 What's up everybody, I'm TheBangooz, you are awesome and today I'm going to be covering everything I know about Metabuff and Core. I'll probably do one of these for all the games I cover, but we're going to start with Core. Right up front, if you have zero idea who Metabuff is and what Core is, then let's just get that out of the way. Metabuff is a company that is creating a sequel to Paragon using the free assets made available by Epic and they are calling the game Core. Now let's get started on everything I know about the company and the game. Before there was Metabuff, there were two companies trying to achieve pretty much the same thing. Brain Dead Games and Unleashed Games. Both were working towards the same goal and recruiting people from the same pool of talent. They decided to combine their efforts and begin working together. Around this time is when Unleashed brought Sylphon to the team. While I have no idea what kind of skills Sylphon has as a GDA, I do thank him as a generally trustworthy dude whose content I always enjoyed, so this step greatly increased my personal interest in the game. Before long the two companies completely merged into Metabuff. Metabuff officially incorporated on 5 September of 2018 in the state of Delaware. Along with the incorporation came the first big update from the company in the form of their 6 part proof of concept. This is when the hype train for Core really took off. Mainly due to this shot from the first video in the series in response to the ever present Will It Be On PS4 question. However, as I've stated many times, this isn't a guarantee that the game will come to PlayStation, it's simply proof that Metabuff agreed to Sony's terms and conditions. Still personally a little irked by the way this was presented. The first video also let us know that they intend to have 10,000 slots available for their alpha and they released the planned date which was April 27th of 2019. That day has of course come and gone that was a bit of a romantic deadline with it being a year from the date that Paragon closed. Metabuff was unable to meet this deadline with a product that they were confident in and decided to delay the alpha. It is currently unknown when the alpha will now be released. The rest of the proof of concept series turned out to be more of a proposal of concepts instead of a proof of concepts showing us some of the possible mechanics planned for the game. That isn't to say that they didn't prove anything, they did show us some of the work that they've done so far and a bit of insight into how they would be moving forward. The exception to this was the final video that covered the UI. This was arguably the truest proof of concept video where they showed us how they were designing the UI, why they were designing it that way and backed it up all with concrete data. You can no longer view the proof of concept videos that were taken down at the urging of another notch. I'll link the impressions of each video in the description below if that's something that interests you. The next major news from Metabuff was the Grayscale AB map testing. Several influencers in the community, content creators, competitive players, and other known members of the Paragon community were given access to two separate gray box maps created for Core. The goal was to get the opinions of not only which map was preferred but what features from both maps were good or bad. They allow people to create content about the map testing and then conducted surveys of not only their participants but also the general community. This gave everyone their first look at the ideas for the map and was a great way for Metabuff to gather community feedback. After the map testing core announced their proposed roster of 15 heroes scheduled for the alpha with an attempt to have three heroes for each role. I'm not going to call out the heroes at this time as the list has changed a few times but if you want to see what they have planned now for now you can head over to metabuff.com. The first change to the roster was replacing Revenant with Sparrow with the reasoning being that the community was asking for it. I did see many people calling for the inclusion of Sparrow at that time however the next change to the roster was a little off. They replaced FaZe and Kuang with Decker and Fengmiao. Again the reason provided was that the community had asked. While some community outcry may have factored in I personally think the real reason is that Decker and Fengmiao have an easier to implement ability set. This is the first inkling I got that the alpha probably was not going to be on schedule. That announcement was made a month prior to the April 27th deadline which is not enough time for them to onboard two new heroes. Metabuff then informed us that they had a wise license for sound engineering and would include multiple announcer packs for the game. They would also work on creating some interesting doppler effects and more ominous music for the jungle. We saw during the full map testing that they were indeed able to achieve some nice sound design. Then came the fully realized map tests. This is when the community got a real look at the design choices for Influencers were once again invited to use our girl Kalari to test out a concept map. This time it was one map with the assets fully implemented. Once again testers were encouraged to create content and share it with the community. This time however changes were made almost instantly. As many people pointed out various flaws with the map, Metabuff quickly updated things to accommodate what was perceived as solid critiques. They made changes to the prime dunk pit, adjusted lighting and added or removed geometry as necessary. Unfortunately this is when things started to go a bit south. Metabuff announced that they would not be able to release the alpha on the planned date of April 27th. Along with the announcement they showed us their planned UI that had some nice hidden nuggets of information such as a planned clan system, ranked mode and a ban system. But that was all overshadowed by the delayed alpha. Since then Metabuff has been rather quiet. They've provided very few updates and decided to focus on the game. We haven't been completely devoid of information though. They have since told us that they would be making more changes to the map based on information received from the map testing. Mid-May they let us know that they're well over 50% completion of the alpha. This is kind of a generalization. Some people say some people in the company said like 90% while others said about 60%. I decided to just go with well over 50%. They indicated that they have no more plans to swap the alpha roster and they showed us a video of Subrog using his abilities. So they aren't dead just laying low. My personal opinion of Metabuff has swayed back and forth quite a bit ever since learning about them all the way back when they were still separate companies. When they picked up Sylphen I was elated. However when I started for the minions my opinion for them dropped significantly due to a perceived lack of transparency. This was not their fault though. At the time I was relying on someone else to gather updates for Core and the problem was with them and not Metabuff. When I personally reached out to the company they were very friendly and forthcoming. I made a few negative statements about Core in some of the first episodes of my little show. I would like to apologize to Metabuff as a whole for that. The fault all that time was completely mine. The proof of concept also gave me a less than positive impression of the company and that one's kind of on them. There's good reason they took those videos down. The release of the AB map testing restored my faith in Metabuff. Not because of the work they had put into the map but because how they included the opinion of the entire community. This was reinforced with the full map testing. I also felt that the map was pretty damn good. I wasn't nearly as devastated as the rest of the community seemed to be with the announcement of the alpha delay. I kind of expected it in fact. They were making those roster changes like a month prior to the pro's release date. I just didn't think it was going to be possible to implement two brand new heroes in time to meet the April 20th of the deadline. I support their decision to push the alpha back. If they didn't take the game was in a state that will satisfy the community then you know work on it somewhere I get it that's fine. I actually applaud them for delaying the alpha. Currently though the lack of any significant updates some of the rather wonky ways they've resented information in the past and the fact that we haven't seen self and do anything correlated in a while has got my spirits to a low point per core. I will do my best to keep the faith though and keep sharing them on. Madeabuff has been able to restore my faith in the past and I really hope they could do so again. But for now this is the Magoo signing off. You stay classy Agora. MANGOOOOO