Epic Opens Up About Paragon’s Shortcomings And How Monolith Will Fix Them

PCGamesN scored an interview with Epic new mmorpg Games’ Lead Hero Designer Cameron Winston about the issues that have faced Paragon during its beta, what the dev team has done to fix it, and how those changes have worked — or, more than once, not worked.

With the Monolith update set to go live tomorrow, Winston talked about the road that led there, including the big complaint of Paragon fans: the map was too big, which made the game too slow. The team tried implementing “travel mode” to speed things up a bit, but even that backfired:

    “[Travel mode] allowed players who knew how to use it to do some really exploity things as far as how they would engage and fight each other,” Winston says … This ‘degenerate gameplay’ involved players teaming up to leap-frog an opponent, with one in travel mode constantly able to catch up to and deal damage to an enemy being kept out of travel mode by a partner. It repurposed the mechanic from a traversal tool to a fighting mechanic and, well, felt terrible.

In addition to dealing with exploits by experienced players, Monolith is also expected to smooth out the learning curve for new players by simplifying the card system. All heroes are also needing reworking to fit with the new map and speed of play. If you need a refresher, you can still read the big Monolith post on the Epic Games site.