Unfinished: Paragon 03/31/2016

With Paragon, Overwatch, Lawbreakers and Battleborn soon to grace us with their releases, I wonder how Gigantic will fair. It's a moba with a really nice art style imo but in a sea of mobas or similar games, I'm sure it'll just be lost to the wayside. I'd love to play more of it but matchmaking in the current beta is awful. 5+ minutes to join to then have someone not accept so you have to wait again. Easily takes 10 - 15 mins or maybe even more just to get into a game.

"Jeff likes to dump." - Drew

This was an...interesting...Unfinished. I don't think I can watch any more MOBA Quick Looks or Unfinished or anything on this site. = /

That sounds awful. If someone decides to just out of the blue kick your ass and then takes a picture of you with that shirt on while you are laying on the ground, people will assume you were the guy that started the fight in the first place.

it's much lower for me, maybe like 1 in 10 if that. Alot of the time even when people do awful teammates in chat will say it's no big deal, etc. I'm not saying that stuff doesn't exist but it does definitely seem to be exaggerated on forums and such.

That salty chat haha

@sado: Thank you!

I don't understand the criticism, there are already MOBA's that don't have a "last hitting" mechanic and this game seems to make a decent compromise of still having a last hit (100 credits that teleports to the player) and not last hitting (drops ~50 credits on the ground and the player has to pick them up before they fade). Seems like a solid evolution of the initial design.

Is anyone else having issues with this video? I can't seem to get it to play in HD streaming, progressive or HTML5. YouTube works though. Seems to be the only format that works for me with this video.

@brad said:

I hate to be that guy Brad, but at the 2:14 mark you do say "I don't play League, so I can't say for sure." While you are correct that League is simpler in some ways that DOTA2, I would say that there are other complexities that it has that DOTA doesn't. I have played both and enjoyed both until the communities just made me never really want to play public matches ever again.

Why is he just walking backwards staring at the enemies?

Yep. The "I don't play League so I can't say for sure" statement compared to a few seconds later, "League is definitely simplified in some ways" is working against Brad here.

Although I'm not at all interested in MOBA beef.

I know people have issues with the card/hero upgrade system, but all that aside, I'm still very much so enjoying this game. It may not be able to compete with Dota which is the clear front runner on a competitive front, but for a less competitive moba, I really enjoy it.

People who desperately try to defend League aren't worth engaging.

Been playing this a bit and really starting to get into it more.

$20 to play now (early), free later in the summer. True account level cross-play PS4 and PC. Buy once play on both (that's why it's free to download on PS4 even though you need to pay $20 to start playing). If you buy on PC, you can download for free and play on PS4 too. Pretty cool.

@dystopiax: I won't tell you that the awfulness of other people in MOBAs isn't exaggerated on forums - that would be folly, you see, because literally everything is exaggerated on forums - but I can say that it's the aspect of these games that stops me from playing them.

I love the sports-like nature of the games, I love the RPG mechanics, I love the tense moment-to-moment gameplay, I love the progression systems, I love how itemization can create innumerable viable builds, and so on and so forth. In theory, these game should be my shit.

But in reality, it comes down to the fact that after a hard day at work, I really don't want to take a gamble on being able to relax. And when you play a MOBA, even the 1/10 chance that you'll be stuck in a chatroom with a bunch of toxic assholes for up to an hour is TOOOO RICH for my blood.

The AI mode is the kind of shitty ai mode some games have where literally the entire momentum of your team is based on how capable you are, while the enemy team is entirely capable of winning the game no problem. So you constantly have to switch up between and push lanes because your teammates are incapable of holding off the enemy from taking your towers. So yeah it totally exists, but it's not terribly satisfying to actually play much of it.

On the plus side though you can choose Co-op team vs AI team (5 real vs 5 AI) or Solo vs AI (1 real + 4 ai vs 5 ai) and all of these modes earn you rep (currency) and account level XP. It's a good way to figure things out and become confident in character's abilities before jumping in, while still progressing.

The announcer sounds incredible.

Also, the character design in this game is fantastic. The catman looks like something out the the labyrinth.

Totally valid point, I have nothing against this game in particular, but I guess that's my point. They all blend together.

