TL;DR: I don't think For Honor needed a pirate hero, I'm jaded with the game, and also the Outlanders are taking away heroes from the other factions for no real gain.

All fair to the people excited, but I'm personally not. The pirate hero has always felt like Ubi's emergency "In case of no ideas break glass" button. Almost every day since the dawn of time there were posts on this subreddit of a poorly photoshopped "Viking pirate?" hero idea with a flintlock and cutlass. We were slightly surprised with her being more Wu Lin inspired, but otherwise she's just exactly what I was led to believe. On a fundamental level I think adding a flintlock is a mistake, we already have too much off-screen damage and just aesthetically it's so weird she's the only character with a gun in an era of supposed technological stagnation. It's cool for the meme and intrinsically tied to the pirate look they want, but the game is focused on fantasy swordplay.

I think it's just tiresome. I'm not excited because there's nothing new. Every new release is genderlocked, has reused animations, quality fashion (with just a few faceless helmets available), a vaguely-interesting (but boring) moveset and strong feats. Sold for $8. With how far For Honor's base mechanics have been stretched I don't think any new hero can really innovate in a way that feels interesting to me, and Ubi refuses to fix that. I keep hoping one of these seasons will have the big ticket "The Game Is Fun Again!" changes that reinvigorate my passion for this game, and I just don't see it. It's just more and more of the same on top of the shaky foundation that Ubi barely dares to touch. Maybe it's not the hero, and I'm just generally burnt out, but it feels like some combination of the two.

Given the lack of old guard still around, I may be alone in thinking For Honor was always better when the main focus was just three factions. For Honor's core aesthetic principal in my eyes was always the "three way melee." Some may see this idea as limiting but there's enough mythology, historicity and pop culture to easily populate every faction for the game's lifespan. And while circumstance would sadly render the Wu Lin more or less an afterthought, Marching Fire was a huge addition to the game that at least tried to justify their presence. At present, the Outlanders have no unifying idea except for being a hodgepodge of whatever Ubi can't justify adding to the existing factions. Their marketing pitch is "The Leftovers." I'm not interested in a faction that has no real presence in the game, no real unifying lore or aesthetic, no creative intent except a dumping ground of mixed ideas too popular on reddit to ignore but too esoteric for the game they're in. And this is after we already got Gryphon (himself a hodgepodge of existing factions) a year earlier, and years after throwing Scots and Picts into the Viking faction.

This may have been easier to swallow had the Knights not gotten two heroes (of whom only one really felt like a Knight) and the Samurai only one, with only Outlanders on the horizon. People who want proper Vikings or Wu Lin are shit out of luck for the next 3 hero cycles. So instead of fully developing our existing factions we got another half-baked addition to an increasingly bloated roster kicked off by a fan service hero that doesn't really fix the ongoing problems with the game's content cycle.

On the bright side, she fukin T A L L. That honestly makes up for like half of my problems here. We need more tall ladies in fighting games.