It Takes 2.5 Years To Fully Unlock ’For Honor’ Or Over $700 In Cold Hard Cash

Balancing a checkbook can be a real buzz kill if you often find yourself with too much month at the end of your paycheck. Do you know what else stinks? Auditing the expense of in-game purchases, whether paid for with the time you spend grinding away to avoid doling out real dollars, or the actual hit to your wallet for various microtransactions. This is especially true in For Honor, in which casual players would have to clear their calendars for the next two and a half years in order to unlock all of the game's items. Or you can spend an exorbitant amount to unlock everything.

Here's the thing—in For Honor, you can avoid microtransactions completely by earning steel in the game, which in turn can be used to unlock all of the game's customizations, including emotes, exectutions, effects, outfits, and ornaments. Or you can pay real money for steel, but that can add up in a hurry. Steel packs start at $5 for 5,000. You'll get a better deal by shelling out $100 for 150,000, which works out to around $3.33 per 5,000.


For each hero in For Honor, it takes 91,500 steel to unlock every customization available. There are currently a dozen heroes, so to unlock every bit of content, you'd need 1,098,000 steel.

"That is approximately 7.32 of the $100 steel packs. So Ubisoft has valued their in-game unlocks within the base game at a $732 over-charge of the original $60-$100 spent on the game," bystander007 correctly points out.

As if, right? Kudos to anyone who can comfortably afford to spend $60 on a game and another $732 unlocking all of its custom items. For most people, the proposition of spending in the neighborhood of $800 for a complete experience is a bit much, so it's off to the grind. The problem there is the time commitment.

"If you're a casual player with hope of unlocking everything in-game then just stop now. I'm serious, stop. Casual players who play 1-2 hours 5-7 days a week will never reach this goal. Completing orders/half-contracts will get you roughly 1,000 Steel, another roughly 200 for the matches you played. So 1,200 a day is a good estimated gain for casual players. That's 915 days. Roughly 2.51 years. So, I guess you could get all unlocks. Long after Ubisoft's popped out For Honor 2," bystander007 writes.

The math is sobering. It's also a bit on the conservative side—his formula completely ignores disconnects, servers that are offline for one reason or another, and the inevitable DLC (half a dozen more heroes are incoming), all of which would add to the time commitment. Oh, and don't think about AFK (away from keyboard) farming. It's against Ubisoft's Code of Conduct and is a surefire way of attracting the ban hammer.

Sigh—remember when buying a game meant you owned all of the content? Those days are long gone, folks.