 What's up everybody on the mangos, you are awesome and Omega Studios has announced that Early Access for Predecessor will release on Steam and Epic Games Store on December 1st. Predecessor is a spiritual successor to Paragon, created with the assets released by Epic Games and distinguishes itself from the competition by stressing quality over quantity. The last Predecessor beta test that I've played were extremely well optimized with very fluid gameplay. Along with the Early Access trailer, we got a message from Robbie Singh who you may know better as RGSAs. While I'm extremely excited to get back into this game, I also have a few reservations regarding the announcement, mainly the Early Access packages that range in a discounted price of $10-40. Today I'll briefly break down where Predecessor is, what you can expect of the game, and talk about some of the problems I have with the recent announcement. Soon after Paragon went offline, Epic announced that they would release millions of dollars worth of assets for free. There was a bit of a scramble as several different people began attempting to use these assets to remake Paragon. Among these developers was a very small team headed by Sargeant Smoky that called themselves Omeda Studios, a comparatively small crew in the Paragon landscape of the time, but made up of highly skilled individuals. While most of the community was gravitating towards Medabuff's remake called Core, Omeda Studios made early waves by bringing on RGSAs as their game designer who later became their CEO. They announced their first alpha test in March of 2019 and while they did deliver on the promise test, it was clear that they had a long way to go before they had a fully functional game. That's perfectly fine, that's what an alpha test is for. More importantly, Core, the biggest competition for support at that time, not only failed to release an alpha test on the promise date, but also went radio silent, leaving the para-refugee community with one game to turn to, Predecessor. Omeda Studios has grown significantly as a company since then, even in the face of relative newcomers to the Paragon remake craze Fault and Overprime. While Fault has come and gone and Overprime is actually going stronger than ever, Predecessor has still managed to successfully earn the respect and monetary support of multiple investors. They also received a grant from Epic Games Mega Grants program, however many people mistakenly believed that meant that Omeda was backed by Epic. They had a very successful beta test, followed by a very unsuccessful test, that exposed some weaknesses in their back-end management. Omeda used some of the funding they received to hire a third-party company to fix all of that and finally released their most recent beta that was massively successful. And that brings you up to speed with their most recent announcement that they will begin early access on December 1st. What you can expect from Predecessor is quality. I did several videos comparing Predecessor, Fault and Overprime and you could tell that their character movement is far more fluid in Predecessor, targeting for a range of different abilities is extremely intuitive, the field of view more closely aligns with what we remember from Paragon, and the map is not only extremely beautiful, but fringe optimizes it incredibly well. Omeda has also migrated Predecessor to Unreal Engine 5 to take advantage of all the upgrades it has to offer now and in the future. They address something that is very important to the community, controller support and console release. Early access will not only have controller support, but will also include aim assist. This is a big development and a step towards console which is of course the most important step for many Paragon fans. They also announced that when the game does come to console, it will be cross-platform just like Paragon was. Early access will have a total of 20 heroes to choose from initially with an additional 5 being added one hero at a time every month. Those heroes include Drongo, Fingmeow, The Fey, Gadget, Gideon, Howitzer, Kalari, Chimera, Bellica, Murdoch, Muriel, Narbash, Rampage, Severog, Sparrow, Steel, Grux, Richter, Decker and Crunch. They also showed a quick snippet of their own original hero, Huntress. I do have my reservations with Huntress though, in both appearance and abilities She looks like a direct rip-off of Valla from Heroes of the Storm. Now I love Hots and I understand that mobile abilities will often be similar to each other, but Huntress is just straight up Valla in a third person environment. I don't know if I dig that or not. In addition to the 5v5 map, they will also have a testing map to try out different heroes and builds. Unfortunately there are also a few things not to expect. There will be no Rank Mode, I'm fine with that but I know it's a feature that many people want. They'll also have no form of progression, either account level progression or hero level progression. I never thought that this was all that important but it really is something that keeps people returning to the game to get just one more level, so I'd like to see them add that in. There will not be an in-game shop, which I assume means no option to buy skins. In-game monetization is key to the longevity of any multiplayer game that requires constant multiple servers going around the clock, and I'm honestly a bit shocked at not only the absence of a shop, but the absence of any Omega original skins. Now we'll get into what I disliked about the announcement. The early access will be paid, which I'm absolutely fine with. However, the packages they offer are a bit confusing. Each package comes with access to all the early access heroes, which is very nice, but you also get coins for a shop that doesn't exist and recolored epic asset skins. Most of the community, including me, gave Strange Matter a ton of shit for their early access pricing, but predecessors pricing is almost exactly the same. The big differences are that Fault didn't give you all of the heroes for their lowest tier package, however they did offer a few original skins and currency that can actually be used. The other problem I have is that predecessors doesn't live in a vacuum, they have a major competitor in the form of Paragon the Overprime who has stated that their early access releasing a week after predecessors will be free. With that being said, I'm sure Overprime will have microtransactions to fund their game, however the choice to either pay upfront or pay later via microtransactions, if you choose to even pay for those, is being offered to the consumer and I'm willing to bet that more new players that have never played Paragon are going to gravitate towards the free option. Stay tuned to my channel for my overall pros and cons of Overprime's final beta test if you want to learn more about that game. My biggest concern with this announcement and launch is that they are currently releasing the game in a state that they themselves are unhappy with due to the constraints they set upon themselves by announcing early access this year and the pressure of Overprime releasing their final beta test and early access also this year. I feel this is evidenced by the inclusion of currency in the early access packages without a shop, I certainly think they never intended to release the game in any state without account or hero progression to keep players invested. Furthermore, the lack of predecessor developed skins points to a lack of a future stable monetization plan. I started this journey of tracking Omedia Studios when they were very young and the company was extremely close with the community, however the comparative lack of consistent communication in the last year gives me core vibes while the half-baked monetization gives me fault vibes. I truly 100% hope that I'm wrong. The strength of Predecessor comes from its core gameplay and it seems that is what they are staking the future success of the project on. It's not a bad play either. As I mentioned before, Predecessor is by far the smoothest, most fluid and beautiful Paragon remake that I've played. Like the video if you enjoyed it, sub for more 3rd person mobile content, but for now this is the man goose signing off, you guys have a good one. Man Goose!