Recently Ubisoft have come under fire for the introduction of new emotes into their fighting game For Honor, specifically due to how much they actually cost in a game that was already full priced to begin with. True they can be bought through the in-game currency of Steel, so in theory it’s possible for a player who doesn’t want to spend anymore real money to earn all of them but at 7000 Steel a pop it’s going to take a while. How long? Well someone actually did the math – it would take a casual player around two and a half years to earn enough Steel to buy all of the emotes for all the characters. Ouch.

If you do want to spend money on Steel, each 5000 Steel pack costs around $4.99/£3.99 – so you can’t even buy one emote for that. You either have to earn the shortfall yourself, buy another 5k pack or the 11000 pack for $9.99/£7.99 – which again is only enough to get one emote. Out of the many there are.

To the calculations done, Reddit user bystander007 has worked out that each hero in the game right now needs 91,500 Steel to unlock all their associated emotes. There are 12 heroes in the base version of For Honor so times 91,500 by 12 and you get 1,098,000 Steel. It would therefore cost you a total of $732/£585 to unlock everything in the current build of For Honor – on top of the £40/$60 you’ve already spent on the game. And this isn’t even counting the six upcoming heroes.

They then crunched the numbers on time taken if someone wanted to grind out all the Steel needed, if the player earned it through the in-game contracts, half-contracts and duels. Based on a casual player’s estimate of about 1200 Steel per two hours of play, they calculated that it would take 921 days or 2.51 years to unlock everything in just the base version of For Honor, as I said earlier-  this doesn’t take into account the upcoming six new heroes (that pushes the time taken up to around 1373 days or 3.76 years).

Oh, and the game requires you to use Steel to keep your weapons and armour upgraded – you fall behind what your opponents might be using if you don’t.

So you can see why players are currently not impressed at Ubisoft’s actions here, as well as the apparent greed of bleeding the players dry of more money after they bought the game. You expect this in a free-to-play (not to such a scale though), but not here. Not for £40/$60…

It’s a shame too, I enjoyed For Honor when I played in its open beta.

Sometimes for all the terrible stuff we hear about gamers in the news, both mainstream and from gaming-related places, it’s nice to know that some people give gamers a good name.

The video above is a gif that an Overwatch player posted to Reddit, wanting to show off his Play of the Game as Reinhardt. As you can tell, their machine wasn’t exactly top of the line which is one reason why they were so happy with their being awarded Play of the Game.

“I run Overwatch on a potato so it’s hard to get a good [Play of the Game], but when I do it is satisfying,” he wrote.

For those unaware, people tend to describe tech as a ‘potato’ when it’s really old. Most of the time it’s hyperbole but this player might have had a point. He has to play the game at 800×600 with all settings at low to get the game running, and even then he apparently is excited to hit 30fps. His specs included an AMD Radeon 8400 with only 512 mb of RAM, which is 200 mb short of Overwatch’s minimum requirements to run the game. It’s a miracle that the game has been running, but there was a Youtuber called LowSpecGamer who had a guide that has allowed the player to run it so far.

Anyway, a few hours later he checked Reddit to find that a number of replies had come in and some were offering him replacement computer parts to help him better run the game. “What GPU do you have? I have an EVGA 660 I could send you,” wrote one player. When there were questions about whether the power supply would be able to handle it, someone else offered him one that could. And it went on and on.

Of course, he has decided not to just rely on the donations and with the help of another Redditor he is picking out a few other parts to help him bring together his new build that are within his small budget. Thanks to the generosity of the Overwatch community though, the biggest expense will be Windows 10 – everything else more expensive has already been covered.

“I’m at a loss for words. Watching a community band together just to help one person, if this all works out and I end up getting this new PC I’ll probably break down crying.”

As I said at the beginning of this article, we so often hear about the bad that sometimes good news is very welcome. GG Overwatch Reddit community.