 Hello everyone and welcome back to episode 43 of For the Minions, the weekly show where we track some of the third-person mobas out there on the horizon. I'm your host, TheMangus. Joining me as always is the magnificent Mandy Mal. How are you doing, Mandy? You know me. I'm just magnificent. Doing great. I'm excited because we have another good show and another special guest host with us. We have Pusey. How are you? Thanks. I'm doing good. Thanks for having me. Oh, of course. So why don't you tell us your history with Paragon, favorite hero, all that good stuff. Okay then. I started, I think, the second close beta week in the alpha. I wish I got the first place, but yeah. I'm usually main jungler. Oh, you guys got in so early. I got in so late. I feel bad. How do you think I feel? I got to play for nine months before I could go down. You didn't even get to play Legacy, poor Mandy. Check out, if you haven't seen it already, check out Pusey's hoodie there. That's pretty awesome, but we noticed that earlier. Oh, I wish I had Paragon merch. It hurts. It hurts so bad. I have none. I have zero. This was all I bought, but it's so comfortable. That's not what I heard about the hats. Rupa said that the hats that they gave out to people that visited are absolutely terrible. Like a metal plate bolted onto a trucker cap. But he's a Paragon merch. I would still wear it. You'd absolutely wear it. Right on. Let's hit right on into the news and updates, and Omeda kind of brought the heat this week with quite a few things that they were talking about. First and foremost was Fringe's map update. I didn't have time to get into it last week, but holy crap. I took a look at it. He's building assets and just he's building it in one area of the map for now. We're just testing, but it's very close, very similar in appearance to the tutorial map that was on Paragon. I don't know if you guys remember that tutorial map, but it was a beautiful map. I think the first time we got to see it was Sareth's hero reveal. That wasn't the first time we got to see it, but that's the first time I think a lot of people took notice of it with Sareth's hero reveal. Everybody was like, is that a new map? What is that? No, it was just a tutorial map, but there's a lot of cool stuff going on there. Pusy, you took a look at it. What did you think of that little area that he made inside the map? It looked gorgeous. Yeah, incredibly well detailed. The water coming out and all the little stone pillars and everything. Yeah, it's really detailed. Yeah. I think that they were saying that 50% of the assets now are built by fringe. Even though they look like Epic's assets, they look like they belong in Paragon. They're actually assets that Fringe created himself to lower the burden on people's computers as they're playing. They're doing some amazing stuff over at Omeda. Mandy, did you get a chance to check out that stream? I did. I checked it out actually a couple of times just to go back and really look at everything. I think it's just so great that they're thinking about people with not top of the line computers. Some people might even be buying computers just to play predecessors. They're probably just getting what they can afford to run it. I think that's amazing that they are thinking of people that way with the assets, building the assets that way. Fringe is just so talented. It looks amazing. It's very, very detailed like you guys were saying. Yeah, it's very pretty. I was blown away. I was like, oh my god. It was the nice, colorful look of Monolith with the legacy appearance if you get what I'm saying. Sort of. Yeah, I get it. Yeah. Some other stuff that they did, they provided some real-time screen adjustments for brightness and contrast and saturation and that sort of thing. As we were talking about earlier, it seems like their graphic options page is going to be four pages long by the time they're done adding stuff on. But it is nice to have those options there. It's just all in all a good thing. You can't really complain about more options when it comes to customizing your gameplay experience. Do you guys have anything? Yeah, go ahead, Mandy. That's nothing but good news for the players. Anytime you're given customization, I think it's a good thing. No one's going to argue with that, I would think and I would hope. Peezy, you were saying you would want to adjust the saturation a bit, right? Yeah, I'd like to change up the colors of the games. Yeah. And I hope they're going to implement something like having Smite where you can adjust the UI as you wish. Oh yeah, that would be really nice. I know Cora was talking about that a long time ago, was having an adjustable UI. I don't know if that's been considered with predecessor yet or not, but that would be really, really nice. If nothing else, I want to be able to adjust my targeting reticle. I didn't like that Paragon, you were stuck with the one. I always liked the little circle one and then they gave us a different one and I didn't like it. I don't think a lot of people did. No they didn't, but they would not give us the option to change it. Such a small thing. Yeah. That wouldn't have broke them. They were too busy putting targeting reticles into Fortnite. Something else friends showed off was snow on the map, which looked incredible. I kind of missed out on the big snow event. That's kind of when I had stopped playing. I stopped playing for a couple months there for a while because I was just a little disillusioned with the game with version 43. I had never really played in that snow environment, but God, did it look good on predecessor's map? Holy shit. Did you play during the