 Hello everyone and welcome back to For The Minions, the weekly show where we talk about some of the, hopefully, what will be the spiritual successors to our favorite game, Paragon. And I am your host, the one and only, Mangus, joining me, as always, is Mandy. How are you doing, Mandy? I'm doing well. We have another fabulous guest host for you guys. We have a prototype 1020, but it's friends calling dog, right? Absolutely. Most of them, at least. Well, it's so good to have you with us. Why don't you tell us how you got started with Paragon, favorite hero, all the good stuff? Well, Paragon's not actually my first entry into MOBAs. I picked it up because I saw it at E3, I believe it was 2015, and I was super excited to have a PlayStation MOBA because most of my friends were on PlayStation. I played League of Legends before that, Hugh, Timer, Dinger, Maine, a lot of Smite, nothing quite sunk in like Paragon did. Favorite hero, Countess. I mastered four of them. I mastered Murdoch and Grux, both in Legacy and Countess and Aurora in Monolith. All fantastic. I loved them all. Very nice, very cool. Well, thank you again so much for joining us. We really appreciate it. It's a pleasure to be here. So, OK, so your favorite hero was Countess. Is there a reason for that? I mean, why Countess? Why Countess out of all of them? I personally felt like I just synergized really well with her, especially with my team. She was a very high skilled capped character that could have huge impact if you played her right. Her early game was very weak. You really had to rely on being able to pick off the range minion. But to do that, you had to put yourself out of position. And my buddy who played in the jungle, he did a Sarath jungle. And the synergy between the two of us diving the back line was just fantastic for our carry and our mages and everything just to blow them all up. Yeah, that's a that's a very good strategy. Yeah, you're right. Countess was very high risk, high reward character. I hope they keep that going when they drop the new card system. It seemed like seem like Kalari and Countess seemed like everybody started playing her, though, like that high risk went away. It was only the high reward. So I've always felt bad for the people that had that had mastered Kalari and Countess and were like Kalari and Countess mains when version 42 dropped, because then everybody was playing them. And it wasn't it wasn't so much of an accomplishment. I felt that before that, like legacy Countess and, you know, early monolith Countess playing her well was an accomplishment by the player. You know what I mean? Yeah, I fully agree. Absolutely. I think 42 took a lot of the skill out of a lot of characters because they just handed you these gems you can buy in lane to give you safety under towers and stuff. And it was just like, yeah, but there's no challenge here. It was very for new comers in demobos. Very watered down. Yeah. Anyway, let's move on to news and updates starting off of, as always, an alphabetical order. We're going to go with made above and core. So I kind of touched on this briefly in a video. They gave me this this update for the last for the minions, but they gave it to me a little late. So I'm going to give it to you now. They're working hard on optimizing the programming. And they say we have compiled and have our first build out. That's the first game build. And they have their new foundational coding and will continue to test and expand prepping for the alpha so that they they are doing some internal testing there of the game. Hopefully it's I'm not sure if it's server based testing or if it's just in inside the Unreal Engine testing. But in any way you slice it, that's good news. And any news from from made above at this point is good news. What do you guys think? Let's go, Mandy, Mandy, what do you think? I think it's really, really good to finally hear something from them. I know we kind of would hear a little bit more than maybe the the general public. So it's really good that we have something like this that we can tell everybody because I know they've been a little concerned. But I think, you know, like you said, that's a good that's a good step. That's a that's a big step. So I'm happy to hear it and just just looking forward to some more. Prototype, any thoughts? I fully agree. Me personally, I watch E3 every year. I'm always hyped up for the news, but I'm used to not getting it so often. Yeah, yeah. There's silence really doesn't bug me. I'd rather them buckle down like a higher end triple A studio to produce a game that we're all going to love and enjoy rather than here's constant news and feedback rather than us constantly putting in put in them changing stuff and us never getting an actual game. Right. That's a really excellent point. Yeah, I'm glad you said that because I know I had kind of said in a previous episode when we talked about it that this is an unusual situation for us to even be getting the amount of information we've already gotten. So it's just important for people to keep that in mind that that a lot of games you don't get the information as readily as we have. So just just keep that in mind and have a have a little bit of patience with them while they're while they're like you said, buckling down, working hard. So I'm