New For Honor emotes spark fresh debate about the cost of Steel

For Honor got new emotes this week - and they cost an arm and a leg.

7000 Steel each, in fact. If you're playing or have played the game, you'll know 7000 Steel is not loose change when it comes to For Honor's virtual currency.

You earn Steel by completing Orders, which range from playing certain modes as a certain character to killing a certain number of enemies in a certain way.

These new emotes, some of which are a lot of fun, are the most expensive in the game so far - and that's not gone down well with the For Honor community.

Players feel like For Honor is too expensive, that its pricing is more akin to a free-to-play game. For Honor is not a free-to-play game. In fact most will have forked out north of £40 for it.

Let's start with the real-world value Ubisoft has attributed to these new emotes. As mentioned, they're 7000 Steel each. Based on the Steel Pack pricing on the For Honor store, 7000 Steel is valued at just over £5. But you can't buy 7000 Steel exactly. You can buy 5000 for £3.99 or 11,000 for £7.99. Smart, Ubisoft.

Redditor bystander007 actually worked out how much money For Honor can cost a player. If you want to unlock a hero and all its associated aesthetic items (emotes, executions, effects, outfits and ornaments), you need 91,500 Steel.

If you want to do this for all 12 heroes in the game right now, you need a whopping 1,098,000 Steel. That's over seven of the £80 for 150,000 Steel packs on the For Honor store, or just over £585. Ouch.

Of course, most players won't be interested in unlocking everything for every hero in the game. I myself play as just a few of the heroes, so I focus on those. And of course you can only equip four emotes, two executions, one active effect for each of those and one idle effect at any given time. And, as you'd expect, you can only wear one helmet decoration at a time. So For Honor is set up for you to spend wisely. But even so, ouch.

If you don't want to pay, you need to grind. And here we find For Honor miserly when it comes to dishing out Steel. Completing Orders and half-Contracts will get you roughly 1000 Steel a pop, with another 200 for the matches you played.

This means you have to play for 77 days to grind enough Steel to unlock all the aesthetic items for just one hero. As bystander007 calculates, you'd need 915 days, or two-and-a-half years to get all the unlocks for all the characters. God knows what state the world - let alone Ubisoft's servers - will be in by then.

Completing Orders for Steel carries its own set of problems because of the way the Order system works, as Redditor Jindouz explains:

One of the other issues is Steel is needed not just for buying aesthetic stuff, such as these emotes, but for levelling up gear. If you enjoy one of the game's modes that does factor gear stats into the equation, such as the 4v4 Dominion mode, then you'll need to spend Steel to keep your characters competitive versus other players. That leaves even less for aesthetic items.

It's important to note that the complaints revolve around aesthetic items that do not affect gameplay. Emotes are cool on the battlefield, but they don't help you win. Fancy new executions make you feel like a badass, but they're not going to beat out skill.

Still, it's hard to get away from the feeling that For Honor's Steel is too expensive, and that the game doesn't dish out enough to the average player. The message from the For Honor community is loud and clear. Here's hoping Ubisoft has a rethink.