snow? Mandy and Pusey, did you guys play during that time? I didn't. I'm same as you. I had already kind of given up on it. I didn't play maybe one or two games, but I don't think nothing that I can really recall. No, I didn't a year. I had like a break in model if after a while because I got bored of it. Yes. It wasn't the same, especially with some item being overpowered, I guess. Yeah. Yeah. That was a lot of my problem with that new card system. It just turned some heroes into just absolute unstoppable beasts. The one thing that you could counter them with was thorned Yomi, and then that didn't work half the time when they kept removing it from the games. I was like, God damn. Anyway, I know one thing. Oh, go ahead. Oh, sorry. I was just going to say, I know one thing that kind of popped into my head and maybe a couple other people's heads when they saw the snow map. Does that mean that maybe we'll get the alpha in time to use it? Perhaps. I don't know if anybody else thought of that, but I was like, hmm. I didn't think of that. That's a good observation. Maybe coming in. Meteor. I'm probably grasping at straws here, but you know. Yeah. I mean, you're just giving the fans false hope. Yeah, that's all I'm here to do. Putting undue pressure on Omega Studios. That's just exactly what I'm here to do. That's what I am here for, my friends. Just some harmless predictions. That's fine. The other thing that we're talking about was using replication graph for network optimization. Puzi and I were talking about it earlier. Puzi, you want to go ahead and see if you can explain it? Well, let me feed the guest to the fire. Well, like a minion, they have a certain radius around them where every player pings to them. And if they're within the graph range, you will see the minion. And if you outside your own. And wars and allies will help with seeing outside that radius of yourself, I guess. That's basically it. It's a tool they use in Fortnite to keep games from not being so damn laggy with like 100 people playing at once. It basically just tracks the stuff around you and only shows you what you need to see. Like if there's minions all the way across the map in another lane that you're not going to be able to even interact with at all, then you're just not going to see them. They're not going to register on your computer. Whereas normally, they would be there even though you don't see them. They would be, you know, taking up some space on your map. That isn't to say that you can't interact with them. If you whip out Murdoch's long dong, whip it across the map and you hit some minions, it's going to show up. I mean, it's not going to be like they're completely gone because everything's going to have its own sort of replication graph. Don't basically sell for you. Yeah. Yeah. That's a good way outside the range. Yeah. That's a good way of putting it. Yeah. I like that. I like that. It's kind of a weird thing. Like Smokey posted a video and it was like a fucking hour long and I was like, Yeah. Basically, it's what we just said. It's just a way to lower your lag. In the end, that's all it does is lower your lag and that's a good thing because that's one of the things that has plagued predecessors since they released their closed alpha. Yeah. One thing I was wondering about though is if you're on a long lane and you want to use your ult across the lane, will you be able to see it if you used ult or is it still zoned out? I don't know. Do you mean like for Muriel to use her ult on another hero that's outside of her? Maybe like if you, I don't know, for some reason, want to ult the wave as Murdoch. Oh yeah. I think so. I think that the if it gets zoned out when you ult. Yeah. I think the actual projectile itself has its own replication graph attached to it. Yeah. So it'll detect things as it flies. At least I hope that's how it works. It would suck if you just couldn't. Yeah, right? If you can't see anything. If you can't ult the enemy's core with Murdoch and win the game, then what's the point of playing Murdoch? It's the point of even playing. Always a good time when you could do that. Or just all still the, well, every single young creep. If you see them, you're like, okay, they're starting now. They're five people. Let's say 20 seconds and I ult. They hope to see them. So any final thoughts on meta studios and predecessor, Fusey? Not really. Just that the windbap looks awesome and I like it. Mandy, anything? No, I'm just excited. I think they're doing a good work over there. Cool beans. Let's move on to Aetherial. We haven't received them yet at the time that we're recording, but Grognarch's voice lines should be out and I should have them patched into the video. So we'll go ahead and listen to those right now. Smaller creatures used to shrivel in my shadow. Now they own the land it falls upon. Mortals forget the wrath of nature, the anger of the earth. I will make them remember I was once a mountain, big, strong. Now I'm a pebble, small, afraid. We don't, we didn't get to listen to those voice lines ourselves, but I'm sure they're going to be good. I don't want to sit here and pretend like I listened to them because maybe they're not. Maybe they're not good, but I'm sure they will be. All their voice lines have been absolutely outstanding. And Fusey, whenever I asked who you wanted for the thumbnail, you gave me an option of Aron or Grognarch. And you did say that you're a jungler, so those seem to be the ones that you're sort of... Yeah, and I like the aspect of if you can cut down a tree and build a bridge to float in jungle and stuff like that. Yeah, hopefully that's the point. It would also be cool