glad you said that. I've been talking about this with a lot of people lately. Here's my thing with it. Here's my thing with how silent they've been after the announcement of the delayed alpha. See, we are in no way are we entitled to any of these updates. Did they haven't had they didn't have to be as transparent as they have been. However, they were very transparent while things were going good and completely shut down and went opaque when things went bad. And you can't really do that and expect the fan base to be okay with it. You can't it's easier to say no and then say yes and say yes and say no. And that's kind of what they did. They were like, here's full transparency. We're gonna be full transparent. Good, good, good. Here's all this info, here's all this info. And then like alpha delayed everybody kind of like, hey, what the hell? And then they just boom, nothing for a good long time. So I think that's the main reason people are kind of losing a little bit of faith in core. As you saw with the last hype poll, it's not as bad as you may think. It's, you know, there's still, Maytabuff is still the front runner out of all these games. I'm pretty, pretty confident saying that. So that's just, that's my two cents on the transparency and opaqueness of Maytabuff and core. Yeah, that is another good point there. Opacity, opaqueness. I don't know how to say that. Not an English major. Let's move on to Omega Studios. Smokey, he just squeaked in under the finish line, just as I was coming home today. He let me know that they're gonna have all the heroes ready next week. They haven't been able to stream much. Smokey's been hard at work, at actual work. And then, you know, he's got a lot of personal stuff going on in his life right now that's been taken up a lot of his time. So not a lot of streaming, but there is work still being done on predecessor. And with all the heroes being ready, hopefully pretty soon they'll open that Alpha back up, we'll be able to get in there and duke it out. Did you get a chance to take a look at any of the Alpha footage or anything prototype? I did, I absolutely did. I watched a ton of streams when people were streaming it. I watched, I couldn't help it. I was so enveloped in it. I wanted to be a part of it so bad. I didn't get one, sadly. But yeah, I was watching streams. I'm always watching Smokey's stream. Whenever he streams, I'll pull it up at work or something, just to be there to help show I'm supporting. And there's still time for those Alpha keys, so hang in there. Maybe I just realized there's a cat behind you. There is a kitty cat behind me. It moved, I was like, is that her hair? There's always a cat somewhere. There's nothing wrong with that. We all need a little pussy. Moving on to ethereal. I just wanted to touch on their lore. As you guys may or may not know, after their lore contest, they kind of picked me up as a consultant for their lore. I edit their lore. And so I've been seeing all the stories and they're pretty much done. They've got backstories done for almost all of their heroes, or myths, as I should say. And hopefully that'll be coming out soon whenever they redo their website. And I just wanted to reiterate, a lot of people too have been thinking that the lore contest was a hoax, because Undying really didn't do an official announcement of who the winners were. And I kind of looked back through it this week to see if they did. And they never really did. They kind of did like a little, like a small little announcement on their Discord. But just so you guys know it wasn't a hoax, it was a UG mystique. I say UG because they now work for Undying and UG Ace. So those were the two winners of Vetherial's lore contest. So that's all I get to say about that. And then as far as lore goes, I know a lot of people don't give a shit about lore, but I think people give more of a shit than you actually think. Cause would you really play a game if all the heroes looked exactly the alike, just did different things? Or would you like Sparrow as much? If she was named DPS number three and Murdoch was DPS number two, you know what I mean? You got to have some character and some lore to the game in order for it to be interesting. I personally think, but you know, whatever. Mandy often disagrees with me on the lore cause she doesn't give a crap about lore. And she's always like, you and your nerd friends need to shut up about lore. That's what she tells me all the time. He's so full of crap. All I say is that it's not for me. I'm not going to sit and read it, but I'm happy for those that do. That's a liar. What do you think about lore prototype? I personally enjoy lore as long as it's not generic lore. Yeah. As long as it's not like she was in the wilderness and had a bow and went hunting. Like as long as it's intriguing, what itch I did have about Paragon. I did like the bullets. I just kind of wish there was more to them, but I understand why they kind of left those open ends there for more characters and stuff like that. So the mystery was really nice. I just wish there was a little more meat. Yeah. I always thought that they were going to follow up on those bullets. And maybe they were like a, like there's like a bullet about Moragesh was that Narbash once gave her a frog. And it's like, don't just say