Yesterday’s news that Epic has decided to shut-down their third-person MOBA Paragon was devastating news for the community. They are now trying to save the game.
It felt like there was a glimmer of hope based on comments made by Epic just over a week ago when they stated that they would be “figuring out if and how we can evolve Paragon to achieve growth and success”. Despite the community submitting a detail development document which was spearheaded by popular Paragon streamer Sylphin which went into great detail of what needed to be done, the plug was swiftly pulled by Epic yesterday.
While the community expected something like this might happen based on last week’s statement, yesterday’s news was a tough blow. Other developers and subreddit founders dropped into the Paragon Reddit channel to offer their sympathies, including RIOT games. The community also rallied on Reddit and pushed the thread called ‘Please Sell Paragon to another developer’ to the front page of Reddit.
Despite its flaws, the general consensus is that there is a very solid foundation to turn Paragon into a great game. There are fundamental problems which Epic never addressed, such as decent matchmaking, that pushed player numbers down. That’s one problem but others such as the card system which put off some players needs addressing, the map needs refining or reworked, the addition of tutorials, and more key elements which have been extensively discussed by the community and explained to Epic.
There is an odd twist to the news today after checking the Chinese Paragon website. It appears the game may be living on in China under Tencent which also owns a 48% stake in Epic. It’s unclear at this point whether the Chinese version will suddenly vanish but the latest post, which went up yesterday, talks about February beta testing in China. Some western players are even talking about playing the Chinese version if it stays active (there’s a video on how to do it). Right now nobody really knows if it will also get pulled last minute in China.
The community has also rallied behind a new petition to save the game which is encouraging and hopefully as many community members as possible will sign this.
A thread also popped up in the Reddit channel last night from an unknown development team announcing that they have been working on a project they are dubbing Project Paramount “Paragon 2.0″ which they say they have been working on for a few months. They are calling it a Paragon replica which would be driven by community input. There is nothing more on it right now, but assuming this is a legitimate project, they are still a month away from sharing any further information. They claim playtesting would be late 2018. For now, just keep an eye on this and see what happens.
Nobody knows whether Paragon can be saved, Epic appears to be done with it and the best bet would be another developer taking it on. It’s not unheard of, we saw that happen with games such as APB. On the other hands, Epic may simply want to sit on Paragon for now, and if the Chinese version is staying live, then there’s little chance of it being handed over to someone else.
If this week’s news has taught us anything, there’s an extremely passionate community wanting play Paragon, it just needed work. That was something Epic was not prepared to do.
