Arcade is a Game Mode in For Honor, introduced in the Marching Fire update. It is currently the only game mode that is exclusive (not free-to-play), as it requires the purchase of the Marching Fire Expansion pack to gain access to it. Friends can play with players who have the expansion without needing to purchase it.
Overview
Arcade is a single player or two-player coop gamemode that pits players against bots. Players will start by selecting a quest based on the tier's gear rarity level. The level affects the difficulty of the quest, how many chapters will be present in the quest along with the kind of modifiers applied to all combatant Heroes. If your Hero is above/below the rarity level requirement, your Hero will receive a buff/debuff respectively to your damage output and input (ie. if you are under level, you will receive more damage and deal less damage); if you are on par with the rarity level, there won't be a damage modifier. Also, with each gear rarity level, the Bot enemies will receive slightly higher health and damage boosts.
Arcade will progress your Hero like any other multiplayer game mode. This also works with Orders, including the Daily Orders, given to the player. Each chapter of Arcade counts as a full match, although rewards for the end of the Quest will be akin to one match. As an example, a 4 chapter Arcade quest will count as 4 full matches for Orders.
Each quest tells a miniature story of a quest your warrior has embarked on. Each quest will randomly select its maps, warriors, and modifiers. Modifiers and locations will be thematically selected for the quest. The player can face everything in the game, including Soldiers, Archers, Heroes, and Guardians; they can even face Catapults and Arrows from above or a field filled with traps. Heroes and Guardians can have modifiers.
Each chapter may have one of three objectives: elimination, survive and eliminate target.
- Elimination is the most common objective, where you just need to kill all enemies.
- Survive puts the player on a clock, where they need to keep fighting until the time is over.
- Eliminate target requires the player to kill one of the enemy bots, who is usually accompanied by bots that do not need to be killed to finish the chapter.
Modifiers
At the beginning of each chapter, modifiers are selected for all warriors. Modifiers can be beneficial or detrimental traits that will change the dynamic of the game. The higher the difficulty of the quest, modifier levels and the AIs bot levels will be higher to make the quest more difficult. At low tier quests, the player will be buffed while the bots will receive debuffs. At higher tiers, it's the opposite, giving the bots the advantage while crippling the player severely, sometimes making a quest nearly impossible if the modifiers are badly randomized.
*Words underlined represent values that are modified by modifier levels*
- Increased damage : All attacks will deal more damage
- Heavy attacks knocks down enemies : Landed heavy attacks will knock down enemies.
- Heavy attacks knocks back enemies : Landed heavy attacks will knock back enemies
- Unblockable : All attacks become unblockable.
- Uninterruptible : All attacks become uninterruptible.
- Never stumbles : Cannot be stumbled or unbalanced by parries and throws.
- Attacks drain stamina : Attacks that hit will drain the stamina of the target.
- Block damage increase : Attacks blocked will do more damage.
- Blocks drain stamina : Blocking attacks drains even more stamina from the enemy.
- Heal on hit : Attacks will heal on successful hit (Works on soldiers).
- Heal on kill : Attacks will heal on kills (Works on soldiers).
- Bleeding attacks : Attack will make the target bleed.
- Fire-y attacks : Attack will make the target burn.
- Never thrown : Immunity to normal throws. Still can be guardbroken.
- Increased health : The Hero starts with increased maximum health.
- Shield : The Hero starts with a shield.
- Regeneration : The Hero constantly regenerates health.
- Regenerative shield : The Hero has a shield that regenerates (by percentage) when not hit.
- Blinds enemies : Landed heavy attacks will blind the target for a period of time.
- Increased revenge gain : Increases the revenge gain for the Hero.
- Infinite revenge : The Hero starts and stays in revenge mode for the entire chapter.
- Slippery : Guard break will not work on the Hero.
- Desperation : Deal more damage when at low health.
Bots only
- Respawning : The Hero will respawn if not executed after a short time.
- Cheats Death : The Hero will respawn after a short time, until all their allies are killed, even if executed.
Weekly Quest
Every week a new story quest is available, offering greater challenges and unique rewards at the cost of the Quest always being at Epic tier (level 108). Weekly quests always have a special theme (fighting Guardians, a specific faction or having a "unique" modifier) depending on the title and its theme.
The difficulty of Weekly Quests vary as they are handcrafted, not chosen from randomized modifiers and the likeliness.
Trivia
- During the latter chapters of an arcade quest, even more for the final chapter, Enemy Heroes can appear as characters from the Story Mode, such as Stone and Siv. These unique Heroes will bring together with them all special moves they had, if they had any.
- Weekly Quests are very likely to use Heroes from the Story Mode.
- As mentioned above, Arcade is the only gamemode in the game that is not free-to-play, as it requires the Marching Fire Expansion DLC. However, Marching Fire Expansion owners can invite a friend to play, even if the friend does not own the DLC. Friends can attain Arcade-exclusive loot through this method.
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