that. Like, let us know what the frog was about. Yeah. I do have to say that was a good mystery. Cause I assume the same thing, that there was eventually going to be all this lore. And the little bullet points did intrigue me and make me want to know more. And then there at the end, they did start releasing some of those stories. Like they did one for what? Countess and Tara, yeah. Tara, yeah. And those were cool. I liked them in small consumable portions. But if it's like a big drawn out novel of a story, I can't, I can't. Even if it was like Sparrow, I just was not going to sit there and read it also. Maybe that would be a good idea for them to just release it in little tidbits. I fully agree. I've played Dark Souls. I don't know a spot of the lore of it though. It's like, you gotta go and find it all and everything. I'm like, I like the game, but not that much. Right? I think good character backstory, if you could like, it's like the little pamphlet, the little books you used to get in your games. Like, it needs to fit on like one page of that, you know? You get one page of that, that's perfect for your lore. Right, yeah. I bet I probably have a game in that closet that has one of those pamphlets in it. I used to hate when I would rent a game and it was like the photocopied one. I was like, oh, this is bullshit. It's a color. I remember going into blockbusters when I was little and just, I remember hooking up the, I think it was the game cartridge for Pokemon Snap and printing out your own photos of for the game. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh my God. Rest in peace, blockbuster. You will be missed. There's still one open. Only one. So move on to Phoenix Rising and then move away from Phoenix Rising because they didn't have anything this week as usual. I just want to remind you guys, all these games, if you want to look into them yourself, I have all their social medias or as many social medias as I can linked in the video description below. So you can go check them out on your own. And also I just want to remind you guys too, if you guys want to be on the show, if you want to host like prototype, all you got to do is shoot, you know, be enthusiastic about Paragon and be enthusiastic about these games and shoot me a DM in Discord and I'll throw you on the schedule. I don't care. So let's go on to the poll results for this week. So the poll results, what I'm doing, I'm going to do it like a tournament bracket and I'm doing five heroes at a time and I did them alphabetically, which a lot of people didn't seem to understand how I picked those five heroes. It was just completely alphabetical and I'm just going to keep doing that. So, and it kind of did result in a pretty mismatched poll for this week, but the poll is for most impactful ultimate. And the winner was Aurora out of Aurora Countess, Crunch, Decker and Drongo. And I think this one really kind of came down to Aurora and Decker. Like that was the real competition here. And it kind of sucks that those two had to square off because I think that that could have been, that could have been the final, the final bracket is Aurora against Decker as far as impactful team fight ultimates go. But yeah, like Drongo, like I don't know who voted for Drongo, but like 2% voted for Drongo. I liked Drongo, he was a cool character but his ultimate was not very impactful on a team fight. But yeah, prototype, what do you got to say about the poll? I personally agree that Aurora was impactful. I don't think she was as impactful as Decker though. Aurora's ult was meta defining at a time because once she came out, everybody had to start running purity sensors. If you didn't, and there was an Aurora on the team, you lost. I remember when they had to nerf her into oblivion because when she ulted, she would shatter whoever. And then if a sparrow and a phase were next to each other, they would shatter off each other again. And it was outrageous. But I think just Decker had more synergy with more characters. You could cage with Gideon, Steel. You could, we used to, me and my team would cage and then we'd have our sparrow on the outside just blasting in with her ult. There was just more characters to combo well with Decker than Aurora, but I mean, Aurora's did define a meta. I think that's interesting that you mentioned phase and sparrow because like phase was so powerful on release, but then once people figured out that purity sensor was the counter to Aurora, people stopped playing phase because she didn't have access to purity sensor. So like Aurora's ultimate directed, you know, your picks of other heroes, your picks for support, you had to have somebody that had that order of affinity or else you were gonna get super fucked by Aurora. What do you got to say, Mandy? You got anything? I actually agree with what prototype was saying. I voted for Decker. I don't know if we're supposed to get political here. I voted for Decker because I thought that, you know, out of the choices here, I'm very interested to see the final poll. That's gonna be really interesting. But yeah, I felt like she, hers was just so, if you're talking about a team fight, I mean, what's better than that cage, drop in the cage? And that was my opinion. I thought she had an awesome ultimate when it came to, you know, those