As someone who’s sunk plenty of time into League of Legends, Dota 2, and Heroes of the Storm alike, I’m always curious what other games can bring to the table. Smite 2 is showing promise after the original’s long-running success, and now Predecessor, the multiplayer game reborn from the ashes of Epic Games MOBA Paragon, has just launched what developer Omeda Studios calls “unquestionably the biggest game update Predecessor has ever seen.”
The new Predecessor update v0.18 is here now, and as promised it introduces a whole lot of new content to the MOBA. The patch introduces the first new game mode, Brawl, new hero Aurora, and a heavy shake-up to the entire meta with the introduction of a sixth item slot. Accompanying this is a full balance pass across basically the entire roster of heroes and items, along with some performance and audio upgrades, giving you plenty of reasons to check in with the free Steam game.
Newcomer Aurora, a crowd-control expert from Paragon making her Predecessor debut, is a high-mobility hero. Her Glacial Charge lets her soar forward and over obstacles such as walls, creating an ice path in her wake that allies can use to quickly follow her into battle. Hoarfrost lets Aurora create a ring of ice spikes, effectively trapping enemies – foes who touch them take magical damage and are frozen for a short duration. Boreal Sweep deals damage and slows in a two-part cone shaped wave in front of her.
When Aurora leaps away, her Frozen Simulacrum passive leaves an icy replica in her wake in true Sub-Zero style, blocking enemy abilities and pulling aggro from your opponents’ towers and minions to give you a clean getaway. Finally, her ultimate ability Cryoseism deals damage to and freezes any enemies that stand too close to her, before detonating in a high-damage chain reaction that also reapplies the slowing effect on any enemy caught in it.
Brawl is the other big addition, and it’s a great way to get to grips with Predecessor in a more casual environment. It features two teams of five going head-to-head on a single-lane map. That means it’s all about big teamfights, and your gold and experience will ramp up at dramatically accelerated rates to help encourage this.
While the focus is very much centered on that main lane, you can still venture into the edges of the map, where you’ll be able to grab the various jungle and river buffs to help turn the tide in your favor. You can even make use of these side routes to flank your opponents and catch them off-guard, but you’ll need to keep watch for the Orb Prime objective that spawns in the middle of the map, as claiming it earns your side a massive boost towards victory.
The final big update leads a mass rebalancing across the board – the introduction of a sixth item slot. That means your builds can be more diverse and creative than ever before. To accommodate this, and the additional gold now required to complete your loadout, Omeda has delivered “a substantial balance pass on almost every aspect of the game.”
“Seriously, the full list of notes is absurdly long and in depth,” it explains, “The game design team gave us over 90 pages of changes, all in bullet points.” The biggest takeaways to watch out for include faster gold gain both passively and from monsters, reduced experience requirements in the late game, and a rework to all hero base stats and “practically all” items.
Along with these new additions, update v0.18 introduces a whole wealth of other improvements to Predecessor, including a complete redesign of the game’s sound system to help you better listen out for trouble and pick out abilities during battle. Performance has also been boosted, with an overall reduction to memory consumption making the game smoother on lower-end machines.
Predecessor update v0.18 is out now on Steam and the Epic Games Store. Predecessor is free to play, so just head over to its store page if you want to check out the latest update.
We recently spoke to Omeda CEO Robbie Singh about why Predecessor isn’t just Paragon 2 and how the team is learning and adapting from its forefather as it aims to compete with the big guns of LoL and Dota. You can also check out our picks of the best multiplayer games to play in 2024 if you’re eager for some more competition.
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