Edge - April 2016

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H P Y E Paragon Epic Games expands the MOBA template into a new dimension Developer/publisher Format Origin Release Epic Games PC, PS4 US <strong>2016</strong> There’s a touch of Katniss Everdeen to the visual design of Sparrow pic is keen to stress that Paragon is a MOBA. This is a contested, storied term, Eone that describes some of the world’s biggest games and a few of its bigger failures, too. MOBAs were the new MMOGs, and the demise of projects such as EA’s Dawngate and Warner’s Infinite Crisis reflect the difficulty that a succession of large studios have faced in trying to climb onto the bandwagon. Epic emphasises that Paragon is a MOBA not to associate it with that rough spot in the industry’s recent history but to differentiate it from a modern trend towards characterbased first- and thirdperson team shooters – a charge led by Blizzard’s Overwatch and reinforced by Gearbox’s Battleborn and Hi-Rez Studios’ Paladins. With its over-the-shoulder camera, Unreal Engine-powered sci-fi look and gun-toting heroes, Paragon very much appears to be this latter type of game. Insisting that it isn’t comes across, at first, as a marketing ploy, as if Epic is trying to position itself outside of the rat race. Playing Paragon for the first time, however, something becomes immediately very clear: Paragon actually is a MOBA. Peel back the guns and the gloss and you reveal a love letter to League Of Legends and Dota 2. Paragon will be available for both PC and PS4, and – perhaps surprisingly – will offer crossplatform play between the two. “We constrained ourselves from the beginning to work on a controller, and to hero and world design that render at 60fps on a console,” Steve Superville, Paragon’s creative director, tells us. Rather than see this as a case of porting a PC game to new territory, Superville argues that MOBAs are inherently suited to consoles. “We believed that the pacing and positioning of MOBAs works better on a console than needing everything to be twitchbased,” he says. “On PC, mouse and keyboard is dominant because you need to swing your crosshair onto a pixel as fast as you can. But the ‘time to live’ of MOBAs just naturally aligns with play on a controller.” This notion that MOBAs have been waiting to work on console, rather than assuming that they must be forced to fit, is appealing. It’s backed up by the feeling that, when you get used to the controllerappropriate control scheme and action-game aesthetic, moment-to-moment play in Paragon is very close to the genre’s roots. Two teams of five players face off on a map with three lanes, along which armies of computer-controlled robots vie for advantage. As you get closer to either team’s base you encounter defensive towers that have to be destroyed. Between each lane is a neutral zone that offers powerups and resource benefits Steve Superville, creative director of Paragon 40
The dense map thoughtfully presents game-crucial detail. Each glowing power crystal has a corresponding tower, and by smashing the crystals in each lane the route to the enemy base is opened up 41
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Edge - April 2016

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