if, whenever you destroy that stuff, if you could deal damage with it somehow, like if you could drop a tree on top of somebody. They didn't say if that was going to be possible or not, but man, that would be cool. You see someone run away and you cut down a tree and kill them. That would be amazing. They need to put timber in their voice lines. But yeah, Grognarch and Aron both berserkers, kind of the ground junglers, not the skunglers as these Sky Slayers are, but there will be an item that will allow everybody to fly. Really? Oh yeah, that's what... Problem is that... That's something they talked about a very long time ago. When I very first started talking to them, that was one of my main concerns is like, if you have a Sky Jungle and Sky Slayers, then every team is going to have to have a Sky Slayer, and that's going to be limiting. And they were like, no, there's going to be an item that you can pick up out of the item shop so that anybody can fly just like a Sky Jungler for a short period of time. Cool. I wonder if you can have the same as the Bruiser, cut down trees and stuff. If they start, I don't know that too. I don't know, that would be weird, right? Yeah, kind of, but the Sky Slayer is passive, it's going to be me if everyone can have it, but they still have to pay though, but yeah. I think it's like a cooldown and it's only for a short period of time though, so it's not like constantly fly like the Sky Slayer can. The other thing coming out of ethereal is the online polls. They've been doing polls kind of like I've been doing, trying to put their feelers out to get an idea of who the community is looking forward to the most. I think this is an excellent idea for my marketing standpoint because they need to have their poster child, their poster boy or their poster girl to really lead the game in marketing. So I think this is a good way they can figure out who people are looking forward to the most. Did you guys see those polls? Those polls are kind of hard to miss sometimes. Yeah, I missed them. Too bad. Yeah, I voted in both of them. There was two that I saw and I voted for my... Who'd you vote for? Nikolai and Malware. Wrong and wrong. Wrong and wrong, yes, I know. It should have been Malaya and Malaya. She wasn't in both polls. It was Malaya and Asheron, those are the correct answers. Oh, that's right. I forgot about... Well, Malaya's already kind of set up to be their poster girl a little bit, but Dante really kind of overtook her. I think it seems that Dante and Malware, as far as I can see, are probably the two most popular characters out right now. There are a lot of people like Pusey here who really like the idea of Grogdark and Aron. Yeah, but they're probably not going to get to shine though. Poor little fellas. Poor little guys. They're like the biggest characters. Biggest in the background. Yeah, all right. Who was Paragon's poster child? I always... Everybody has a different answer for this. I always thought it was Steel, but I don't know. Who do you guys think? I feel like Steel was kind of out in front in a lot of their promotion... Well, promotional, haha. They didn't really put out too much promotional stuff, but anytime you... Like the trailers and stuff, he was very prominent in them. I saw a lot of Twin Blast in this screenshot, so in the beginning, at least. Then the PS4 trailer came out. It was like Steelie. I think, I don't quite remember. Yeah, I always remember that first commercial, like the last thing you saw was Steel coming in with the Shields. Not only that, he just threw the Shield aside, like jumped at the screen or something. Like, wasn't even in the game, but... Yeah, I always felt it was Steel. I know a lot of people are gonna say otherwise. Yeah, I think like you said, everybody has a different answer. Yeah, which is fine. But my bro's rampage was when they were way too busy. None of my characters. All right, so let's move on now. Well, actually, no, let me back up. Let me back up. You got anything you want to say about Ethereum before we roll on? I'm just... I'm amazed how good everything sounds, it looks, and I can't be more excited. Once that gameplay comes out, though, that's when people are really gonna... That's when everything's gonna really ramp up. Let's move on now to the other games, Metabuff and Phoenix Rising. We got nothing from them this week. Again, some more rumblings out of Metabuff, but I still haven't gotten anything concrete. So once I do, I'll let you guys know. And Phoenix Rising, they're still just working away back there doing their thing. Hopefully... I don't think we'll see anything out of them this year, but maybe next year we'll see something. I'm still gonna continue tracking them. They were the first ones to step up and pick up that Paragon Torch and start carrying it forward. So I think we owe it to them to keep them in our hearts and minds and not forget about them because they didn't forget about us. I kind of miss them, though, because I really enjoyed their jungle style. Yeah, with all the mushrooms and everything. And their bigger jungle boys, Boss, looked really detailed when they created it. That big Kaiju-looking motherfucker, I forgot about that. He looked pretty sick. Yeah. But if you guys want to learn any more about these games, I'll have all of their socials that I can linked in the video description below. But we're going to move it along now to my poll results, the ones that I've been doing, which is the ultimate, ultimate competition, who you guys thought had the best ultimate. And this week was Sev, and it was Sevrog and Gideon. Gideon won with 75% of the votes. Sevrog, of course, had 25%. Not really