 What's up everybody I'm the Mangus you were awesome and today we're going to be talking about the predecessor Alpha. If you somehow don't know, Predecessor is a Paragon Resurrection project in development by Omega Studios and they recently had their first closed Alpha session since their original outing in March of 2019. The community's reaction to the Alpha was overwhelmingly positive and for good reason. The game looked and felt great. You've probably already heard me extolling the virtues of Predecessor via my weekly updates. I do have some critiques to share. Mainly that the game wasn't as complete as I thought it would be. I know that sounds like an odd complaint for an Alpha State game, but this is the second Alpha for Predecessor and they've been working on it for a while now. I'll talk more about that later. I'm going to break this down into three sections. First I'll talk through what I liked about the game, then I'll move on to balance and why I think it wasn't as big of a problem as many believe it to be. Finally, I'll cover some of the things I felt could use some improvement as well as some of the bugs I encountered. As always, I hope this video was helpful and informative. If you enjoyed this video, please consider hitting that like button. If you enjoyed my content, please consider subscribing and share this information with a new one you think could benefit from it. I've said many times in the past that many of these Paragon remakes are lacking some ephemeral hard to define quality that Paragon had. I still find it hard to articulate what that X factor is, but I do know that Predecessor has it. While I did have difficulty learning the item system at first, the rest of the game felt like getting right back on that horse. I had zero difficulty playing whatever hero I had selected. I never felt like I was having to learn new tricks. Playing well or playing poorly seemed like a direct reflection of my skill as opposed to a lack of game knowledge. I felt, I don't know, comfortable. Doing certain things in Predecessor just felt natural, like using audio cues in the jungle to know that the enemy Gideon had not yet unlocked his portal, it would make for an easy kill. It felt great to use Mardak's long arm as a support tool to turn the tides of battle from across the map instead of just stealing a kill. Something I used to take pride in doing in Paragon. Hell, just building full attack speed, Fing Meow, knowing full well it wasn't optimal and letting it rip anyway was a blast. Hit registration was absolutely on point, getting a different sound effect for a hit or a miss not only helped with immersion but it also flat out assisted with gameplay. It worked the other way as well, you knew when you were getting hit and after playing for a bit you could tell who or what was hitting you. The towers actually felt scary at the beginning of the match, something that Paragon was certainly lacking, but they weren't so overwhelming as to prevent a good coordinated dive after a few minutes in. PvE objectives like Fangtooth and Ore Prime were placed well on the map and were appropriately rewarding to take. Character speed seemed slow at first, but with the layout and size of the map, I think movement was balanced well. The overall speed at which you gained golden experience was the same way. It felt like slow going at first, but once I was a few games in, my opinions changed. The overall progression is balanced well towards keeping games to around 30-40 minutes. Now let's talk about hero balance. I'm going to go through some gameplay tips here because that's what just kind of turned into as I was writing it out. First and foremost, I don't expect perfect balance from an alpha state game. Heroes need to be just balanced enough so that people can play the game in a way that it's meant to be played without one hero just ruining the experience and I think predecessors achieved that. Many people will disagree with that statement, however I think a lot of the perceived imbalances were due more to a lack of player knowledge than actual overpowered or underpowered kits and numbers. For example, many people thought that Murdock and Sparrow were far too powerful. They were overtuned, I'm not going to sit here and tell you that they weren't stupid strong, however it wasn't as bad as people say. I saw many players taking ADCs into mid or off lane, hell I even saw a jungle sparrow that worked, but just because that worked doesn't mean the hero is overpowered. If there is a sparrow in the mid or off lane and your jungler doesn't crush their soul the second they step close to the middle of the lane, well that's on your jungler. Of course Murdock with his shots fired ability is going to out poke and out push in the off lane or mid lane if you just let him. Kind of related to this, but another thing that I saw way too much of was junglers initiating a gank with their movement ability. If you ambush into Gideon, he's just going to portal away, reaping dash into a Murdock and he will just buckshot and back up. If you're going to gank a lane, just run up from behind, beat on whoever it is a bit until they use their escape and then use ambush to catch up to them. Another thing that made ADCs seem far more powerful than they were was people were taking the duo into the wrong lane. In predecessor, the duo lane is the one closest to Fangtooth, which is represented by a yellow dot on the map. You take the duo here so that your sport can easily go ward the raptor pit and then come back and support the ADC. And if you happen to dominate your lane