I didn’t get a chance to try Paragon with a PS4 controller, but I imagine a similarly intuitive setup.
Everything funneled downwards towards the middle of the map in the center lane, with the jungle weaving between each of the three lanes.Įach hero has five abilities and since I was playing with mouse and keyboard, they were mapped to left mouse, right mouse, Q, E, and R. From my high vantage point at base, I could see all the way to the far end of the map, which is something in direct contrast to the lack of depth and scale found in most top-down 2D plane MOBAs. I landed in the match and was immediately presented with a massively open map. The first match I played put me in the boots of Twinblast, a hero that resembled a more stylish version of Nathan Drake, if Nathan Drake had morphed into a Power Ranger. You’ll still be shepherding lines of minions down lanes, taking out towers, and engaging in tense duels in open areas, but the shift in perspective is a huge change. In the case of Paragon, they’ve left much of the genre intact, but created a new spin on things by shifting the paradigm dramatically. And upcoming releases such as Overwatch or Battleborn have less in common with MOBAs than meets the eye. “Interestingly enough,” Wasilczyk elaborated, “we looked back at our heritage and history of making amazing action games over the years for inspiration.” While games like SMITE have taken the MOBA genre into more action-focused directions already, it’s still a heavily target-based auto-attack sort of game. A lot of members of the team were huge fans of MOBAs, unsurprisingly, so once they were given the greenlight to make a brand new IP, they knew they wanted to make a competitive multiplayer game, but had to come up with a special twist.
“With Paragon, we had the rare opportunity to go out and really make something unique,” executive producer John Wasilczyk told me. Paragon is a hybrid approach that not only retains the identity of each style of game, but liberates them in their singular glory. This isn’t a MOBA with third-person shooter gameplay, or a third-person shooter with MOBA objectives – neither genre is diluted here. But in the process of crafting this strange yet satisfying game cocktail Epic aims to ensure that each facet of what makes Paragon special remains intact.
But it stays true to its roots as a MOBA with everything from 5v5 matches, minions, lanes, towers, cores, and the litany of specialized heroes to choose from. And while it does retain many of the familiar elements of League of Legends, Dota, and Heroes of the Storm, Paragon also shares a lot of similarities to newer MOBAs like SMITE and Gigantic, with fast-paced gameplay that puts you closer to the action. Welcome to the JungleIn Paragon, Epic Games (Gears of War, Unreal Tournament) has flipped the entire MOBA genre on its side – literally, by way of the traditional third-person action-game camera – to create an amalgamation of genres and ideas that’s equal parts strikingly beautiful and exciting to behold. I was all set for ‘Gears of War and League of Legends have a baby in an alternate sci-fi universe.’, It turns out I had no idea just how damned fun that would turn out to be. I thought I had a pretty good idea of what to expect from Paragon, the upcoming MOBA/shooter hybrid from Epic.