Predecessor

Could have been great ... but the Devs simply don't care. They prioritize "new content" over "core gameplay/loop" - it simply is backwards for this type of game. Who cares about great when we can spit out a new hero every 3-4 weeks that messes up all the balance ? I don't get it, if it's the skins you care selling - just make new skins for existing heros + make existing heroes fun to play + fix the core game loop ... you don't need to throw garbage on top of garbage to get more garbage. To be concrete, here is the list of issues the game suffers from (most prominent ones) - matchmaking: pretty much non-existent - "we don't care how you are gonna spend your next ~30 minutes, be happy with ~2m queue times", which wouldn't be that big of a deal IF the games were comebackable - snowball: the games are not comebackable, once a competeent player is ahead the game is decided (you are just stuck in it for the next ~10-15 minutes to see it through) - the combat speed is too fast past ~20 minute mark into the game - you cannot even choose the role you want to play (infamous auto-fill from League of Legends) Everything else about Pred is awesome ... it just doesn't matter, which is very sad. I wouldn't even call hero balance "being poor", as all of the above simply makes discussing it irrelevant. If you are looking to chill out for 30-60 minutes per day, mindlessly running around - that's doable here. Do not make mistake of hoping for more, just don't. Been like that ~9 month ago, same old same old today.

After putting more than 500 hours into this game over the last two years, with some breaks in between, I recently came back to see how much it had changed. Since then, the game has added new characters, objectives, loot boxes, and a season pass. While there is plenty of new content, I also found that some long-standing issues remain, while several new problems have made the overall experience even more frustrating. The biggest problem is the community. Almost every few matches, you'll run into someone who spends the entire game spamming "Good Job," constantly pinging the map, raging in chat, and blaming everyone else instead of focusing on their own gameplay. On top of that, there are players who intentionally feed or give up, making already frustrating matches even worse. Another issue is the queue system. You queue first, then choose your role, and finally pick your hero. The problem is that many players aren't comfortable playing every role or don't have experience with every hero. This often leads to people choosing heroes they don't know how to play or heroes that simply don't fit the role, causing the match to snowball from the start. I suggested adding preferred role selection, similar to Smite and other MOBAs, but instead of having a discussion, the idea was immediately dismissed by members of the Discord community. Balance is another major concern. Some heroes are so weak that there's almost no reason to pick them, while others completely dominate matches with very little effort. Newly released heroes also have a habit of launching over tuned, making the balance feel even worse until they're eventually adjusted. Matchmaking also feels inconsistent. Too many matches are heavily one-sided, with one team completely overwhelming the other. Whether it's due to matchmaking, team composition, or balance, competitive games seem far less common than they should be. Performance also seems to have gotten worse since I last played. I've recently experienced multiple matches with noticeable lag, and several other players in those same matches confirmed they were experiencing it as well. This wasn't something I regularly encountered in the past, so it's disappointing to see performance become another issue. While Omeda Studios has continued to add new content, it feels like cosmetics, battle passes, and other monetization features have received more attention than improving balance, matchmaking, performance, and systems that could help reduce toxicity. I understand the studio needs to generate revenue, but I'd like to see the same level of focus applied to the game's core experience. I'm not someone who usually writes reviews, but after spending over 500 hours with this game and ultimately deciding to move on, I felt it was worth sharing my experience. While the game has received plenty of new content, many older issues remain, and several newer ones have made the experience less enjoyable than when I last played.

Played a version of this game since Paragon. This is hands down the best version of the game overall. Well worth your time/money :)

Breaking character for this... so many better mobas exist to the point where i'd say even on your middle school free laptop, you could learn dota or league and have a much overall cohesive experience. If any of your friends say "Ayo, hop on Predecessor!" treat them like a lame horse and blow their ♥♥♥♥ smoove off.

Like many others point out, matchmaking is pretty bad, but it's not the developer's fault directly - the player base is generally extremely terrible because most of them are console kids playing this like it's CoD. There's a huge list of QoL that makes this game extremely unappealing to anyone familiar with MOBAs, so they're the only people left who want to play this game. Otherwise it could be a very good and very fun game - but until they actually make it better for PC players, it will strangle itself to death. A big issue is that MMR is very happy to go down if you start losing games - EVEN IF CAUSED BY INTENTIONAL GRIEFERS - but you have to win dozens of games with nearly 0 losses for it to even start to go up (i.e., if you are at +26/-18 for W/L, if you lose 3 games you'll be at +22/-22, but if you win the next 5 you'll still be at +22/-22) Examples of missing or terrible QoL: - Edit: I just remembered the biggest offender of all; you have to fight your teammates for your preferred role AFTER YOU GET INTO CHARACTER SELECT. You can't have any preference ahead of time, and if you run into a duo when one of them wants your role, they'll both select it so you have a 1/3 chance to get it at best. - No ward timers / placement counter, neither over the top of the ward nor on the minimap, so you need to manually time every single ward in your head - Sweeper to reveal wards instead reveals your exact location perfectly to the enemy team, even through walls (but not fog gates) - No ability to ping enemy abilities, so unless you type it out in team chat or speak it in voice, you don't know if their flash / ult is up (which with how toxic the children are that play this game, you'll want to just completely turn chat off, they won't use it to say anything useful anyway) - Can't ping minimap in any capacity (since they only care about the console players, who wouldn't easily be able to do it anyway) - Can't do different kind of pings, just one ping button and an okay-but-not-great VGS (works very poorly on PC, again designed for console only) - Can't see objective health unless standing on top of it (not visible from over the back wall even if you can see the objective, even if you have a ward on it) - Player icons cover tower healthbars on minimap and there's no over-tower healthbar so you can't see how low it is until standing on it - Major inconsistencies on mechanics from a clarity perspective; Kallari, a stealth assassin, can go "invisible" (camouflaged) for several seconds, which gives enemies an indicator above their head if she's within a huge range and she becomes completely visible if in close range to them or any ward; while Sparrow, a hyper-scaling ADC, has a true invisibility that doesn't even reveal her location if you hit or CC her aside from seeing a damage number (maybe) - Shutdowns come too late for fed players and only for being on killstreaks (being up 200 farm at 20min doesn't create a shutdown AFAIK); by the time you even can get a shutdown, it won't even help because you'll still be down 2 items - Shutdowns don't take team leads into account at all - if you get 5 kills, you're worth a shutdown, even if it's 5-50 teamwide - Hunt (this game's "Smite" from League) will sometimes just not work, probably because it thinks you're not staring at the pixel-perfect direct hitbox center of the jungle objective, causing (infrequent but frustrating) losses of games because the game told you it didn't want to work, even when not CC'd and the CD is up - Minion AI is better than it used to be by a lot, but it's still not good - their pathing is still really weird and they randomly move at 2x speed after engaging anything for any amount of time - Jungle monster AI, similar to minion AI, is better than it used to be, but camps still get stuck on the ground / walls, and can sometimes permanently get stuck resetting, so you can't even farm that camp until you get enough items to kill it faster than the reset healing - Small jungle monsters might randomly reset as soon as you kill the large monster of the camp, usually if the big monster died inside the camp while you're pulling the small monsters out of the camp - Hotfixes, including balance hotfixes, almost never get posted to Steam and very frequently don't even get posted to their own website (which is atrocious btw, they don't even use 80% of their own website anymore) - Base models and skins, in general, are objectively poorly made (unnatural bends / twists, clipping, bad coloration, etc), including for new original characters

It's Paragon from Epic games, with some weird new attempts. This is the third iteration of this game I've seen.

CONSOLE RUINED THIS GAME