Originally posted on 20 March 2018. Scroll down for news of the release of 19 further free characters.

Epic Games has released 20 animated hero characters and over 1,500 environment assets from Paragon, its action MOBA, free to Unreal Engine users. The assets can all be used in commercial projects.

Further Paragon character packs will be released throughout spring and summer this year.

Turning commercial failure into marketing success
A free-to-play MOBA, Paragon got mixed reviews on its release in 2016, and was subsequently overshadowed by the success of Battle Royale mode in Epic’s next major title, Fortnite.

In January, Epic announced that it will shut down its Paragon servers this April, offering players full refunds.

Today’s announcement rather astutely turns this commercial failure into a marketing and community-building success, making content with an estimated development cost of $12 million available to UE4 users for free.

Download 20 free rigged hero characters and 1,500 environment assets from Paragon
The new content packs, available via the Unreal Engine marketplace, include 20 of Unreal’s rigged hero characters plus all of their skins, and “thousands of textures, VFX and animation cycles”.

In addition, the download for Shinbi includes an animation Blueprint that developers can use as a base for their own projects.

There is also an environment pack comprising over 1,500 assets from the game’s Agora and Monolith maps, including 528 meshes, textures at resolutions up to 4K, FX, and a complete sample level.

Epic has also released a voice pack for Paragon’s in-game male announcer.

 
Updated 25 September 2018: Epic Games has released a further 19 characters from Paragon, including Boris: the final hero announced for – but never actually released in – the game.

All of the new characters come with animation Blueprints, Epic having also released Blueprints for the remainder of the original free characters at the start of August.

 
Pricing and availability
Epic Games’ Paragon asset packs are available for Unreal Engine 4.19+ running on Windows only.

The packs are free downloads from the Unreal Engine marketplace, and can be used in commercial projects, but are only licensed for use with Unreal Engine.

 
Read more about the free Paragon asset packs on Epic Games’ website

Download the free Paragon asset packs from the Unreal Engine marketplace

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