Paragon

» see epicgames.com/paragon as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

i did not play paragon, and honestly almost nobody got a real chance to. it lived about two years and spent most of that time being quietly outrun by another game from the same building. i knew it as an engineer knows these things, from the outside, mostly through the fact that it was an unreal engine showcase. epic making a game to show off epic's own engine is a story you notice even if you never install it.

what it was. paragon was a moba, the league-of-legends genre, but pulled behind the character into a third-person over-the-shoulder view instead of the usual top-down board. that gave it a heavier, more action feel than its rivals. it went into paid early access in march 2016 and opened up free-to-play that august, and for a while it looked like a serious entry.

epic put real production into it. the characters and environments were expensive-looking, the sort of thing you build when you want the world to see what unreal engine 4 can render. but a moba lives or dies on its playerbase, and paragon's never grew into the size that genre needs to stay healthy.

~ the record ~

~ what actually happened ~

the thing that killed paragon was not a competitor. it was epic's own other project. fortnite's battle-royale mode took off in late 2017 and turned into one of the biggest games on the planet, and epic did the rational thing and moved its engineers and its money toward it. paragon was left running with a studio that had somewhere more important to be.

by january 2018 epic announced it was pulling the plug. there was no attempt to sell it or spin it off. the calculation was simple once fortnite existed, and paragon was on the wrong side of it.

~ what really happened ~

epic handled the shutdown better than most. it refunded every single player who had ever spent real money on paragon, across all platforms, no questions asked, ahead of switching the servers off on april 26 2018. that is rare. usually a dead game just takes your purchases with it.

then it did something rarer. epic released paragon's entire art and asset library, tens of millions of dollars of characters and environments, free to any developer using unreal engine. a dead game became a parts bin for everyone else's games. several fan projects picked the whole thing up and rebuilt paragon from those assets, so the game outlived its own servers as other people's work.

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