In an announcement that sounds like the opening of a ripping fantasy yarn, Ubisoft has offered a $10,000 prize pool to the winners of For Honor’s new Hero Series, an online tournament starting July 8th in North America, Europe and Brazil on PC, Playstation 4 and Xbox One.
Players can register to participate in weekly 1v1 duel tournaments over four weeks, accumulating points based on their rankings after each tournament. 16 players from across the three platforms will be invited to fight it out for the cash money at a live event at the Intel Esports Arena in Burbank, California, which will be broadcast on Twitch, Facebook and Youtube.
Released back in February, For Honor initially attracted attention for its unique medieval battle simulation gameplay, finally offering a solution to the age-old debate of who would win in a fight between Knights, Samurai and Vikings. If you’re interested in that sort of thing the current official score has Vikings and Samurai even on 3 wins, with Knights playing catch up on 2. Â Overall reception has been somewhat mixed, with players citing matchmaking imbalances and lack of long term replayability and depth.
Connectivity issues and ragequitters have seen player numbers drop, although Ubisoft has addressed some of these problems by introducing a ten minute server ban for prematurely leaving a game. Along with the recent release in May of the Shinobi and Centurion characters in the Shadow and Might dlc, the developer will be hoping to entice new and lapsed players to take up arms and join the fray.
Future updates will keep the competition fresh by introducing a ranked mode, first for on-demand tournaments in Duel and later expanded to Brawl and 4v4 modes. Players will have separate ranks for each game mode, and rank will enable access to exclusive loot. Ubisoft will run a Public Test for ranked Duel mode before release.