kind of big team fights and maybe even game changing, turning, you know, can turn around a game. Let me pull up my comments for this thing. Somebody, somebody named that guy, did this entire like analysis of each of the ultimates. And it is absolutely amazing. If you want to go to the poll and read through his, his comments, it's very well written. Wow. Really enjoyed it. But yeah, one of the things, one of the things a few people mentioned too, was Decker's cage was far more impactful on legacy than it was on Monolith because it dealt damage and legacy. And also, you know, Monolith, people could just jump out of it in certain places. Like legacy, you had to have some kind of movement ability, like a Ligitians teleport or whatever to get out of a containment fence. But in Monolith, if she, if you caught it at the right spot, anybody can simply just step over the lip and be out of it. So Monolith really killed Decker. Killed her stun bombs. For some reason it just didn't work. They never fixed it. They never fixed it. You had a 50-50 chance on whether it was gonna stun. It was. Here comes the stun. I got it. We're gonna gank. Oof. Now he's gone. So many times I'll watch her hit somebody right in the head, bounce off and then just keep going. Like, well, God damn it. We got that minion real good. Like Decker, why don't you stun him? Like, I tried, it hit him. That's why a lot more people went towards Narbashes and Richters. I have so much respect for Richters hitting those chains. It is ridiculous. Now you're talking in Mongoose's language. Oh yeah. Richter was the man. He was the best. So that's gonna be it for the up-home results. Let's move. Well, we usually move into tech time, but as you probably know, Ruba is working hard on predecessor. And I kind of did not wanna pull him away from working on the game. Just to do a little segment for my little show. So I'm gonna leave Ruba alone. I'll probably find out how to do some of my own tech times in the future. But for now, we're just gonna have another Paragon Dance Party. Enjoy. Welcome back everybody. Hope you enjoyed that little Paragon Dance Party. Before we get to the topic discussion, I wanted to include a new segment on the show. If you guys have any highlights from old games, I know you can't do the replay system anymore, but if you happen to have anything recorded and you want it on the show, just send it over to me and I'll see if we can stick it in here somewhere and have a new segment, just old Paragon highlights. But let's move on now to the topic for discussion, which is heroes that will benefit from the slower gameplay of legacy. Kind of like what heroes might function better if the attacks are a little bit slower and if the gameplay is a little slower. So prototype, why don't you kick this off? What do you think, man? I personally think that the long games of legacy was at one of the pinnacles of Paragon. They were phenomenal. I remember my longest match was two hours and 30 minutes. And that was back when defensive dunk was the thing for orb prime, where you could bring orb prime back to your little head, sink it and bring your in-hips back. Oh my God, it was game changing. You could get your carries fed better. Like if you were behind, the longer games just allowed carries to do more damage, assassins to come out more, tanks to get like everybody benefited from a longer game in the long. It was just, it was a whole nother level. It was, you had to watch your positioning not only after you got orb, but like to get back to your pit, you could get jumped in the jungle by the team that's respawning to come kill you. Again, it was, absolutely. God, I think I had a, the longest game I think I had was about two hours, but yeah, you're right. Supports don't often aren't able, often able to max out their builds in long games like legacy style. So I think supports in general would probably benefit from legacy style gameplay. So they'll be more often be able to max out their, their builder or whatever and, or get all the cards they need. And that'll be even more impactful with a traditional card system like all of these games are starting to go with. Man, did you think any heroes in particular would be better suited for a slower gameplay? I wasn't, because I never played legacy. I don't think I ever played a two hour game. Probably not in monolith. I don't know. It felt real good when you won and real bad when you lost. Yeah, I can imagine. But so I wasn't a hundred percent sure that I understood the question, but my first kind of thought was maybe Sparrow or like Kari's like Sparrow that were slower to build up. Like I didn't know if that would be beneficial to them. If I, or if I am understanding the question correctly. But yeah, that was my first thought. So please discuss and tell me if I'm right or wrong. No, I think you're absolutely right. I think Sparrow was much more of a top pick in legacy than she was in monolith. Because monolith, you know, the games are shorter. Sparrow wasn't able to take off in the late game like she was like a legacy. If the team had Sparrow, you knew that you had to push hard to win quick because if Sparrow got her full build, you were kind of fucked. She was just super stupid strong. So yeah, that's a good example. OK, cool. I'm glad it. Because I wasn't