Predecessor is Omeda Studios’ upcoming take on the third-person action MOBA, building on the foundations of Epic Games’ short-lived Paragon, an action-based take on the genre that was shelved for the studio to focus on Fortnite. Right at the time of the global open beta launch, we managed to ask Robbie Singh, CEO at Omeda Studios, some questions about the genesis of the game and the plans for the future.

MP1st: Were you a player of the original Paragon? Why did you decide to take on the task of creating a MOBA game based on Paragon instead of creating one entirely from scratch?

Robbie Singh (CEO at Omeda Studios): Oh yes. Quick background on me is before starting this I was a content creator on YouTube and Twitch, and I was actually the biggest content creator for Paragon. I was already making a lot of content on the game, I had built a pretty large community around the game, and when Epic Games decided to shut down Paragon to focus on Fortnite, I thought “Hey, I am the biggest content creator on this space, I think I have some pretty cool ideas on what a next-generation MOBA could look like,” and so that was kind of my idea behind starting this project.

MP1st: Did it come as a shock to you when Epic Games decided to shut down Paragon? Did you find it to be somewhat of a unique game at the time?

Robbie Singh: Yes, definitely. It was a pretty big shock, I thought that Paragon brought something very unique to the MOBA genre. A lot of companies were making League-esque, top-down perspective games and Paragon was a very unique take. That was what really drew me towards it, it didn’t really follow the rules and the underlying systems on MOBAs, it felt very much like an action game.

MP1st: What makes Predecessor different from other attempts at bringing Paragon back to life, such as Paragon: The Overprime?

Robbie Singh: I think that the key thing for us has always been that we wanted to focus on the gameplay, making sure that in itself it is really cool to experience, really fun for players, and focusing on the moment-to-moment combat that I think players really enjoy about Predecessor. That really sets us apart, we put a lot of time and effort into polishing our heroes, making sure the mechanics feel really good, and so that’s the thing that sets us apart not only from other people that are trying to do similar things, but the MOBA genre in general, where a lot of the top-down games, as great as they are, don’t feel super immersive in the action. I don’t think they get the adrenaline going like this does, and we really wanted to double-down on those things.

MP1st: Did you plan for Predecessor to go free-to-play right from the start, or is this something you decided to change as development progressed?

Robbie Singh: That was definitely something that we thought about right from the start. The MOBA genre has always been dominated by free-to-play titles and you do need to be a free-to-play game to at least participate in the genre, so we always built it with free-to-play in mind. Our focus early on though was that we’re going to do a paid Early Access so we can iterate with a small amount of people and really refine the product before going into open beta. And now that we’re in open beta, we’re expanding that pool of players and continue iterating on the product, but we also believe it is in a really great spot, with people doing tournaments every week and that gave us a lot of encouragement to release the open beta.

MP1st: What can we expect in terms of post-launch content, especially new heroes? Any schedule for new releases that you can give us?

Robbie Singh: We have new heroes coming very soon, there will be another new hero launching April 9th, shortly after that there will be an update to the item system, three weeks after we have another new hero coming out, and we have a new game mode launching. We try to drop a new hero every six weeks, and as we get closer to our global full launch, we start to increase that cadence, and we have a ranked mode coming out in a couple of months.

MP1st: What are the main features that you feel a third-person MOBA brings over the more common isometric MOBAs such as League of Legends and other games, apart from the obvious action focus?

Robbie Singh: I would say one of the things we’ve done as well is really ensure that Predecessor is a game that can be played anywhere, by everyone. It’s available on PC and console, and of course it will be available on Xbox fully cross-play, that’s something that doesn’t exist for League of Legends and Dota. I think that was one of the goals we had as well – the game needs to be free and it also needs to be accessible by as many people as possible, because we think a game like this really resonates with console players. A lot of the greatest PlayStation and Xbox titles have been third-person games and this really fits well with that audience.

MP1st: When Paragon launched, it had some fairly steep system requirements. Did you do any sort of optimization for this launch to make sure it runs in fairly modest specs?

Robbie Singh: We’ve done a lot of optimization on our side, but Epic also has optimized the Unreal Engine, and we’ve moved to Unreal Engine 5 as well. There’s been optimization on both ends, and the game runs on PlayStation 4 as well. Obviously, we recommend playing on the newest generation of consoles for the best experience, but the game will definitely run on lower-spec machines and it scales up accordingly.

We’d like to thank Omeda Studios for taking time out of their schedule to answer our questions.