Where Paragon is going wrong
The original ‘legacy’ map was open and expansive.
Around April 2016 Epic Games started releasing promotional videos to Youtube and IGN regarding a new third-person MOBA called Paragon. It looked sensational. Amazing graphics, beautiful open world, interesting strategic interactions. I had never played a MOBA before and was not really sure what it meant, but Paragon looked too good to pass up. I paid for Early Access and entered a wonderful world with which I was enamoured for over a year, up until recently. However, much has changed in the development of the game. The entire map/world changed and the speed and pace of everything changed, the itemisation changed, and finally my feelings towards the game changed. I am writing this essay because I am not sure exactly why my feelings have changed so much, and to try to get to the bottom of why we play games at all; what was so addictive about Paragon; and if they are anything more than a pastime.
In Paragon I experienced what I think was my first real addiction. You could say I am addicted to carbohydrates, caffeine or sugar, but taking them away from me would not affect me the way Paragon did. I would go to work angry after a loss and the whole day would be ruined because I played too long and left ten minutes too late, losing in the process. I stayed up late in games lasting 75 minutes or more getting a bad night’s sleep and annoying my girlfriend in the process. She hates this game, with a passion. She has threatened to leave me because she does not like to see the person I am when playing it. But I could not stop. I played almost every day and every day that I did not seemed like an eternity. On the train I would read about it, listen to podcasts about it, and wake up and play a game every day if I had time. But that stopped in early October 2017.
It's hard to say what exactly made the difference in the end, because so many things have changed with the game. We must not forget that when I first played on the ‘Legacy’ map of Agora, everything was novel and exciting. The big open spaces, the blue sky, the old gnarled tree looming over the big crystal towers, the canopy covering the jungle, the black minimal game menus, the minimal electronic music brooding and ominous. Entering a match of paragon felt big and cool and like nothing else on the market.
The jungle of Monolith: dark, plain and cramped.
The new Agora map ‘Monolith’ is much smaller (30% smaller) and feels much more compressed. The scale alone brought the impression of the game down dramatically. The jungle before was a real jungle covered by foliage so you could not see into it. It was exciting to dive into the jungle and with some heroes you could leap out of it and make a play. That was gone and the card system was also changed. Though I think the new card system is more interesting than the older system and also simpler for new players, everything else that has changed has been negative for me. The pace of the game has sped up dramatically. Paragon was slow and methodical on Legacy and it was like moving chess pieces on a board; you could see what was happening and you knew that you had been outplayed and that there was nothing you could do except prepare for the next move, or make a counter move. But Epic decided it was not action-packed enough so they made the map smaller, increased movement speed while removing the sprint function (basically a net increase in map traversal), decreased cooldowns across the board, decreased relative mana costs, and turned Paragon into an action-MOBA.
Many passionate Paragon fans on reddit or the forums will tell you that Steve Superville leaving the project was when things changed, and this seemed to correlate but there are many people behind the wheel of Paragon and for whatever reason Paragon changed so much that it is not the same product that many people bought into. Since the Monolith change my enjoyment of the game has progressively decreased and recently I have seen little point in playing. I have been playing a completely different game instead. I do not think I am just bored with Paragon as I sometimes try to play a game and see if it is fun, but it is not. Elite: Dangerous, without being “action packed”, is so much more enjoyable a game than Paragon is, but for the same reasons Paragon is not. I will explain why.
As the pace of paragon increased, the fun factor decreased. Yes, there is more happening at any one time. Yes, it looks good (since the recent visual update). Yes, there are many heroes and build variety is probably better than it was before the card rework (but there are always optimal builds that the top players go for). However, the faster pace has brought about many bugs. I played a game with countess the other day, a burst caster who relies on being able to execute a string of ability, in the right order, in quick succession. It was impossible; I died a lot. Every ability I used caused lag, I used my ultimate on one player and he appeared five metres away and just completely ignored the damage and root of my ability. But this is not just one hero or just one game. Whenever you are in a grouped-up situation, a team fight situation, or something, there is so much going on the game cannot handle it and neither can players.
The game works now that you farm and get strong and try to win a few decisive fights to get ahead. The once ahead you group as four or five and you take objectives. Nothing can stop you at the point; if you have a decent composition and more numbers then you will kill the other team just by spamming abilities. That is all that happens now. Towers offer no protection, the map is too small for you to get away and there are too many abilities or cards to slow you or root you and stop you from getting away, and so you chase down enemies as a group and you kill them wherever that may be. If you have numbers you usually win, and then you take objectives. There is nothing that a defending team can do except retreat and try not to die. The problem with this is the pace.
Everything happens too fast to react. There are cards and abilities to use to save you. Serath, for example, an attack damage carry, has a short immunity ability that stops her movement but timed correctly can save you. Before the card rework and further ability pace changes, I could use this ability very effectively to dodge attacks and heal myself back up with lifesteal; it was amazingly powerful and satisfying to use it properly. Since the changes I do not remember once seeing an enemy prepare an ability and using this ability to dodge it. That does not happen anymore. It is too fast. When Epic moved to Monolith, abilities became more valuable, and you could effectively escape if you wanted to with movement abilities, or immunity abilities. Now you need cat-like reactions, or you have to have magically predicted that the enemy team was about to jump on you from stealth and unload all of their hard crowd-control and damage abilities on you at once. In this case, if you did not see it coming (by map awareness or warding) then you are dead; there is nothing you can do to prevent it. That, there, is it. That is frustrating. That is unpleasant. That is unenjoyable. Team fights should be fun tactical affairs with play-making and counter-play. But it all happens too fast. You have no control. If you cannot control your game, it leads to frustration, and that is why my entire friends list that used to all play paragon have all but quit, myself included.
