 What's up everybody, I'm TheMangooz, you are awesome and it's time once again for The Road Back to Paragon, my monthly series that summarizes what's been going on with the various third person mobas that I track. I'll let you know right now that I don't have anything this month for Madabuff or Visionary Games, however, Omeda Studios and Undying Games more than made up for it with a lot of exciting stuff in October. I'm also going to be including Project Stamina, a company that is striving to revive Gigantic, another game that met its demise through corporate mismanagement instead of just being bad. I know it's not Paragon, but it's still a third person MOBA-ish game that many of my subs have expressed a great deal of interest in. Let's kick things off with Omeda Studios and Predecessor, the first big news out of them was a switch from their own servers to using Amazon Lyft to manage their hosting. This will give them the ability to run the alpha for longer periods of time, expand the number of servers to meet community needs, and a slew of other backend benefits they will no longer have to handle and can instead focus on making the game. Speaking of working on the game, they've been able to successfully add minions back onto the map. While I haven't played with minions in the game, Manny was able to try it out and says that everything seemed to be running smoothly. They also made some adjustments to how they handle your hero's field of view. It now only displays enemies to your allies and on the mini-map if you can actually see them instead of simply just being around you. This was always their plan, but they had a placeholder system in the first iteration of the pre-alpha. Currently, Smokey is working on getting the mini-map up to standard so they can add that in as well. In an effort to reduce lag, they've implemented replication graphs, which is a system that Fortnite uses to allow hundreds of people on a map without bogging things down. They've also been making quite a few map updates. Fringe has been streaming his progress showing off a test area that resembles the tutorial map that was found in Paragon. He has also continued to manufacture his own assets for the game in order to keep the appearance without bogging your system down with unnecessary polygons. In a huge surprise twist, he also revealed that he's been working on a monolith style map alongside the more legacy style map. I know many of us love legacy, but there are also those out there who enjoyed monoliths, so there's hope for all of you who prefer the smaller map. Aside from all that, the team over at Omega has also added several graphic scaling options so players can have the freedom to adjust the game to how they want to see it. Lots of exciting news out of Omega Studios this month. They still haven't released a date for when they'll reintroduce the pre-alpha, but it seems they are moving forward with purpose, speed, and motivation. Not to be outdone, Undying Games released a significant amount of information about a ethereal clash of souls this month. Along with the releasing a majority of the myth's voice lines, they also completely revamped their website. The website debuted a ton of information about the game including myth and world lore, information about a tropos, their version of the ore prime, and all of the class abilities minus the overseers. So if you want some interesting stories, cool media, and awesome voice lines, check out their website. Be sure to check out those class abilities while you're there. Not only is it an interesting concept to have class based abilities on top of myth abilities, but the ones they've assigned look extremely fun. What I feel is more important though is that they've been opening up more and more channels of communication with their fans. They often engage their potential player base via voice chat and discord, and have started disseminating information and running polls via their YouTube channel. While Undying did throw quite a bit of fuel into the furnace of the hype train this month, they do want me to remind everyone that game development takes time, and they want to do it right. They aren't releasing any dates yet, and they don't want to get people's hopes too high. They want to under promise and over deliver so that they can exceed your expectations. As far as I'm concerned, my expectations for ethereal were exceeded long, long ago. I love this one. And now the new entry into my little world of upcoming games, Project Stamina. Much of the Paragon fan base found refuge in the game Gigantic. Unfortunately, it was canceled soon after Paragon. Project Stamina aims to create a spiritual successor to Gigantic. These guys are a very solid company with great leadership that has already made significant progress towards their goal. Not only do they have character models and ability sheets, they have shown real gameplay. The gameplay uses placeholders for the heroes, but it shows that the core mechanics of the game work. I'll start covering them more closely in the future, but for now I suggest you check out their upcoming state of the game stream on October 30th. I'll post their discord and twitch links in the comments so you guys can check it out. That's it for this month, folks. Exciting stuff across the board. However, we still don't have any firm dates. I know the wait is hard, and I know it seems like it's taking forever, but the alternative is smite. Fuck's smite. Man, goooo!