In the second part of an exclusive interview, John Gaudiosi talks with Epic Games’ Steve Stuperville, creative director of Paragon, about its newest offering from heroes to the latest technology driving the game. Plus, watch a new video trailer about the multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) game.

See the video at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2q2U1bRuy2I&feature=youtu.be

Gaudiosi’s interview:

  • Can you talk about some of the heroes in Paragon?

We launch with 13 heroes. A lot of them have the normal MOBA tropes. One of our goals was to allow players who have played MOBAs before to go in and understand what this is. It feels different and there are different things to learn, but they won’t be totally confused. We have rangers, archers, brawlers, we have guys with axes and club. We’re allowing players to define what type of heroic fantasy they want to fulfill.

  • Can you give us an example?

We have the character Kallari who’s abilities are assassin-like. She goes stealth. She has some knives that she can cut people up with. She can throw a dagger at people, and her ultimate basically allows her to assassinate people by picking them off.

When she triggers it, everybody on her team gets vision of all the enemy players and she can teleport to any one enemy. So anytime you have a team fight, if one person thinks they’re getting away and her ultimate is up, she can show up right next to them and finish the job.

  • How do these characters improve with play?

It’s just like traditional MOBAs, so as you play you level up and you get what we call Card Power. Card Power allows you to itemize. One of the things that’s different about Paragon is you have a card system where you build a deck of cards and that comes into the game. Those are the items you have available to make yourself stronger throughout the match. In a traditional MOBA you have all the items available to you the first time you jump in. It’s really overwhelming for new players because there can be 300-plus items in the store that you now have gold for and you need to buy, and then you’re being yelled at by other players when you don’t know the right one to buy.

Our card system helps smooth that out because we give you a starting deck of roughly 40 cards and you can play the same couple of heroes over and over again and get a sense of what items actually work. From there you can go and build your own custom decks. On the other end, the card system allows a bit more strategy because there’s a chance to be clever.

That doesn’t exist in other MOBAs, where the other player can realize what you did and choose the one item that makes your choice a bad one. Paragon becomes more of a chess match between players. It’s a battle of wills once you get past the mechanics element.

  • What has Unreal Engine 4 [Epic’s latest game development engine] opened up for Paragon?

Unreal Engine 4 allows us to make the game look beautiful. Our artists are some of the best in the industry and they’ve done fantastic work, and using the engine allows the game to scale down to lower hardware specs. What we end up with is a game that looks great on the machine for a person who spent $8,000 on their power PC rig all the way down to students who have laptops. Our goal has always been to run at a solid 60 frames per second and we’ve been able to do that on both PC and PS4.

  • Are there different ways that you’re finding people are playing on PS4 versus a PC and how does that balance out?

What we’re finding is what we always hoped, which is gamers are gamers. Players who want to be competitive are competitive, and they want to play their game on whatever platform they find most convenient. One of the things I find most encouraging is we set out to make a cross-platform game where I have friends who only play on PS4, and I have friends who only play on PC.

Very few of them are like me and have both platforms, and we weren’t able to play MOBAs together because there were no MOBAs that were on PS4. What I’ve seen going from conference to conference is people will come up and say we love Paragon and my friend and I play because it’s the only game that allows us to cross-platform. Our cross-platform is trying to be a seamless as possible. You can play against people on PC or PS4. Your friend’s list works cross-platform.

Even your purchases are cross-platform because Sony’s been a great partner, so no matter which platform you buy a skin or a pack or whatever your progression happens, whatever platform you play on next, it’s there waiting for you.

Note: Part one of the interview is available to WTW Insiders.