We’re going to drop some jargon here. It can’t be avoided. There is no way to talk about a game like Paragon without either including a big block of text explaining what kind of game it is, or just saving that time and space and using made-up terms that only game people will understand. So jargon it is. Sorry, anybody who doesn’t regularly keep up on the videogame biz.
So there are at least three big-name hero shooter FPS/MOBA combos coming out this year, and Epic Games’ Paragon is one of them. The game isn’t out until later this year, and the extended free beta doesn’t start until later this summer, but if you aren’t already tooling around in the game’s paid Early Access, you can get a taste of Paragon during a free beta over the Memorial Day weekend. It starts on Thursday, May 26, and wraps up on Monday, May 30, aka Memorial Day itself. If you’ve got a Playstation 4 or PC, you can spend your long weekend first-person shootering some multiplayer heroes in an online battle area, for sure. And if words aren’t your thing, you can check out the trailer, which reaffirms that, yes, this is happening.
It can be hard to keep Paragon and Battleborn and Overwatch straight—their notable differences aren’t apparent until you play them, and only one has been released yet—but I know an easy trick to at least distinguish Paragon in your head: it’s the one that my mom’s childhood best friend’s actor son did motion capture for. Now you’ll never confuse it with those other two games again.