Multiplayer battle arena Paragon shuts down on April 26, but its characters and environments have a chance to live on. Epic Games has released “$12 million [$AU15.6 million] worth” of the game’s character and environment assets onto the Unreal Engine Marketplace for free.
Epic has no time for a MOBA that spent two years trying and failing to find an audience – especially not with Fortnite Battle Royale taking off so big – but that’s no reason for a pretty game to go to waste. Awkward battle arena gameplay notwithstanding, Paragon’s always been a bit of a showcase for Unreal Engine 4, with gorgeous (if a bit generic) science fiction and fantasy characters battling in lovely environments. Well, now 20 of those characters and more than 1500 bits of those environments are free for anyone to download and use in their own Unreal Engine 4 project.
We’re going to be seeing variations of this stuff everywhere.
The 20 Paragon heroes initially released to the public (there are plans for more) include character models, visual effects, dialogue, sound cues, animation cycles and all available skins.
K-Pop hero Shinbi comes with an animation blueprint, which can be tailored to a developer’s specific needs.
The pack also includes a wide array of assets from the game’s Agora and Monolith maps, including a sample map for developers to use and change as they see fit.
Epic Games said that development of the assets released today cost well over $US12 million ($15.6 million), so it’s nice that they aren’t just dumping them in the garbage. Who knows, maybe an enterprising UE4 developer can take these assets and use them to create the shooter everybody thought Paragon was going to be in the first place.
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10 responses to “With Paragon Dying, Epic Games Is Making The Characters And Environments Free”
What would be the extent of using these assets? Could a developer legally just use all these assets and no original ones to create their own game and be safe from any legal issues?
I’m not sure, but I just imagined Epics annoyance when the fan made Paragon MOBA becomes a massive hit lol
Epic gets 5% of any revenue made from selling a game built with UnrealEngine4, so they probably don’t mind. Free stuff like this just gives the engine more exposure. This release also coincides with the release of a new engine version.
As I said I have no idea, I just imagined it for shits and giggles.
Yeah exactly – they would be happy to encourage anyone to use these assets, coz they’d end up getting money out of it anyway 😀 win-win
My understanding is that is exactly what the Unreal marketplace is for. You buy assets and they are yours to use as you see fit.
I mean isn’t that basically what PUBG did
Well those crappy asset flips on Steam are going to look great (or wierd when you see one of these models next to a low res sprite) for the next couple of months.
I didnt know it was closing down :/
I bought the game in pre-order and was hoping it was going to keep being worked on until it made it.
I jump on every few months and hope the changes are for the better. I’m probably one of the reasons it failed. :/
Played this a few times. It was kind of cool but i don’t understand how MOBAs work (it was the first I’d played).
The characters seemed interesting, looked cool and played well though. I hope someone just takes them all and makes an overwatch/hero shooter ripoff, i think that would be cool with these characters and you could probably modify the maps to work as well.
Fully expect to see thousands of asset flips with Paragon assets now.