Regarding last hit, I've just always marveled at the audience's ability to latch onto that one feature since it seems so divisive and seems to illustrate how little difference there is in larger mechanics across the genre.

@firrae: Yep, me too. Tried Chrome, Firefox and even Edge out of desperation. Only YouTube works.

Is the gameplay as unbelievably dull and boring as it looks or is it just that particular character? No, it can't be judging by the damage done. There are hybrid MOBA's that are better at pulling off the bridging of MOBAs and other genres like shooters or MMOs. They work because they actually successful pull off playing an action game inside a MOBA's trappings. This game seems like its goal is to create the illusion of playing an action MOBA hybrid while actually just being a traditional MOBA that for whatever reason decided to place the camera behind the hero. (Eye-Candy and atmosphere, basically)

I don't know why they went with this... The camera perspective is inferior to traditional MOBAs like LoL and DOTA2 and they clearly aren't interested in making an action/MOBA hybrid, so how in the world did they settle on this?

Here's my question? Do any of you LoL and DOTA2 players have any interest in really making this your main MOBA? My guess is that they're appealing to you guys primarily because they definitely aren't appealing to people who only tried the other hybrid MOBA's like Smite, Battleborn, SMNC, etc. Also, how many successful MOBA's have high system requirements?

Went from not caring to "this looks really cool."

If it helps, runes are one of the few things in League that you can only buy with the in-game currency, and don't even get the choice to unlock with real money. There are a few things in that game that ramp up your overall efficiency, but that's all tied to those runes and your "summoner level", which caps out at 30 and can probably be maxed out in a couple of weeks of casual playing. It's basically a way of gradually introducing some of the complexity of the game to new players, and matchmaking takes that heavily into account. You don't have to, nor should you, begin investing hard earned points into runes until you have a full roster of characters you're happy with and want to invest more into specializing.

Runes aren't even per-character. If you decide that all your characters benefit from a full stack of, say, armor runes, then you unlock nine of those runes to fill up the slots and now all your characters have a few extra points of armor.

The only monetization in League that affects gameplay is actually simply unlocking characters without having to grind for them.

I like the aesthetic of this game, but I also really like Unreal so that's probably why.

Paragon: Not For Dumping (Sorry, Jeff)

I've only lasted 5 minutes into this QL but do they at any moment mention Smite at all? Really seems like this is much like that game in particular.

Nope, none whatsoever. I'm already so entrenched in Dota 2 - not just monetarily but also as a function of time, effort spent learning the finer details, community, etc. - that I have absolutely no interest in going through that process again with any other MOBA no matter how good it might be. I'm a fan of Dota, not a fan of MOBAs, and I suspect you'll see that sentiment among the majority of hardcore LoL/Dota fans.

It's fun and feels fluid and responsive in a way that Smite can only dream of (that's not saying much though, Smite is one of the worst fucking games I've had the displeasure of playing in my life) and the production values and visual feedback is fantastic, but there's absolutely no reason the games need to be as long as they are.

The minions are way too beefy, take forever to kill, and move at a glacial pace, it's ludicrously hard to push down lanes with the downtime after killing a bunch of members on the enemy team.

I stopped playing after about two weeks because of that, the games are artificially long, games that should be 30 minutes can easily extend to 50 just because of the way the game is paced in ways that have nothing to do with your team's performance or the capabilities of the heroes.

They need to speed it up, if you're going to have a MOBA try to play like an action game, it needs to have the pace of an action game, Smite already felt like nothing but a brutal slog because of this, and the only thing saving Paragon so far is that it's actually enjoyable to play moment-to-moment.

@firrae said:

"I don't play League" isn't the same as "I've never played League" because it is in the present tense. All it says is that he does not currently play League. Things may have changed since the last time he played. So, he left some wiggle room. Similarly, I don't play Hearthstone... because I didn't like it.

Mannnnnnn I kinda wish Brad had more overall MOBA experience, a fair amount of stuff he describes as from league have kinda ended up genera standard. DOTA is sorta an outlier with a lot of the very specific (and sometimes rather awkward,) ways it deals with things. In that way league ends up more accurately described as "streamlined", HotS is reeeeeeeeeeal simplified though.

Yay, another MOBA...

Wait, this game isn't free to download like Brad says, is it? I thought you need to buy one of the packs to get early access?