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Following the stratospheric success of Fortnite and its compelling Battle Royale mode, Epic slowly shifted focus away from Paragon in recent months. Epic then announced in January that the game's servers would be shutting down in April, a disappointing fate for a title with a $12 million development budget and a total lifespan of roughly 20 months.

All that development work won't be totally wasted, though, as what Epic says are more than 2 million registered Unreal Engine developers can now use the game's assets "in their own UE4 projects."

The released assets include files for 20 Paragon hero characters, complete with "base meshes, thousands of textures, VFX and animation cycles, and dialogue with hundreds of sound cues," Epic said. Shinbi's character pack also includes a tailorable animation blueprint that beginning animators can play with for reference.

Developers will also get access to 1,500 environmental assets from the game's Agora and Monolith maps and a sample map to test them on. The company also promised "millions of dollars' worth of additional Paragon asset packs" to come through the spring and summer.

Epic has previously released similar free asset packs drawn from mobile hit Infinity Blade and from its evocative "Soul" engine demos. This is Epic's first such free release of assets from a big-budget PC game, though.

Epic's situation here is kind of unique, since it has a marketable game engine to promote and an attention-grabbing Fortnite cash cow, which means it can effectively give away the Paragon IP without issue. Still, we wouldn't mind seeing other developers emulating Epic here and freeing the hard work developers put into failed and shuttered projects. We're looking at you and all the beautiful, no-longer-used assets for Evolve, 2K Games.