It’s interesting to learn that the art and animations for Paragon cost Epic Games $12 million, all told. How do we know that? Well… the company is giving them away. Not to anyone, to everyone. All of the characters, skins, environmental art, and so forth are all offered completely free of charge to anyone who wants to use them in any sort of Unreal Engine 4 development project.
For those of you not following along, that means that fans could resurrect Paragon completely for free if they wished to. They could also make a totally new game based on the same characters, or just use some of the assets, or use those assets as a starting point for something completely different. It’s entirely up to each individual user. Because all of the assets are there, and again, they’ve been released to the public for use completely for free for UE4 development.
In short: This is really cool.
That’s really nice of them to help restore some good rep for people. Maybe they’ll be willing to do that for Fortnite’s PvE side since it looks like it’s going to hit a point where it goes belly-up and abandoned for BR.
That’s an awesome gift for aspiring developers. Thumbs up, Epic!
At least one of the SuperHero projects uses UE4, this is great news.
I wish they would go a step further and release the whole game so people could mod it, i would actually pay for some kind of Minecraft/Landmark using UE4.
I wonder if this can be used to swap character abilities, Morigesh or The Countess with the whip would be awesome.
Good, this is the sort of thing I hoped would happen.
I often dabble casually in UE4 for personal projects, so having access to the environmental stuff would be fantastic.
Huh. That’s a pretty savvy move.
It shows support for the developers who poured thousands of man-hours into the original project.
It supports up-and-coming developers who don’t have the skill, money, or wherewithal to generate their own art assets — especially environmental assets, which are critical yet expensive “background art”.
It keeps the time and money that Epic invested into the project “out there” and in the eyes and minds of the community.
I sincerely wish that more companies would figure out what can be released to the public when a game shuts down.
Nice moves Epic.
I wish other companies would take this attitude with abandoned assets.
There is no incentive for others to do this. With these assets it explicitly states that they are only for use with Unreal Engine, which is how they’ll make their money back on them if a product successfully launches. No other company is in this position.
Actually, at the very least Crytek and Valve are in the same position of distributing both completed games developed in-house (and thus over which they have all rights) and the game engines themselves, and so could make similar offers if they wanted.
We have seen an example of how much moves like this can do to unleash fan creativity with the way SFM-made movies took off after Valve released SFM for free and allowed all the assets of its games to be used for such movies, resulting in things like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPk1VjGbSYU
You mentioned abandoned assets… and Epic is just killing the entire Paragon brand. Crytek and Valve aren’t going to release assets to current money making IP that aren’t abandoned, just like Epic isn’t about to release the Fortnite assets.
I’m pretty sure Fortnite’s success is the reason why Epic is releasing these assets.
Good on them! First they give out refunds and now this. Epic’s handling of the closure of Paragon has been superb.