Over the past week or so, Ubisoft's For Honor has faced criticism for the sheer amount of unlockable content it offers players, which one Reddit user calculated would cost over $700 or 5,200 gameplay hours to access . Ubisoft Montreal Game Director Damien Kieken addressed those concerns in a lengthy livestreamed video conversation . The main thrust of his argument? "We never had an intention for you to unlock everything in the game."

To Kieken, the idea of unlocking absolutely everything available in For Honor "doesn't really make any sense. We applied RPG mechanics on top of the game... it's like in an RPG, let's say World of Warcraft, you would never try to unlock everything for all the characters of the whole game. It's the same thing in any MOBAs, you're not trying to unlock all the content for all the heroes in your game."

It's interesting that Kieken compares the $60 For Honor to two genres that are usually free to play these days (or occasionally offered on a monthly subscription plan). Unlockable content in a fighting game like For Honor is also very different from that in an MMO, where finding and completing quests for new items and abilities is the overarching point.

In any case, Kieken says the team designed For Honor around the idea that most players would "play one to three characters" rather than trying to unlock content for all 12, adding "that's really what we see now in our game." The idea was for players to spend five hours or so unlocking the feats for their preferred character, and then a few dozen more and maxing out the stats on their gear. After that, earning Steel for more cosmetic items was seen by the developers as more of a "mid-term objective" or "end game content" that could be unlocked more slowly (and Kieken proudly noted that there are no in-game items that you have to buy with real money).

"Because it's cosmetic—when you go in the store, you don't buy all the things they have," Kieken said. "When you come back three months after, you want a new one. That's really the same idea... We don't expect them to buy everything; we just expect them to buy things they want right away because they don't want to wait a week to get it."

I want it all, and I want it now

Kieken seems to be pushing back against the idea, heavily ingrained by decades of fighting game design, that the single-player portion is "completed" when you've unlocked every character/costume/weapon/trinket/etc. For Honor suggests a new model, in which you focus on unlocking the cosmetic items you want and turn off the part of your brain that demands you virtually "own" 100 percent of what's available.

That's easier said than done for some players. "Everyone knows they're being penny pinchers with [the in-game currency called] steel," Reddit user JMSpartan23 writes in a popular post on the game's subreddit. "The fact that they charge us an absorbent[sic] amount of steel for cosmetics? What the hell?"

"The devs, whether intentionally or not, just spit in our faces with their responses in yesterday's stream," Reddit user antoseb added. "They are lying straight to our faces and think we are all too stupid to know they are just milking us for more money."

While defending For Honor's design, Kieken did say the recent backlash has "started an interesting discussion, even within the team" and noted explicitly that "it doesn't mean we won't change anything. We're listening to the feedback, we're looking at the data, like we do when we balance heroes basically..."

That said, he also noted that the microtransaction purchases help support a team of "several hundred" that is still working on For Honor, developing new maps and new heroes that will be offered for free every few months, so as not to "split the community." In the end, letting obsessive players spend up to hundreds of dollars on visual trinkets might not be a bad trade for giving all players access to free gameplay content well into the future.