then both of you can quickly rotate over and take out Fangtooth. What I saw happen though was duos going in the opposite lanes, leaving a duo vs solo lane. This would leave the off laner to get his or her shit pushed in and then the duo could just take Fangtooth repeatedly. The other duo on the other side of the map, they also pushed someone shit in, but they gained little from it as the option on their side was orb prime, and you're not going to take orb prime in the early game. Another hero I saw a lot of talk about was Severog. People either said he was too strong or too weak. I sighed with the camp that says he's probably a bit overtuned. I think people thought he was too squishy because folks were building full damage on Sev and then getting absolutely wrecked in teamfights. If you have no health or armor on Sev then you're just a big ass target for the enemy team to feast upon. However, if you went with a full tank build, your size became an asset that allowed you to block for your team while still dishing out a significant amount of damage as long as you had plenty of stacks. Those stacks are the reason that I think he may have been overtuned. All you had to do for stacks was last hit. It didn't matter if it was soul siphon or a basic attack. As long as you last hit, you got your stacks. As a result, Severog, always a late game beast, came online a bit too early. He was already just ghosting around doing whatever the fuck you wanted by mid game as long as you built tanky. I don't think they need to restrict stacks to siphon, but I do think they should bring it back to only ability last hits giving him stacks. Now for the problems I had when playing. These are all things that can of course be fixed over time, but if we don't bring them up they won't know to fix it. As I mentioned at the start, the game didn't feel as complete as I thought it would be. This applies not only to gameplay, but to expected features as well. For example, there was no chat functionality during the draft pick. In my opinion, this is where you truly need to be able to speak to your team. In-game communication can be handled via the ping system, but when choosing your team comp, you need to be able to let people know what you're comfortable with playing. Not massively important during an alpha, but I did find myself, several times, wanting to tell people to just pick what they want. If you want to go mid lane muriel, have that at my friend, it's an alpha. Explore your options and have fun. But I couldn't tell people that, there was no chat feature there. There also wasn't any kind of social feature for adding friends. I think this ended up being more of a blessing than a curse. Not being able to team up meant that you didn't have coordinated streamer 5 stacks just straight ruining games for everyone else. However, it also meant that I couldn't add people that I enjoyed playing with. You get into a rhythm when you queue and end up playing with or against the same people a lot. Shout out to the Coloradan and his friend Statefan. Both skilled and positive players would have liked to have added them as friends so that I could at least see when they were on, but that functionality wasn't there. As far as gameplay goes, there were no jungle buffs. No red or blue buff, nor was there a green buff like Paragon eventually had. The end result was a jungling experience that was nowhere near as dynamic or engaging as it was in Paragon. There were river buffs, but they only gave movement speed and mana regen. Nothing fun like stealth, ability damage, or damage over time effect. One complaint that seemed to be pretty common was the field of view seemed very close to the hero, made for some odd targeting and sometimes you would get stuck on an outcropping of rock, but you wouldn't be able to see what the hell you were stuck on because the camera was right in the back of your head. The gravity in the game seemed a little light as well. I liked it when running, having a little give and take when starting or stopping added weight and momentum to the heroes, but anytime you left the ground, I mean, I know we're on a Gora and not Earth, but jumping off a ledge with any hero felt like you had picked Luigi and Super Mario Brothers 2. It was especially apparent when getting hit with Severog's colossal blow. I would see him wind up for that shit and be like, well, I'm gonna go take a fucking nap, wake me up when I hit the ground. As far as bugs go, I didn't encounter many. I did teleport beneath the map once with Feng Miao. I also had trouble with abilities like Subjugate or Cosmic Rift not firing off sometimes if part of the reticle was in a wall. I saw a few instances of minions either attacking nothing or stopping on certain parts of the map for no reason, but hell, Epic never really completely solved minion AI, so I think that's to be expected from time to time. All in all, this outing for predecessor was a massive improvement over the last. The game was just good old-fashioned fun. I found myself thinking about how I could improve item builds while I was at work and immediately logged on when I got home and queued for game after game. Those in the community that were fortunate enough to get a key had great things to say about the game and those who could only watch seem to enjoy it as well. Omeda's studio still has a long road ahead of them, but they laid out a great foundation to build upon. I hope to eventually see all of you, including you console players, back in Agora soon. For now, this is the Mangoo signing off. You guys, have a good one. Mangooos!