to come on that later.

11. Could you please tell us more about the different multiplayer modes?

The multiplayer mode that is playable here at E3 is Dominion. Dominion is a tense 4v4 objective-based multiplayer battle with NPCs, fostering teamwork, strategy and duel skills. To win the match, both teams share the same objective: kill enemies and control specific zones so they reach 1,000 points, Break the enemy team then wipe out all enemy players - when Broken, players can't respawn. Killing NPCs and enemy players rewards hard points, while controlling each of the three zones rewards soft points - if a team loses control over the area, it loses the points it previously earned. Those scoring mechanics potentially

generate many turnovers in a match, building tension until the climatic Breaking phase. We will of course have other multiplayer modes in Hero, which we will unveil later.

12. Does For Honor include a campaign?

Yes, there will be a single-player campaign in For Honor and the complete details about that dimension of the experience will come at a later date. It will also be possible to play with and against AI in all our multiplayer modes.

13. What’s the story of the game?

What we can tell you now is that the action takes place in a time period that reminds about Middle-Age. It’s a kind of alternate reality where the Dark Age, an even darker version of the one that actually happened in Europe, would have lasted for a very long time.

This is a time of permanent conflicts, a time of endless war between the three factions. A time where the most powerful and important people are the ones players are embodying: the elite warriors, the true Heroes of the battlefield, capable of influencing the issue of battles and conflicts with their skill in battle and their science of combat.

14. When will the first live period take place?

It’s very important for us to get feedbacks from real players on our core experience as soon as possible, so expect to hear more details from us very soon.

15. Whom is this game for?

For Honor is for anyone who is excited by the idea of feeling the true emotions of a skilled melee warrior on a believable battlefield, for anyone who has a sword fighting fantasy. And given today’s popularity of games and shows related to those matters, we believe that represents quite a big number of people!

16. When will the game be released and on what platforms?

For Honor is in development for the Sony PlayStation 4 computer entertainment system, the Xbox One entertainment system from Microsoft and Windows PC. Stay tuned for more information on the release date.

And without further ado, you can see the spectacular gallery below.