For Honor is taking notes from Ubisoft’s other big competitive multiplayer title, as there’s now a Rainbow Six Siege-style Starter Edition available, offering a cheaper price of entry for a more limited selection of starter content.
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The For Honor Starter Edition is available now on Steam for $14.99 / £11.99 / €14.99. Maps and modes are all the same as the regular game, but you’re given a more limited selection of heroes. Three Vanguard heroes – Warden, Raider, and Kensei – are full unlocked from the outset, and you’ll get an additional three playable heroes based on what faction you choose at the outset of the game.
Those three faction-specific heroes can be unlocked for customization with 8000 steel, the in-game currency. That’s also the price to unlock additional playable characters from the base game. DLC characters can be unlocked for 15,000 steel each. Or you can go straight from the Starter to Standard Edition content with the All Heroes bundle for 50,000 steel.
It also includes the full story mode, so it’s a cheap way to get a flashy melee-focused single-player campaign to play, if that’s what you’re into.
On Reddit, community developer Eric Pope says “the Starter Edition is just one of the tactics we’ll be using this year to continue growing the game, and our community. While our console players currently enjoy the benefits of a very vibrant and sizeable playerbase, our PC players have not had the same experience. A larger player population on PC will be better for the health of our PC community, helping to reduce matchmaking times and opponent variety, while also increasing the level of competition in game.”
Player counts in For Honor – especially on PC – have been a topic of some concern since after the game’s launch, but it seems Ubisoft are not content to cut their losses on this version of the game. Between the Starter Edition and the launch of dedicated servers, we’ll soon see how much life For Honor yet has.