Epic Games announced that they were shutting down their multiplayer online battle arena Paragon back in January. Given the game’s struggle to maintain high player counts and the companies recent success with Fortnite it seemed like the natural progression for the studio.
Yesterday they did something a little more unexpected. A post on the Unreal Engine forums revealed that Epic Games has released many of their in-game assets from Paragon onto the Unreal Engine 4 marketplace and that they will be available for designers to use completely free of charge.
As of now Epic has released 20 characters 1500 environment components, and an announcer audio pack. According to the post, more are going to be made available through the summer. Not only that, but animator Jay Hosfel will be participating in a Twitch livestream for Unreal teaching interested designers how to set up the animation blueprints for the Paragon characters.
This is a huge win for independent developers. High resolution, well built assets don’t come cheap, as evidenced by Epic’s estimate that this batch of assets is worth about $12 million dollars. This is a great opportunity for developers just getting started to get to play with professionally designed assets and see what they can make of them.
Paragon doesn’t officially close up shop until April 26, but the assets are already available. You can check them out on the Unreal Engine marketplace.