Epic releases assets from cancelled Paragon MOBA

Epic Games is giving its cancelled multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) title Paragon a fitting send-off, by releasing the assets it created for the game - valued, the company claims, at £8.55 million - for free and open re-use.

Based on Epic's Unreal Engine 4, Paragon was originally scheduled to launch for Windows and PlayStation 4 as the company's flagship MOBA. Early beta testers and Early Access backers were praising the game as it went through the development process, but then Fortnite happened. The addition of a battle royale mode to what was originally a cooperative survival sandbox title proved a smash-hit, and Epic opted to concentrate its efforts thereon by cancelling Paragon outright and issuing anyone who had spent real-world cash on the title during its Early Access stage a full refund.

The company isn't stopping there, though, and has announced that it has made the assets it developed for the game - valued, it claims, at £8.55 million - available for anyone creating Unreal Engine games to use free of charge. 'We are extremely excited to announce that we’ve released $12 million worth of assets from our action MOBA Paragon on the Unreal Engine Marketplace,' announced Epic's Amanda Bott in a forum post. 'They’re all free to use in your Unreal Engine 4 projects with no strings attached! We look forward to seeing what developers around the world do with them!'

The assets include models for 20 hero characters, large swathes of content from the Monolith and Agora environments, and announcer audio, all of which are available for free and unlimited re-use - even commercially - providing, that is, you're using Epic's own Unreal Engine 4 to do so. In other words: You're free to make a game based on the assets in Unreal Engine 4 without paying a penny to Epic, but extracting the assets and loading them into CryEngine or Unity is a big no-no.

Bott confirmed that additional asset packs from the game will be released between now and the summer.