Pros: Phenomenal graphics, top class map design, decent array of heroes
Cons: Extremely long matches, slow movement/mobility in combat, not much innovation in features, same three lane push single objective gameplay we’ve seen in other titles
Epic Games have recently launched their early access of their new third person MOBA Paragon, currently accessible on a paid/founder access or invite we were lucky enough to get the chance to play for a few hours. Having played a few MOBA we are familiar enough to make the comparisons and so one of the key things we were looking at was how the game fit into the genre in its current form.
Like you we had seen the cinematics made from in game graphics and so we don’t need to tell you how great the game looks, from character models, level design and ability effects it all looks extremely impressive. However, one of the bigger elements that the graphics and third person perspective allow for is the actual level design, whilst there are other third person MOBA (Smite being the most obvious and probably the most well-known) Paragon does an impressive job at adding various levels to the map, from the jungle areas that lead down into enclosed canyon areas, or high bridges that overlook your towers where you can shoot down onto the enemy.
The layout of the map definitely makes the game feel more like a third person shooter, and whilst it does require aimed skill shots as opposed to any tab targeting, there are still much smaller ranges to keep it more in line with a MOBA so that ranged players aren’t too dominating. The majority of the battles do happen at a fairly close quarters range, and lots of melee characters have some quick gap closers to get on top of the ranged characters, which highlighted our first biggest frustration with the game. The actual movement, when you are in combat, is surprisingly slow and nowhere near the fast pace we had expected from a third person MOBA and, focusing on Sparrow as our main character to try out (a ranged archer), once we were in melee range trying to dodge around and move felt extremely sluggish and kept at a walking pace.
Moving around the map is a little easier, you can hold down your shift key to jump into “travel mode”, indicated by your character getting a bit of a blue aura around the screen you start to move more quickly, however this shouldn’t be used when in combat as if you take damage you are suddenly stunned for a few seconds. We used the ability mostly for getting between lanes and into the battle, but also for navigating around the Jungle where we could find camps, harvesters and a boss, which we did try to fight solo around level 12 but we had pretty low health, otherwise we’re pretty sure we could have solo’d it. The camps break down into four different types; camps for Attack Speed, Mana Regen and Damage and then XP/Card XP camps, players can also activate Harvesters to gain additional Card XP resources.
So what’s Card XP? Well it’s pretty much your gold in other games used to buy items, that you can only do from the safety of your base, however the system works a little differently and instead players can earn and collect cards through gameplay as rewards and build up their own personal inventory deck. You earn Card XP and slowly accumulate Card Points throughout the course of the battle, earn enough and you can activate a card and put it into one of your six card slots (activated on keys 1 – 6). You start with a basic deck which gives you access to healing and mana potions, scout drones and various damage boosts, interestingly whilst you equip the cards they also have a set number of charges that once used can be replenished in the base, which we thought was a pretty cool idea. The system is simple, but there was some confusion for us that we read you could “upgrade” your cards, so each time we were in the base we were trying to improve our cards, or pick the same card again and drop it on our active cards; seemingly it just means you can replace the low cost/early cards with more expensive ones later on, so upgrade your deck as opposed to individual cards; either way it’s a neat little system that offers a lot more individual customization.
Our games focused, unfortunately, on BOT/AI games as you need to level up before you can start PVPing, and match lengths make this a pretty long task. It felt like the AI was dumb but strong, they would happily charge under our tower to attack us, even though we were nowhere near dead, and our own team AI would push and push and push regardless of how little health they had left. There doesn’t seem to be any way to control the AI by pinging them to get them to follow you, so you are essentially trying to carry the game yourself and use tactics that just aren’t supported. At the other end of the spectrum, and this may just have been the character we chose, they felt super overpowered insofar as to how much damage they were putting out on us versus what paltry amount we could do to them; even the huge characters like Rampage could throw out an Ult that would drop us to nearly half health, whilst our own three super arrows we could fire out seemed to barely make a scratch.
Aside from being the obvious third person the game actually follows a lot of the same mechanics as other traditional MOBA; push three lanes and assists your minion waves through towers and into the enemy base to destroy the core. There is a single map, last hitting, there is grabbing “card XP” to buy items, there is classic roles and jungle camps that give boosts to whoever picks up the boost (not necessarily who kills it) making “carry” roles. All in all, features wise, it doesn’t feel much different to League of Legends or Dota2 when it comes to what your core gameplay revolves around.
This is where we start to lose interest unfortunately.
LoL reigned supreme for a long time uncontested and its success for many generated a score of similar MOBA trying to jump on the back of its success; but then the genre opened up and developers started trying to do something different with their titles. They added in new features, they tried to shake things up a bit, some went further than others and tried to separate themselves from the pack (Heroes of the Storm coming to mind). Unfortunately it doesn’t feel like Paragon does that, the only real huge difference is that it’s third person (which in itself isn’t original) and the map layout which changes things up a little, but as it’s not a Third Person Shooter MMO it still comes with MOBA limitations.
The biggest defining factor for us is the match length; it is excruciatingly long and 45 minute plus games are absolutely the norm, where other MOBA have tried to scale down the match length to appeal to a more “casual” crowd (or players that don’t like spending most of their game session in one match) such as Heroes of the Storms’ scaling leading to 20 minute’ish matches, or Arena of Fate’s set time limit on a game. Paragon hasn’t gone in this direction, it’s staying old school, and to us it feel like a grab at the LoL/Dota2 audience but trying to coax them over with fancier graphics and the third person twist. Depending which camp you are in will depend on whether you like Paragon or not, the singular lane pushing objective doesn’t hold that much appeal for us personally, the lack of innovation with core mechanics is disappointing, but insofar as to the game as a whole we’d say it’s pretty decent.
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