Epic Games has announced the release of $12 million worth of assets from its free-to-play MOBA title, Paragon, with more to follow.
The assets are available for Unreal Engine 4 developers to access, and include 20 “AAA quality” characters along with their skins, dialogue, VFX, and animations, plus over 1,500 “environmental components.” They’re available to download for free in the Unreal Engine Marketplace.
Epic has gone a step further, offering advice to those looking to use Paragon assets in their own UE4 projects, suggesting they start with Shinbi, whose animation blueprint can be used for animating the characters in the other Paragon packs. There’s also a sample map that can be used as a base for a custom environment, or for testing.
The full list of what has been released is below:
- Characters: 20 Paragon Hero characters will be initially available including all skins for distinct character variants. The release also includes base meshes, thousands of textures, VFX and animation cycles, and dialogue with hundreds of sound cues. The character Shinbi comes with an animation Blueprint which can be tailored to specific needs. Epic sends special thanks to OTOY and 3D Scan Store for granting permission to keep intact the high-quality character materials using their facial and body scanning technologies as part of this release.
- Environments: The Paragon release includes over 1,500 environment assets created for the Agora and Monolith maps, including a sample map for developers to use and customize as desired.
- More to Come: Epic will release millions of dollars worth of additional Paragon asset packs beyond the initial $12 million offering through spring and summer 2018.
Earlier this year, Epic announced it would be slowing down development on Paragon to focus on Fortnite, and just a few weeks later, the studio broke the news that Paragon’s servers will be shutting down in April.
Thankfully for Epic, Fortnite (more specifically its Battle Royale component) has proven to be quite the success, rivalling PUBG and becoming the most-watched and most-streamed game on Twitch earlier this month.
Early adopters who picked up the Founders Pack can look forward to some exclusive skins, although the studio hasn’t confirmed a release date just yet.
Shabana is a freelance writer who enjoys JRPGs, wine, and not finishing games. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram.