Hello everyone. This is Paragon, a brand new title coming from Epic Games,
creators of the Unreal Engine, Gears of War and many many other titles. Now because
this is the Unreal Engine it certainly looks hyper realistic. But what exactly
is Paragon? Well Paragon is an actual MOBA in third person.
A massive online battle arena, two teams five players per team, and lots and
lots of mayhem. Now because this is the familiar MOBA structure what you will
find are three lanes, defences at set points along each lane, creeps moving towards
each other and you ultimately being the deal breaker as it were. You're going to break the deadlock.
If the opposing team are going to let you. Now there's a variety of different heroes
here and it is going to be a free-to-play title when it
eventually launches. All the heroes will be available for free by the looks of it
but where they're going to make their money is out of card packs. Now these cards are Paragon
basically boosts. When you're actually playing the game you pick a card, you can
then level that card up and you'll get various bonuses for your character during the match. Think of
this really as like items but instead of having an item and then
having to find the next item in the list, merge your items together to create a better weapon and all of that, Paragon
they've simplified it around a card system which should make balancing a little bit
easier if you ask me, long term for the developers. Now I've played a couple of
matches of Paragon and the combat works really well. Certainly when you get into
those team fights where five versus five it really is absolute mayhem. But having all of
your various powers there, the main character we've been playing so far has an awful lot of stuns and
slows and contains basically to try and slow down the enemy team, stop them in
their tracks or basically wall them in so that we can finish them off inside a mini arena
of sorts. Now this does work exceptionally well. I do have some slight problems with how
fast the movement speed is, but again your ability to kind of run across the map
fairly quickly using the run option is actually quite useful. When it comes down Paragon
to that combat though, you're going to find that things maybe feel a little bit more
like wandering through fudge than it does a fluid movement system at the moment. I'm not sure
whether that's something that's going to be changed. It could very well just have been the characters
I've been playing. But it does seem just looking at the other player movement, Paragon
speed is not necessarily something this game is there for. This is really about
positioning, dodging and so on, more than anything else,
not necessarily running circles around your opponent. Paragon
Now the heroes are feeling quite nice and varied. The ones they've really been
kind of showing off as it were during some of the pre-alpha footage are not necessarily
the best the game has to offer.
There's a nice variety here. They all really feel they've been ripped out of the
unreal world as it were, tweaked and then dropped into this one but it does feel really
nice. The animation style is great as is the texture on the models. Again this
being the Unreal engine it does have a hyper-realistic feel to it, that's not a
bad thing. Seeing the game engine running nicely at 60 frames per second on our 970 GPU
with no framerate drops whatsoever and it looking this good is a wonderful Paragon
thing to see and it's great that Epic have really embraced their visual style here
for this game. Now, if you're interested in getting into Paragon, pick up a founder's pack. Founders pack start
at around $20 and will get you into the game today. There are other packs
available which cost maybe up to sort of $50-$60, I don't think it's particularly worth it. This
is a long-term a free-to-play game at the end of the day with progression people have to
unlock. The initial $20 buy in to get into the early beta that's pretty good I
think really for what they're offering here. Ultimately though long-term this is
about unlocking the content through playing. I wouldn't necessarily recommend dropping cash on the
top founder packages there as it were. It really doesn't quite feel like good value for money in
my opinion. Now the free to play aspect of this game does mean
microtransactions and here they're going to be using a gold system. Buy gold, use it
to buy cards, those cards are then used to buff and upgrade your character during a match.
We'll see how exactly that is going to work in practice over the next couple of
weeks whilst I can get a better feel for the game and how slow the progression I suppose is going
to be at acquiring these cards yourself. As with all free-to-play games ultimately the developers have got Paragon
to make money and so we can always expect progress to be on the sluggish side
but let's see exactly what Epic have got planned here. My hope is that they won't
try nickel and diming people and instead they'll create a game where everything is fast
and fluid including building up those credits but you have enough fun that you want
to progress and pick up some
additional cards using, well, actual money if you feel like it. We'll see exactly how that works out Paragon
in practice over time. Now do please remember to subscribe and like to this video if you'd like to to see more of
Paragon. I will be running a live stream over the next couple of days so do
keep your eyes open for that. We'll be able to explore the game together live as it were. Paragon