In the wake of severe fan blowback, Ubisoft has decided to cancel plans it had made to de-clutter the For Honor in-game cosmetics store by removing a large portion of the items that are currently available and later re-introducing them on a rotating availability basis.
It all started last week when Ubisoft community developer Eric Pope announced a new Summer Sale event via Reddit, a sale which temporarily lowered the Steel cost of roughly 146 different cosmetic items. Steel, for those who don’t know, is in-game currency that can either be earned via gameplay or purchased via real money microtransactions. The Summer Sale was mainly meant to serve as one final sendoff for the cosmetic items in question since, once the sale was over, those items would be taken out of the game to help make way for new upcoming items.
Pope was careful to stress that the removed items wouldn’t be gone for good as they would be later brought back on a rotating availability basis and some of them would even continue to be permanently available via the various bundle deals that For Honor offers. The fan community, however, was not having it. Many fans suspected that the Summer Sale was a way for Ubisoft to pad its revenue figures ahead of its Q1 financial report (which is due to arrive later this month). Others saw it as a thinly veiled attempt to pressure players into spending real money on Steel by removing pricey cosmetic content from the game.
Either way, the fan backlash was loud and pervasive, so it’s probably not surprising to hear that Ubisoft reversed the content removal decision roughly 24 hours after first announcing it. In the follow-up post announcing the cancellation, Pope admitted that the For Honor team did a poor job in communicating their reasoning behind the content removal plan, reasoning that involved making For Honor a less overwhelming experience for new players. As a gesture of good faith, the Summer Sale is sticking around even though the items in question aren’t being removed. Players have until July 19 to grab the Summer Sale items at a discount.
For more on For Honor, be sure to read about how Ubisoft paid tribute to a deceased fan in the game’s recent 1.25 update. Also, if all this talk of For Honor has you itching for some Norse mythology (the game does have playable Vikings after all), you might also be interested in our recent look at God of War’s Vanaheim concept art.