I thought I had a pretty good idea of what to expect from Paragon

Welcome to the Jungle

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Guns Blazing

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Heart of the Cards

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Striving for Excellence

In Paragon, Epic Games (Gears of War, Unreal Tournament) has flipped the entire MOBA genre on its side – literally, by way of the traditional third-person action-game camera – to create an amalgamation of genres and ideas that’s equal parts strikingly beautiful and exciting to behold. And while it does retain many of the familiar elements of League of Legends, Dota, and Heroes of the Storm, Paragon also shares a lot of similarities to newer MOBAs like SMITE and Gigantic, with fast-paced gameplay that puts you closer to the action. But it stays true to its roots as a MOBA with everything from 5v5 matches, minions, lanes, towers, cores, and the litany of specialized heroes to choose from. It’s all here.But in the process of crafting this strange yet satisfying game cocktail Epic aims to ensure that each facet of what makes Paragon special remains intact. This isn’t a MOBA with third-person shooter gameplay, or a third-person shooter with MOBA objectives – neither genre is diluted here. Paragon is a hybrid approach that not only retains the identity of each style of game, but liberates them in their singular glory.“With Paragon, we had the rare opportunity to go out and really make something unique,” executive producer John Wasilczyk told me. A lot of members of the team were huge fans of MOBAs, unsurprisingly, so once they were given the greenlight to make a brand new IP, they knew they wanted to make a competitive multiplayer game, but had to come up with a special twist. “Interestingly enough,” Wasilczyk elaborated, “we looked back at our heritage and history of making amazing action games over the years for inspiration.”While games like SMITE have taken the MOBA genre into more action-focused directions already, it’s still a heavily target-based auto-attack sort of game. And upcoming releases such as Overwatch or Battleborn have less in common with MOBAs than meets the eye. In the case of Paragon, they’ve left much of the genre intact, but created a new spin on things by shifting the paradigm dramatically. You’ll still be shepherding lines of minions down lanes, taking out towers, and engaging in tense duels in open areas, but the shift in perspective is a huge change.The first match I played put me in the boots of Twinblast, a hero that resembled a more stylish version of Nathan Drake, if Nathan Drake had morphed into a Power Ranger. I landed in the match and was immediately presented with a massively open map. From my high vantage point at base, I could see all the way to the far end of the map, which is something in direct contrast to the lack of depth and scale found in most top-down 2D plane MOBAs. Everything funneled downwards towards the middle of the map in the center lane, with the jungle weaving between each of the three lanes.Each hero has five abilities and since I was playing with mouse and keyboard, they were mapped to left mouse, right mouse, Q, E, and R. I didn’t get a chance to try Paragon with a PS4 controller, but I imagine a similarly intuitive setup. As Twinblast, my abilities ranged from basic pistol shots, a quick and evasive dive, and an attack speed boost, to an AoE burst that slows enemies and my big ultimate that granted me powerful grenade-launcher-esque barrages. Twinblast was a good starter hero, but his base attack speed wasn’t as fast as I’d have liked and his medium-range required me to get dangerously close to my enemies to have much of an impact.After I stumbled my way through the first match, I came back into the second match with a lot more skill and confidence. This time, I opted for Steel. He’s a huge, hulking, metal character that pummels his foes with brute force. I had much more success this way, especially when dabbling with more defensive and tanky builds to supplement my aggressive playstyle.The left click was my basic series of punch attacks, but my right mouse allowed me to hold a small metal shield in front of me to deflect and negate incoming attacks. This was an excellent maneuver to buy time while I backed away or waited for another ability to recharge. Q let me charge straight ahead, which proved useful for not only opening my attack on someone, but also for retreating when things got hairy. E deployed a massive multi-story tall shield that could be used to protect myself and several others at the same time, while R was my big ultimate attack. For this display of power, Steel rises into the air and slam back down to the ground sending a huge shockwave that not only raises enemies into the air, momentarily stunning them, but it also deals heavy damage.In my finest moment during my hands-on time, I was able to perfectly land my ultimate and stun three enemies simultaneously, before finishing them all off with a swift charge. The cheers of my peers were unspeakably infectious.“We want to allow people to have meaningful involvement with their characters,” Wasilczyk told me. “That means rewarding the experience and time you spend with Paragon. The unifying factor is that we want to make sure we make time feel valuable." To that end, every hero can be customized by building a deck of up to 40 cards prior to the match starting.Each and every card contains either a passive ability, such as a damage multiplier, or an active ability, such as a healing potion, all of which can be equipped during matches. Every card also has a particular cost in and of itself – from 1 to 10 – which detract from your overall resource pool to equip cards, maxing out at an overall total of 60.In a practical sense, this creates an interesting strategy for building your deck as it pertain to each hero. For example, for Twinblast, it makes more sense for me to stack my deck full of damage, attack speed, and other types of offense-based boosters. It’d be a waste to put a large number of defensive cards in my deck. However, I could sprinkle in a few health-boosting cards if I find myself struggling to stay alive during a match.All of the deck building happens outside of each match. During the match, you gain experience that can be used to then upgrade your card slots and equip different cards to fit that particular match. So if I’m not having trouble staying alive and just want to ramp up my damage even more, I can go all-in on boosting my damage with Twinblast, but if I have a match later on that’s a bit tougher than before, I could instead slot some of my health boosting cards later in the match. Since every deck can hold up to 40 cards, there is room to experiment. But it’s smart to keep each deck focused on a certain type of build – whether that be DPS (damage per second), support, tank, or something else entirely, since each hero can have multiple decks available before every match.In addition to tweaking decks and cards before matches, you’ll also unlock cards over time. New packs of cards that provide new abilities and bonuses will change the way you play certain heroes and may even incentivize you to try an entirely new hero that you’d never played before. As Wasilczyk puts it, each hero is like a “toy box” of possibilities. You get to learn how they play, how they change the game, how they work with other characters, and even how playing against them changes things as well.Beyond the decks and cards, every hero also levels up their abilities in the match as well. You begin every match only with your basic left mouse attack, but through playing and gaining experience, you’ll eventually unlock the right mouse, Q, E, and R for all five abilities. As you continue to gain levels, you can even upgrade each skill several times, which adds another layer of progression. Do I want to continually bump up my base attack first? Or do I spread out my upgrades to level everything evenly? In some cases, I found myself wanting to upgrade my ultimate attack as soon as possible since it can be such a huge game changer.There’s still a lot of time between now and when Paragon is planning to launch later this year on PS4 and PC, time that will likely be spent balancing and tweaking systems so that they’re just right. Competitive multiplayer games like this live and die by the balance of their characters, a fact that Epic is taking very seriously.They’re also doing what they can to offer plenty of other ways for people to dive into the world of Paragon when the time comes. They’ve employed assistance from talented film veterans to cultivate a powerful Replay tool with static camera angles that record each and every match for easy sharing. You can also dive into full matches with AI opponents either on your own or with friends. Combined with the fact that Paragon features full cross-play between PC and PS4 platforms ensures a high level of polish for all aspects of the experience.“We wanted to take the big and flashy cinematic trailers that you see for other MOBAs and turn those into an actually playable game,” Wasilczyk said. “We wanted to bring that sort of visceral action to life. Those are action moments that you don't normally associate with MOBAs.”

David Jagneaux is a contributor to IGN. Chat with him on Twitter at @David_Jagneaux