surprising to me. I do think Sevrog was a better overall character, but I think Gideon's ultimate was probably a little more impactful, especially when they attached a stun to it. But yeah, Gideon will face off against Aurora next week in the final showdown to find out who you guys thought had the best ultimate in Paragon. So, Puzi, who do you think, Sevrog or Gideon, as far as the best ultimate? I think Gideon, but several goals could kill, maybe one or two, but Gideon's, you could wipe out the entire team. If the placement was good and you had good setup, yeah, definitely. If you have like a Gideon jumping from behind, ulting and then still jumps in. Yeah. Yeah. Or a gadget ulting that or whatever. I think Gideon's required a lot more thought and setup and everything like that, but definitely in the long run was more impactful. I am a little surprised at the difference between them, though. I really thought Sev that it would be a close one between these guys, but... And Sevrog's was on a much shorter cooldown, so that gave it a little bit of an edge. But yeah, I think when we're talking about impactful ultimates like the big game-winning plays, it was hardly ever a colossal blow. However, it was oftentimes a good black hole. So, I think I like the results of this time around. Now it is time for the topic of discussion for this week and the topic of discussion. We'll be talking about how other spells from other games that we feel would be nice to be imported into any of these games. Predecessor, Core, Phoenix Rising, Ethereal, and then also how different spells could interact on Ethereal's weird sort of map structure. So, that's a... Puzi and I were talking about it a little bit. So, since I know Mandy's not prepared, Mandy, what do you think? I actually am prepared, thank you very much. So, as far as like spells that I would like to see, I don't play a lot of spellcaster type heroes, so I'm not... I don't have an answer for that. But for spells that I would like to see or how they should function or could function on the layered map, the main two things that came to my mind would be for like vision, which I know there's wards, but maybe it could be a certain type of like knock knock who's there and all that. There we go. You know, maybe there could be a spell that gave you a little extra vision on the different layers of the map, like say you have to go to the top one, but you can still see what's going on in the middle one or whatever, something like that. And then also travel, just getting from one layer to the next maybe a little more quickly, but not in an overpowered way, which I don't know how that could be balanced. It's not my job. That's not my job to balance that out. I will leave that to the capable hands of the developers, but those were the two things that kind of came to my mind was just vision and travel and how that would be kind of fun to have a spell that could help. I think something like Kalari's vision would work, you know, whenever she revealed everybody on the map. That's true. Something that could do that team-wide would be really nice for a theory, I think. Yeah, that would be... I still don't know how they're going to do their mini-map. It's going to be a weird one. Yeah, I haven't thought about but yeah. How to make it good. The only way I could think is if you put like a little like indicator by the person's face on the mini-map as to what level they're on. Yeah. But then if they're in between levels, how would you indicate that? Or if they're jungle? Yeah. Yeah, I have no idea what they're going to do. It will be interesting though. Maybe we can get a little sneak peek at that sometime. I know the developers are watching, so... So, Pusey, what did you think? Yeah, it's like some character are built from other MOBAs. I think like... I don't know if you played Hero Heroes of the Storm. There's a guy called Shugal and then there's two people in one character and how that would work. One guy is still staring and the other is like a mage inside. That would seem like something that Ethereal would implement too. That's something that any of the games get implemented down the road after they're done putting all the heroes that people want to see in there and they start designing their own. Something Shugal-ish would be really cool. Special Ethereal, because it's 6v6. Shugal's a pain in the ass to deal with too if you don't know what you're doing. Because that is a ton of health and a lot of damage coming out of... That's another thing though. You really got to trust the person that you're playing with. Like if one person is controlling the movement, the other person is controlling most of the damage. You really got to put your faith in each other's hands there. And you might screw up if one guy dashes in one way and the other guy uses spells that way. Once he gets killed, it's a 2 for 1 really. Two people out of the fight. I could definitely see Ethereal doing that though. Another, here's the storm tie-in, that's kind of what I think that the overseers are going to be doing or going to be kind of like Avatar where he puts his top hat. If you guys don't know who Avatar is, he puts his own little thing that he controls on top of somebody's head and then he can fire from them like they're a tower. The movement is completely based on them and then his body is elsewhere on the map and then he can also set various traps around the map without ever moving around the map. I think that's kind of what an overseer would be. I don't know, I had talked to Owen about that and Owen had no idea who Avatar was. They obviously didn't take inspiration from him. It's like Cappy from Mario