Paragon: Early Access First Impressions

I’m pretty excited about Epic Games and their new releases. Especially Paragon, their new third person MOBA that’s built on the new Unreal Engine. Paragon is still in pre-alpha, but it’s pretty impressive. After playing through it in these initial stages, here are some of my thoughts.

The Graphics

Paragon is built on the Unreal Engine — an open engine with decades of development behind it and huge following of developers. So needless to say, the game flat out looks good. The detail on the characters is fresh and follows the environment well. The environment looks great. The road you follow in each lane is done well, with notable attention to detail. The foliage, minions, surrounding buildings, and towers all show how much work the devs put into the game. I have a feeling that gameplay and graphics were equally important to the devs, and it really shows.

But to get the full effect, you’ll have to have the power to support it. At the end of this article, you’ll find a list provided by Epic that offers recommended specs and AVG FPS per piece of hardware.

Gameplay

Like your usual MOBA, there are lanes with towers that need to be defended and destroyed. You wait for the creeps to come, and then follow suit behind. But instead of a top-down view, you are in a third person view behind your champion. This is where things start to get interesting. This game isn’t one where you can simply click your ability and you hit. You have to try and aim if you want to hit anything. There is a different set of skills needed. Think of it this way — add The Division to Dota 2 and you have Paragon, in the simplest form.

Some of the champions use guns at range, others cast magic, and others are up close and personal. It doesn’t matter which champion you use, because they all require some kind of skill in aiming and moving to avoid getting blown to pieces.

After you have chosen a champion, you need to choose your skills and your cards. Like Dota or LoL you choose equipment, but instead of actual equipment you have cards. These cards can be upgraded and will either be passive or activated as you play. As you kill creeps and players during the match, you get points that can be put towards upgrading cards or buying new ones. 

As with other MOBAs, you get to level up skills, which are activated by Q, Right Click, Left Click, E, and R. You also level by yourself, instead of as a team like in Heroes of the Storm.

All the champions are fun and each one have their own unique style.  Getting used to each champion is a challenge, but once you find one you like, try leveling that one up and sticking with it, so you can adapt to the play style. 

Content

As of now there is only one map with three lanes.  The main objective is to destroy the opponent’s core.  You can jungle a little, but be careful — this will leave your lanes open and make you vulnerable to attacks from behind. 

As of now, this game is doing great for being in Early Access. The controls are smooth, everything looks great, and there is a decent player base to keep games going. There are some balance issues that need to be handled as your team levels and with certain heroes, particularly with TwinBlast and Rampage.

Overall I give this a B+ for being early access. Sign up for the beta here or purchase here for early access.

Recommended specs:

• Nvidia GTX 660 or AMD Radeon HD 7870 equivalent DX11 GPU
• 2 GByte VRAM
• Core i5 2.8 Ghz
• 8 GByte RAM
• Windows 7/8/10 64-bit

Minimum spec:

• Nvidia GeForce GTX 460 or AMD Radeon HD 6870 equivalent DX11 GPU
• 1 GByte VRAM
• Core i5 2.5 Ghz
• 4 GByte RAM
• Windows 7/8/10 64-bit