The second major general change that Epic Games have slowly implemented is to raise the skill floor and lower the skill ceiling. Most of the changes have been justified as removing confusing mechanics (harvesters > amber link > nothing) or making things fit better on the new smaller map. In other words, making it easier. This has become the subject of intense debate on the reddit and forums recently because of several changes made to the game that have brought higher skill cap heroes, like Kwang, down by making their skills easier to hit and easier to use. Most recently, Epic thought it would be a good idea to make last hitting minions (the mainstay of MOBAs since forever) significantly easier with an execute mechanic that kills minions on any last hit below 20% health. They have explained that these changes are to benefit new players and claim that it does not change the game for people are the higher level. However, it has created uproar and some high profile competitive players of the game have come out against it.
Why is this significant? Surely making the game accessible to more people is a good thing, right? Well, accessible - yes, but easy - no. A tutorial would make the game more accessible but it would not raise the success rate of bad players, thus making good players feel better. Furthermore, if Epic thinks that player retention is low because of a high barrier to entry then they should consider the popularity of other MOBAs like League of Legends and DOTA, which have players in the millions and at this stage a much more complex game with more heroes, more items and abilities and years of development that has created a deep and interesting interacting system.
Another aspect about making the game easier overall is longevity. Without a high skill cap, a game like this will always suffer, as it relies on people making it a part of their life and playing every day for years in order to get to an extremely high level of competency. Without a high skill ceiling too many players will lose interest and there will be no competitive scene. Epic set out to make the best competitive MOBA in the world, and now they are lowering their ambitions. Their statements have changed and their updates are all going in one direction.
Why is this important for games theory? What do I want from a game? What does it have to do with Elite: Dangerous? Well, basically, it’s the same for longevity. Paragon is reducing its longevity, giving long time players less reason to continue, and giving new players a leg up so that the older players will soon be playing with the new ones. And, significantly, reducing the amount of time it takes to reach a high level of skill. Raising the skill floor and lowering the skill ceiling only compresses the skills into a tight group and makes progression seem small. People play games because they give them the feeling of progression. Players of this kind of game want to be progressively challenged and when that stops they will get bored. But this goes deeper: the feeling of progression is essential to gaming. Some may say games are just about fun, but this is not true. Look at Tetris, Mario, Half-Life, and every other successful series that ever existed. The thing they have in common is that they get harder. Mastery of skills is the single most important factor in gaming. As the game gets harder you get better and you learn that you can do things that you could not before, that certain mechanics interact and that you enjoy the feeling of satisfaction when you complete a task that was difficult.
The Milky Way galaxy and the paths of players’ travels on the game. Some even deliberately making patterns that would show up on this map.
This is what Elite: Dangerous does very well. The difference being that it’s got a low skill floor and a high skill ceiling. That skill floor starts when you try to land for the first time in a space station and you crash your ship all over the place, perhaps get a fine for dangerous driving, or worse your ship could be destroyed by the station security just for loitering. This is quite a high level of difficult and for the first month of my play time landing was a challenge each and every time. I still make mistakes. I still know I can land better. And that’s just landing, one of the fundamentals of the game. Flying around fighting requires much more skill with the lateral/horizontal boosters as well as the propulsion throttle, power management of the variable pips into your different systems: systems, engine, weapons. Management of all of these things at the same time is difficult. But there are tutorials, and it is fun to learn. There is much to learn in this vast game. You can look at guides on the internet or you can figure it out yourself by trying it in solo play, or just play and never mind the huge costs when you destroy your ship. I recently started tinkering with flight assist off. The whole game I was thinking it was difficult to fly, but there are some people who never use the default flight assist. You drift like you truly would in zero gravity and your ship does not move in the way that you expect; it’s hard. But there is a very high skill cap. When will I stop playing? When I have every ship and I have explored everything the game has to offer. At present, I am a long way away from mastery. And the journey is enjoyable. The sounds and little actions that you perform in everything require a bit of technique and thought and it’s never unfair. Unlike Paragon, which is frustrating and buggy and still does not have anywhere for me to go without simply playing heroes I don’t enjoy. One small map that I know like the back of my hand, or the entire Milky Way galaxy to explore.
As we can see, reducing the skill gap is a bad idea from the games development perspective. Taking away agency and satisfaction in execution from the player makes a game frustrating and unenjoyable. Perhaps data shows that accessibility brings in more players and that those players stay on average longer than if it is difficult. Perhaps this is just another test in the long beta of Paragon. It could be that I am wrong, and that I do not speak for the general player base. Maybe I speak for hardcore gamers. But, I will tell you why Sony is winning this console generation so consummately. It is because they do not let the sales of their games completely dictate their policy. Uncharted does not sell as well as Call of Duty. They give money to small indie studios who create amazing games that not everyone will play. They also create masterpieces that may not be popular but go down in people’s memory as something of a very high quality. Companies in the games industry in this day and age are forgetting about quality. They are forgetting that people remember, and have opinions, that people talk and that word of mouth exists. Data points and statistical analysis is killing a section of the industry. If you want to create a Call of Duty which everyone plays and enjoys but has absolutely no effect on the gaming press or critics, that is never remembered except by some children who play it because their friends do and do not know any better, then do that. But if you want to create a competitive eSport MOBA, then you have to stick to a singular vision and you have to design it based on that objective. MOBAs will never be for everyone; why try to cater for people who might never play this game anyway?
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