Odyssey. Like how Mario can put his cap on. Yes, there you go. And it's sort of the Austin Play League of Legends. Yumi, she can jump onto an teammate but only if she's close then use her spells. Oh really? Yeah. She just rides the top of them? Yeah, she can use all her spells and then jump out whenever she wants. Oh, that's really cool. And she's a support. Yumi's a cat, right? Like a little cat. Yumi like a little cat or something? Yeah, I think something like that. Another thing I was thinking of as far as how spells could affect ethereal are spells that impact every level. Like calling in a meteor that hits top and goes, you know, drills down to the bottom and then. But would that be like, how would you balance that? Would it be instantaneous, like a beam that just shoots straight through everything and there's some sort of indicator on each level to let you know that it's about to hit? Or would it be like it busts through the top, busts through the bottom, you know, middle, then hits the bottom or something like that? I don't know. They can do a lot of cool stuff with that game. Yeah. Maybe being able to fire from one level into the other level. Go ahead and say it, Mandy. Like a Murdock? A Murdock what? A Murdock Long Dong. I didn't want to say it. Shooting from the top lane to the bottom lane if that works. Yeah, I imagine one of the heroes is going to have an ability like that where they can just fire all the way through the map. I mean, that's got to be there. That's got to be there. That would be really cool. And I would like to see, like I was saying, like just a regular ability that goes through all the levels. Like multiple ones like that would be kind of cool, I think. I feel like I could see that on like Malware or Dante, like on a Marksman. The Long Fire? Yeah, being able to... Yeah, maybe Malware with his bow and arrow, he can do a charge shot like Sparrow used to do. Yeah, I like it. Oh, wouldn't that be neat if it was just a regular ability, not an ultimate. But it was a charge shot like hers that could pierce the rain and you could just fire. If you were good enough, you could fire down at the mid laner. Or if you're at the bottom lane, you fire off. Gotta keep the poking. Every time we talk about this game, I get so hyped for it. Just the possibilities are endless here. Right? Love it. Absolutely love it. Like here's the storm was an underrated game and it's kind of over. It's not really done with, but it's really on the back burner right now. But I think it's a good place to pick up some inspiration for spells because they did some really interesting stuff in that game. It just wasn't... It was too stripped down of a MOBA to really compete with the rest of them, I think. Yeah. And they and Dota have the same kind of mechanic when you're controlling multiple characters as one person. Yeah. Oh, Dota has something like that too? Yeah, they have Meppo, Meppo. Something like that. And as long as one of the guys survive, you don't die. Oh, really? I think it works like that. And you can just jump with all of them and it's really much micromanaging and stuff like that. And how that would work on Ethereal, for example. Something I was kind of thinking of was like Ragnaros and Hots, which there's probably some other stuff and other ones, but you know, you can call a flame wave that travels down a lane. It doesn't have to be the lane he's in. It starts at the core and goes through the enemy's core. And it just completely wipes out that lane as it goes. I think that would be cool for Ethereal and just be... It would be real good as well. And you have this passive d-spell when he jumps into the turret and protects it. Oh yeah, that would be cool too, yeah. Yeah, as we said, Heroes of the Storm got a lot of unique things. Yeah, maybe that's something Overseers could do is jump into towers, control towers and minions and stuff like that. That would be kind of neat. I want when the towers go down, I want to say, I hope the princess was in another castle. That's what I'm talking about. How do you guys think about like Summoner spells in League or Relix in Smite when you have these extra abilities? Right. Like ghosts when you run fast or blink or teleport and stuff like that. Maybe a small period of flight could be a relic in Ethereal. Just anybody could pick it up at the beginning. That would be cool. Yeah, well I think that's about all I have for the subject. You guys have anything else you wanted to add? I'm good. No, I'm good. All right. So that's going to wrap it up then for the topic of discussion. Let's get into plugs. Pusey, you got anything to plug? You got a YouTube channel, Twitch or anything like that? I have a Twitch channel, but I really don't stream a lot of it. But when a princess or a three-year-old is coming, I'm going to stream a lot more. It's TwitchTV slash Pusey. All right. I'll have it linked down in the description below. Same old, same old over here. Just twitching every now and again, and every once in a great while I'll upload to YouTube. Right on. By the time this comes out, I'll have a video on Project Stamina out. That's, I don't know if you guys have ever heard of Gigantic, but that was another game that unfortunately got shut down because of corporate mismanagement instead of, you know, it being a poor game. And they have their own group of fans that are trying to revive that game, and they're kind of rebuilding it from the ground up. So you can check that out if you want. But that is going to be it for this week. I hope you guys enjoyed the show. And thank you so much for coming out. This is the For The Menus crew. Signing off. You guys have a good one.