Jason VandenBerghe is the brain behind the idea the 2017 game, For Honor. He pitched his idea to different companies for ten years, but they all said no. Until he pitched the idea to Ubisoft.
At the time, Ubisoft Montreal needed a new project to work on, and had six months to pitch back whatever they came up with. This was a big risk for them, since 85% of popular games are sequels. To agree to the pitch Jason presented, it would mean creating a new brand, since it was a game that had never been worked on before.
The project went underway, and was codenamed 'Hero'. The original idea for the game came from Jason's childhood, and how his mother loved the musical 'Camelot' which features the character Lancelot singing about valour and chivalry. This inspired him to uptake these chivalrous ideologies himself, and growing up he started imagining a game based around it. The game is based around war and peace, and what morality means on the battlefield and to an individual person.
The game also played with new styles of playing. To test these, tournaments of the game were done throughout the offices in Montreal. This was a good way to test and also fix, since the programmers were also play testing. This meant they would know exactly how to fix things if they went wrong. This would also mean all the feedback was in one place, and one employee could simply ask someone else what their experience was like.
Still in the pre-production phase, the green light had not yet been given by Ubisoft. When they presented what they had of the game so far, the game was given the 'go ahead at full steam' from them, meaning they had permission to create a larger game than they'd first anticipated. Since they needed to create a brand for their new game, the started creating a trailer for the game. The first trailer for For Honor released in 2015, two years before the actual game would release.
When the project moved into production, problems started to arise. The work was spread out across multiple countries, and that led to changes being made that weren't what was originally discussed. This was something Jason felt strongly about, as he was the one telling people to do things differently, and he stated how it hurt him to do so. One of the biggest parts of production was E3 and other convention events. The game quickly received attention, and its anticipation rose as more and more people heard about it.
A lot of features had to be axed due to complications such as budgeting and staffing. This meant that the split-screen feature, something that Jason had said was key to the game, had to be removed as well. This was something that a lot of fans picked up on before the release, and there were mixed responses. Since the game had already been Demoed at a convention, a lot of people who already played the game may have been the most upset about this.
Despite all the struggles, the game was successfully released on the 14th of February, 2017. It sold rapidly and sold 40,062 copies in Japan alone. It was the winding-done segment of the project for Jason, and since he'd been told he wouldn't be working on the sequel, this would be his only project working with Ubisoft. He looked back on the four year project as something that had to come to an end, but since the idea had been with him so long, he still embodies his own ideologies.
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