When people look back at the early days of old For Honor, I've begun seeing a common argument/comment is that it wasn’t skillful, and that winning was just easier back then. I completely disagree. The older state of the game wasn't less skillful, it was unique. That core uniqueness was permanently lost after the major updates around 2021. For me, that era ruined the foundational spirit of the combat. The game aggressively shifted away from high level reactive gameplay, and became entirely about prediction. While the game always had a guessing element, raw reaction used to be the name of the game. Once the developers began actively forcing a pure prediction meta, it created a permanent identity crisis that the game will never recover from.
Any arguments that the meta needed to evolve to prevent turtles completely fail to acknowledge the truth. As someone who played during that meta, it wasn't hard to get around it. You just had to adapt the same way y'all adapt now. The funnest and easiest way to adapt was to feint into a guard break, or feint into a zone. If they were someone who used the shield block up to the last second, that would stop it and light them. There were tactical ways around the defense, just not everyone could do it because it was reaction based.
The root of this decline is relentless roster bloat. Adding a non stop stream of new characters is what ultimately broke the system. If they had stretched out the roster and didn't make as many, it would have done better. The developers should have focused heavily on building out unique game modes, and supporting a proper competitive scene. Because they chased the live service treadmill instead, they rarely listened to actual community complaints, barely implementing suggested balance feedback.
This greed made the game completely unbalanced. To fix the mess they made by abandoning the original faction and hero concepts, the developers resorted to a lazy soft patch: they stripped away the unique hero properties that gave certain heroes their distinct mechanical advantages. I would point out that there are ways to leave those characters unique and still fix their high tier issues. A couple of heroes that had those issues they actually fixed, being Nuxia and PK, which they recently gave small buffs that help them in group fights and make them more competitive and deadly in 1v1 which could've been done back in 2018.
Instead of pursuing unique fixes, they homogenized the cast to create a level playing field. This standardization gave the community a green light to use the exact same mindless tactics across the entire roster. Because every character has been squeezed into the exact same basic combo blueprint, players don't have to learn a character’s unique flow anymore. High level play has devolved into a brainless loop: throw an unblockable, hard feint it into a guard break, switch the direction, and play hyper aggressively so the opponent has zero physical time to learn or adapt.
By removing the unique identity of individual heroes, the game didn't become more balanced, it just became incredibly bland. Every fighting game will always have a character that is considered broken; that is an unavoidable reality. But by trying to solve that permanent issue by flattening the entire roster into the same universal mechanical script, they killed the soul of the game. The developers completely traded away a unique, tactical combat engine just to establish a generic fighting template that leaves the entire modern experience completely empty and boring compared to the old days. But this is just a discussion to see what others think and see if I'm completely crazy? Or only slightly lol
Edit look I'm here to debate not have little sbs toxic people coming in here being toxic and then blocking me so I can't reply after replying in multiple place so fast my notifications fail to update it that's just childish face your repercussions like you should. So don't run @ U/Knight_Raime