For Honor brings sword-slashing, head-mashing and katana-wielding military might to PC today with the start of the beta. While it’s not fully open, there are a lot more codes out there for it than have been available previously, and all NDAs are removed. Here’s the key facts you’re after.
What else is there to look forward to? Here’s all the upcoming PC games on the way.
When does the For Honor beta start and end?
Emails went out to anyone who received a beta key saying that the For Honor beta will start at 3pm CET / 2pm GMT / 6am PST today, January 26, ending in the early hours of Jan 30. Here’s the full details for each major time zone:
- 2pm GMT, Jan 26 – 1am GMT, Jan 30
- 3pm CET, Jan 26 – 2am CET, Jan 30
- 9am EST, Jan 26 – 8pm EST, Jan 29
- 6am PST, Jan 26 – 5pm PST, Jan 29
- 1am AEDT, Jan 27 – 12pm AEDT, Jan 30
In other words, you’ve got Friday, Saturday and Sunday to enjoy it in whatever time zone you’re in.
How do I get into the For Honor beta?
Sadly, it’s not as simple as just a download. Keys have been distributed to a few folks via Ubisoft’s official sign-up, and each of those people can invite three uPlay friends – check with your mates, or on Reddit, NeoGAF or the official forums. Smaller communities you’re part of might also have their own sharing thread, and are more likely to have spares too.
There’s also the SCARS website that Ubisoft advertised last week. For a while it was giving guaranteed beta access for anyone who went through its full process. However, anyone who gets to the end of the site now is reporting no code pops up, or the option to redeem it. There’s an FAQ entry saying it has ran out. For now, it seems to be a dead route.
Obviously, make sure you’re signed up for a code in case Ubisoft decide to do some more releases through the weekend.
What’s in the For Honor beta?
According to the For Honor beta trailer above, here’s what you’ll get to play with:
- Three game modes:
- Dominion – 4vs4 and the main game mode of For Honor.
- Brawl – 2vs2, a quicker, more fight-orientated mode.
- Duel – 1vs1 in a tiny arena which is as deadly as your opponents.
- Six maps:
- As far as we can tell, these are split across the game modes.
- For example, there is at least one duel map, a couple of dominion ones, etc, not six maps playable in every mode.
- Nine heroes:
- These are evenly split across the three factions, fulfilling streotypes for each.
- Samurai:
- Orochi – Defensively minded and prime for counter-attacking.
- Kensei – Long-ranged (for a man with a sword) and adaptable to fighting different kinds of opponents.
- Nobushi – The longest attack range in the game on the end of a large polearm offers great zone control.
- Vikings:
- Raider – They’ve got a massive two-handed axe and like to disarm people with it. Do huge damage.
- Berserker – Dual-wielded hand axes make for a quick fighting style.
- Warlord – Short range and wielding a shield, Warlords are as defensive as Vikings get.
- Knights:
- Conqueror – With a shield and mace, able to hold a great defensive position.
- Warden – Subscribe to the ‘hit them with a big sword’ style of thinking, making them adaptable but unspecialised.
- Peacekeeper – Quick, assasin-style characters with two swords.
Can I run the For Honor beta? What are the system requirements?
We’ve got a full post about the For Honor system requirements for you to look at. In general, it should run on any reasonable (or unreasonable) machine, but do remember it’s a beta and may still have some optimization work to do.
Will my progress in the For Honor beta transfer to the live game?
Unsurprisingly, no. You being better at the game definitely will, though, so train up them skills.
Help! The For Honor beta is crashing, buggy or I’m bad at it
While you’ll need to check our upcoming guide for the latter, the first two are sort’ve the point. Ubisoft are working out the creases in their grand plan (to control all the water). That said, here’s some quick fixes:
- First up, there’s a fine list of known issues over on the official forums, including workarounds for most of them.
- Don’t go into the reputation menu. It’s a guaranteed crash to desktop if you click on anything in there.
- Matchmaking is just dodgy, and there’s not a lot that can be done about it, short of hoping that Ubisoft switch the server structure over to dedicated rather than peer-to-peer. That’s unlikely to happen over the course of a beta.
- Some fairly standard tips for getting online games in a beta stage to work:
- Check your anti-virus, firewall and other non-essential programs aren’t getting in the way.
- Try turning some settings down if you’re unhappy with performance, even if your rig should be able to handle it – these things are unoptimised.
- Use the feedback forums. That’s what they’re there for, even if the game is already gold.
Hopefully that helps with some amount of the problems you’re facing. As for getting good, have you tried picking the Nobushi?
That’s it, go play, or wait for the For Honor release date on February 14 – say you love them with an axe.