A documentary called Playing Hard which tells the story of For Honor and how Ubisoft produced the game is now on Netflix. The documentary that takes a look inside the Ubisoft offices was originally released last year and has made the rounds at different screening events and has been sold in a physical format, and it’s now available on the streaming platform. Jason VandenBerghe, the game’s creative director, and other figureheads involved with the game’s development make candid appearances in the documentary.

For Honor players will already know all too well how Ubisoft’s game is played, but this documentary offers an inside look at the people behind the game and the time it took to make it. The game has had a turbulent history starting soon after it launched with a lack of dedicated servers and other issues threatening its livelihood, but Ubisoft’s since righted the ship with continued updates and new content. That’s been a process itself, though Playing Hard takes a look at the years that came before that.

“Playing Hard offers unprecedented access to a highly secret world where a few gamers/designers are shaping what has now become the biggest entertainment industry in the world,” the synopsis of the film reads on the documentary’s site. “It follows the creation of the game For Honor over a four-year period. As the production team grows from 40 to 500 people, we witness the human theatre involved in creating and launching a major video game.”

The site also said that “Ubisoft bet on transparency” when agreeing to the film and opening its doors to director Jean-Simon Chartier. Ubisoft “had no say over the final cut of the film,” the site said, something that For Honor brand director Luc Duchaine backed up in his own words.

“Just to give a bit of background, Jean-Simon Chartier (the film maker) had full independance when making this film, i.e. we didn't control the edit and didn't pay for it,” Duchaine said on Reddit when news of the documentary’s Netflix arrival was shared there. “The only thing we did was to open our doors and let him film and follow us. The entire film was shot over a period of 4 years.”

Playing Hard is now streamable on Netflix with a preview of the film seen in the trailer above.



Posted: Apr 08, 2019 10:55 am
Related Forum: Gaming Discussion

Source: https://comicbook.com/gaming/2019/04/06/for-honor-playing-hard-netflix/