sure if we meant slower or longer, I guess. So I guess both really. Yeah, that's that's very true. They kind of go hand in hand. But yeah, that was kind of my first thought is just that giving her that opportunity to max out and then just really will pass. You know, I feel like that she was the first one that popped in my mind. So my girl Sparrow. I think I think heroes with shielding abilities or like react react abilities like Tara's shielding, like where she could absorb an attack and then, you know, have a shield equivalent to that or even Grim being able to absorb an ability and then Yen being able to just, you know, knock something back. I think with things flying out a bit slower and a bit more planned than heroes like that will will benefit greatly, especially Tara, because, you know, when the auto attacks are just flying around, you know, just bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam. It's hard to specifically counter a certain ability with her shield when you're more than likely when you activate it, you're just going to eat an auto attack, which might be, you know, good enough. But if they're going out a little slower, then you can specifically eat a certain attack, get a bigger shield and be more effective as Tara. So I think Tara will definitely be better in legacy style gameplay. And that's the reason we're talking about this, because core and predecessor both want to kind of bring back the legacy era of Paragon. So and I think Grimm, I think Grimm, I think Tara, I think Drongo with the way his round rounds work, I think he will be a bit more effective in legacy gameplay than he was on Monolith. But no, I just think it's interesting that you bring up characters like Tara and Drongo who were released later in Paragon's life cycle. You know, that they would have maybe benefited from being released earlier in the life cycle. So I'm successors in remakes and whatever you want to call them that are going to be more legacy stylized. Cool to see that some flak, you know, there was definitely they had their fans. They didn't really get a good opportunity to to be show, you know, to showcase themselves as as a hero. So I'm interested to see how they do in these remakes. The whole legacy game play, I feel really hinged upon travel mode itself. It was a whole nother like aspect to the game. And it gave such an advantage to like characters with lock on abilities or characters that could like Chimera's jump or Countess's teleport. It it was it made those characters like need to play. And I see if you or jump you rooted it was huge. And so I think it would really depend for those types of like characters if they're going to implement that system again. I kind of hope not. I love to travel mode and I love the animations, but I don't think it worked very well. If they got rid of the root in the slow for later on, I think it would be OK if it was just like a normal. Mobile fight, like you just went to your like attacking movement speed from it. I think it'd be fine without like any hindrance, but it was really detrimental to get rooted right out of travel mode. And there was nothing you could do. You're like, OK, I'm here. Yeah. Yeah, that was probably the biggest problem with legacy with the travel mode. And they didn't they couldn't figure it out. But like like I said, at the time, they seemed to they fixed a small problem with a sledgehammer. Like they completely redid the game. Oh, travel mode doesn't work. Let's make a new game making a whole new map and everything. Our card system doesn't work on the new map, but let's make a new card. Yeah. Kind of crazy, crazy. But I think I think that's about all I have to say on the topic. What do you guys got anything else? I'm good. Yeah, I'm good. All right. Right on. Let's move on to plugs prototype. You got a Twitch stream or a YouTube channel or anything like that, man? I do. I stream Monday, Wednesday and Friday, Friday times because I do have an outside life. It's typically 8 p.m. to 11 p.m. YouTube, I typically will just upload the box from somebody misses them and wants to see him. I actually just recently hit a hundred followers. Hey, congratulations. That affiliate status. Thank you very much. Nice. Congratulations. Very cool. Right on. And I'll have his YouTube and Twitch link down in the video description below. You guys want to go check out prototype? Yeah. And we've got a professional streamer, Mandy, over here. She's been doing it up lately. Yeah. I'm going to set probably I'm probably going to get future Mandy in trouble, but I'm going to set a goal that I will have by the time that is premiering. I will have a video out on YouTube. I'm going to. I'm probably creating drama for future Mandy, but we'll let her deal with it. It'll be fine. But yeah, I've been sorely neglecting my beautiful, beautiful YouTube community. And I don't want to do that anymore. This premieres. I will have a video out on YouTube. OK, well, I don't know what yet, but hold to that. I'm going to hold you to that. Now I got nothing as always. So that is going to wrap up the show for this week. I hope you guys enjoyed it. I enjoyed this. I had a lot of fun with this one. So I hope you guys did too. But that's going to be it. So for the entire for the media team, catch you guys later. And then go.