So, firstly, ‘For Honor’ has once more come back – or is
about to come back, I suppose – with new and improved…stuff. As I have written
in the past, a big part of their problems is technical, something that can be
fixed only after it is uncovered by testing, (and by playing), as ‘For Honor’
has experienced, and experimented with, so – yay. What is next?
Well, by ‘yay’, I mean that the staff at FH has fixed those
problems – or at least they think that they have – and we will wait and see how
it works out. What I want to talk about here, (but only as a preliminary) about
the next two new classes of the game – the Highlander of the Vikings, and the
Gladiator – of the Knights.
…As it is evident even at this point, neither combo makes
much sense, logically. At least, in the previous update the Shinobi of the
Samurai had some connection to them,
(and as game testing showed, he and his kusarigama had certainly worked as
PCs), but already the Centurion was not exactly ‘knightly’, and now, when the
issue of the Gladiator was raced the game crew mentioned the ‘Roman Empire’ and
‘south’ in the same context.
Just what are they going for, here? Europe? I.e. the Vikings
are ‘north’, the Samurais are ‘east’ and the knights are ‘west’, let us
suppose. However, it is a lot of distance between the Samurais’ Japan and
Europe of Knights and Vikings. If ‘For Honor’ was going for realism, then he
should’ve – or could’ve – introduced someone closer to home for Knights and
Vikings than Samurais – Ottoman Turks, for example – and if it wasn’t going for realism, then WTF with ‘south’?
Africa was further down south than the Roman Empire was, ditto for South
America (Mesoamerica, if you want to), so this does not make sense.
And this is a problem that cannot be fixed by technical
means. ‘For Honor’ does not appear to be realizing where it wants to go,
unlike, say, ‘Injustice’, which has it figured out, from beginning to end, and
has no thematic issues either.
Back to Gladiator and Highlander. Gladiator is not exactly
knightly material; people do not really associate them with knights; the Roman
Empire was never big on knights; the knights arose in northern Europe –
England, France, Germany; they were individualistic, individual, professional
fighters, but unlike gladiators, they were not just free people, they were also
nobility, something that remained important even in modern times, when
depicting knights.
Gladiators, on the other hand, were prisoners and slaves,
something that remained unchanged even in modern times, (when depicting the
ancient gladiators, i.e.). True, in regards to prisoners, they were often
prisoners – Celts, Gauls, Germans, though the most famous of them all,
Spartacus, was actually from Thrace, modern Greece/Balkans, instead. If you
look through the Wiki, you can clearly see that knights and gladiators were
very different, so how – let alone why – does ‘For Honor’ fit Gladiator into
the knightly roster, (so to speak)? This is something that we will see better
once Gladiator can be played later this year, and ditto for Highlander.
As any fan of Mel Gibson can tell you, Highlanders were
never Vikings/Norse. They were Scots, Celts, and they fought Vikings during the
time of the king Arthur instead. Yes, they were barbarians, not knights, but ‘Vikings’
and ‘barbarians’ aren’t synonyms, no matter what you might think by following
such modern movies and TV series as ‘Vikings’ on History channel, for example. In
‘For Honor’, Highlander looks like a Viking, but not really; he is some sort of
a weird hybrid, so WTF with realism? Are we going for it or not? If we are, some
rethinking of the characters, and character rosters, is in order; if we are
not, some redesign of the ‘For Honor’ game world itself is in order.
So, as we can see already, ‘For Honor’ has some good ideas,
but also some weird ideas, and some lack direction as to where they are going,
in the end. I hope that, though, they will get through this muddle, eventually.
See you next time!
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