Epic set Paragon assets free for Unreal Engine games
A big wodge of free assets
Parts of Epic's third-person shooter MOBA Paragon will survive after the game shuts down in April. Epic today released thousands of Paragon's character models, map props, textures, voiced lines, and more free for all Unreal Engine 4 games to use. If you're prototyping or could use a few bits to spruce your game up, hey, have a dig. Epic say it cost them over $12,000,000 to make these assets, and I'd say it's certainly better to re-use them to support and promote Unreal Engine than let them sink with the game. I suppose if you're mourning Paragon's impending death you could also create your own unofficial fan game, you funny little thing.
The initial Paragon asset blast includes 20 characters (with their models, textures, animations, effects, and dialogue, plus an animation Blueprint for one fella) along with over 1,500 environment assets created for two maps. Many of the characters look like weird 90s Image Comics castoffs, which limits how widely they can be used, but there is a lot of stuff that could be used for a lot of different games.
Epic say they plan to release more Paragon assets across spring and summer of 2018.
You can find all the assets on the Unreal Engine Marketplace. More instructions in this forum thread too. Epic do specify that these assets are only licensed for use in Unreal Engine 4-based games (which Epic takes a cut from, of course, if a game sells well). Open would be nicer, but I suppose I don't begrudge them limiting this to their own engine when they're blasting so much for free.
I'm always delighted to see more fancy free asset packs. Games built on these are extensions of the old modding spirit, using asset packs and public engines rather than Quake, Half-Life, or whatever the "everyone owns this" foundation game of the day was. They let people make games they otherwise wouldn't be able to, and that's great.