 What's up everybody I'm the Mangus, you are awesome and today we're going to talk about the game demo for Over Prime that was held by Soul Leaf and streamed by Sarah Jog. I'll link his twitch in the video description if you want to go check out the full games. There was a lot of surprises in this stream. Faze was added in, which I didn't know had happened. Many of the heroes had altered or completely changed abilities. All of your basic abilities were unlocked at the beginning of the match. The portal from the teaser video that warps you from one side of the map to the other was in play. The towers had a new and kind of interesting design and there were less towers per lane. They also premiered their new update video that can be found on YouTube with a tease at what I originally thought was like a brand new hero, but I'm pretty sure it was just Yen with a skin. Not that Yen being added isn't exciting. I love me some Yen. It would be weird to see a new hero at this point I think. I think people like take Wraith for example. If you introduced like a completely brand new hero design before you did Wraith there would be so many Wraith fans just irate and pissed off so I think it would probably be a mistake, but I am kind of looking forward to seeing some new hero designs from just any of these companies. Damn went off on a little bit of a tangent there. There were a ton of changes that could easily be missed if you were distracted by how gorgeous the new map looks, so I'm going to go through and break it down while offering some of my opinions. Before we begin, for those of you who don't know, Over Prime is a spiritual successor to Paragon in development by Soul Eve. While some people are able to play, most of us currently cannot. They do plan for Steam release relatively soon with console release at an unknown time after that. Over Prime is being published by Netmarble and they have insisted that the hero names be changed, so if you're looking at Bellica and it says Ellen, well that's why. A lot of people have been given Soul Eve shit for changing the names, but it's not a decision that's really in their hands. And also, who the fuck's going to use these new names? Nobody's actually, it doesn't matter what they name because I don't care what you name Bellica, I'm still going to call her Bellica. I don't care what you call name Murdock, I'm still going to call him Murdock. So let's talk about the heroes and the kits. They played, I believe, three games and we got the point of view of Kalari, Murdock and FaZe. A big change for Murdock was instead of his static trap, he instead had a fucking rocket launcher attached to his back predator style and it fired a volley of homing missiles at the target. It looked to work much the same way as Revenant's old Q, but they didn't pierce terrain. It was a lock-on and there were multiple instances of damage flying out there, but at least it didn't go through walls. It was fucking people up in the lane, but it was kind of often dodged in the jungle by like a thing that would just kind of scarred around a wall or something and it would just hit the terrain. We already talked about the Kalari changes in the last Over Prime video I did, so I'll just say that much of what I said seemed a little true. Her ult was great for 1v1 fights, but sucked in a teamfight, and the new Shadow Slip type ability that replaced her double jump kind of turned her into Chimera. You have to fully commit with Kalari because there's no backflipping over wall and slinking away anymore. FaZe seemed to work exactly as she did in Paragon Days. She still had her ADC leash to jerk people out of danger, the long-range beam slow was there, and her blind was in effect with the more of a blur of your screen than a blackout, which I kind of liked. I wasn't able to really get a feel for it if any of the other heroes in the game had alternate abilities. I will say that Revenant seemed a bit undertuned compared to Murdoch. I made the joke that they should have changed his name to Revacant. I don't really expect proper balance from a game demonstration though, I just wanted to see the game in action. Balance could come later. Now some of the major changes. You start the game with all of your abilities unlocked, well not your ultimate, everything but your ultimate. This very much reminds me of how Heroes of the Storm is. In fact, much of what Soul Leaf has done with Overprime reminds me of Hots. I'm cool with it, I love Hots, but Heroes is more of a brawler than a MOBA and I'm not sure if that's what Soul Leaf wants. Another very Hots-like aspect is the way Orb Prime works. This isn't new to Overprime, but I'm guessing many of you don't know that the Prime Dunk mechanic is back. However, when you dunk the Orb, the Prime Ball spawns in mid and pushes your lane for you. That's very reminiscent of how marked camps work in Hots. Something else that isn't new but is worth mentioning is Travel Mode. Overprime brought Travel Mode back to the game. There didn't seem to be any kind of punishment for being knocked out of it and there was like a wind up time before you could enter Travel Mode. The portals that they added to the side lanes functioned like I expected they would by obeying the laws of Pac-Man. You could Zerp from one side and then Zerp back over to the other. Soul Leaf seems to be very focused on making the game faster and here's where my problem lies with a lot of these changes. I don't care if they make the game faster, I think it's good that there are options out there for people more interested in that style of gameplay. However, I think some of the systems they've implemented will actually slow the game down. Travel Mode, for example. You would think that increasing character movement speed would only serve to speed the game up, but we saw the problem with that in Legacy Paragon. Being able to zoom out of your spawn after death means it's harder for a team on the offense to capitalize on team fights. What you want to do after you get a few people down is group up and take down a tower or capture a major objective like Prime, but Travel Mode makes people more hesitant to do so. To clear minions and attack the tower, you have to use regular movement while the enemy team is going to come flying at you from every direction in Travel Mode. Then you have leapfrogging, the process by which you keep someone from retreating by having one person use Travel Mode to get ahead and attack while the other person enters Travel Mode to leap ahead and do the same. It's very punishing to anyone trying to split push. A smart split pusher knows when to turn tail and run, but with leapfrogging Travel Mode, it's impossible, so you're less likely to split push for a game ending play. The same goes for these portals on the sides of the map. A common strategy is raise some hell on duo lane so your offlaner can push without having to worry as much about ganks. Even if you lose the teamfight in duo lane, you still get value from off lane. Can't do that anymore. The enemy team will just charge through the portal and thrash the offlaner. I think these portals will actually slow the game down once people get a better feel for the game because they'll be less likely to try and push that off lane. Overall, I was very impressed by many of the improvements Soul Eve has made. The animations were very well done, the map looked fantastic, the game menus and UI were awesome, they also retained many of the good things that set them apart from the other pairs on me like a much larger hero roster, multiple maps, and multiple game modes. There are some things I didn't like though. The particle effects need to be toned down a bit. Sometimes the teamfights look like the 4th of July with all the explosions, lights, camera shake, and like a billion different numbers and status notifications showing up. In the past, I've always felt that the cons for overprime outweighed the pros, but they've slowly reversed that. The current state of overprime is one where the good qualities greatly outweigh the bad. Hopefully, we'll see this one on Steam soon. We'd love to see it on console too, but one step at a time. Until then, I'll be keeping my eye on overprime and I suggest you do too. I hope you enjoyed the video, if you did hit that like button for me, but for now, this is the mangu signing off, you guys have a good one.