The Paragon Successor Projects — Fault

In late 2019, Fault was announced after a year of work behind the scenes. The first of its paid-access alpha tests followed only a few weeks later in December 2019, with several more alpha weekends in the months that followed. In July 2020, Fault launched via early access on Steam.

I caught up with Ryan Red, Community Manager at Strange Matter Studios, to find out more:

Ryan Red: Fault isn't trying to remake Paragon; that's a big thing that a lot of people get mixed up. We do use the assets from the game we loved! We're making our own game here; our first as Strange Matter Studios.

When making Paragon, Epic was in a position where being flexible and responding to everything the community was asking for was difficult. Just like any AAA studio, they invest a lot of money into their product and need to make that back.

What indie companies invest is a crapton of time, because they don't have money!

And when they do, they get sucked right into their game. Being an indie company with an early access product, we can afford to focus solely on gameplay and our depth.

We loved Paragon, and much of the game’s philosophy is alive in Fault — though our execution is fundamentally different as an indie company, and by having the benefit of hindsight. We are proud to be standing on the shoulders of giants.

We believe that close and continuous contact with the community is the best way to grow this type of game, and it needs to be backed up by flexibility in the team to respond to what the community is saying.

We have that flexibility: we play to the strengths of being indie by being much closer to our community. The heads of each department talk to players and take their feedback directly.

When we did our EA release, there were FPS issues: and we decided to stop working on our HUD and marketing to focus 100% on getting those issues fixed. We did the restructure and minion rework to focus on the people we already had. It's community first here with Fault.

A second thing is that Paragon had so much amazing potential; they could have killed some of the current big games out there that have esports. They did focus on the competitive, but as an indie team we can afford to be much close to our competitive players.

We aren't a huge company that has to protect our image and not associate with new or unproven orgs. We're available to associate with orgs that are just growing, and help them grow, and give them the support they need to throw events.

We've drawn on competitive knowledge from Paragon, but also from players of other games like HotS and SMITE which have mature esports. The feedback from those people has been really valuable. We're not holding ourselves to only Paragon players; we take inspiration from everywhere.

Being a smaller team, we have the devs directly linked with our esports team. We can tweak the map how we want it to look for individual events. We're so close and devoted to comp.

Ryan Red: We're trying to improve on the MOBA genre in general, by adding more depth to third-person MOBAs. A lot of them wind up being brawly.

We believe they can hold all the depth that a popular top-down MOBA can, but at the same time these are high-action 3rd person games, and we want to ensure the immersion is still there. We look to improve on the genre in general by focusing on BOTH aspects of 3rd person MOBAs.

Also, we’re taking inspiration from other games and esports. We want competitive players to arrive and see there's aspects of this game, that game, and we want them to be rewarded for being skilled, in a game which demands lots of different skills. We look at everything, we do our research heavily and we're all MOBA players ourselves.

Fault's map design is unique. The jungle pathing is stronger and more competitive; we put a lot of attention into that and players often bring it up. We're using familiar assets, but we completely reworked each hero. They have passives, they have changes to their abilities, they have completely new abilities and animations. We're making our own stuff; Kwang's a really good example.

Our original Favour and Aspect system definitely pushes things forwards, because there's a bunch of ways to grow your strengths. You earn Favour for killing lots of minions, 35 I believe. If you take out the Raptor, the first tower, or enemy inhibitors: your whole team gets one. You're also getting it for every 7 kill participation.

Favour is valuable because it "grows" your items. Lets say I have a mage item that gets more energy damage per Favour, and the person on the opposing team also has this item. If I have 20 Favour, I have 20 extra energy damage on the guy I'm going against.

Because your whole team has this desire for Favour, your whole team wants to group up and take that early tower. The same with Raptor; at nine minutes and a half you should be positioning to take it.

Of course, you see this in League of Legends as well with the dragons which give a team buff. In Fault, we're letting you personalise this reward through your choice of items, which means it's relevant to you and your build every time and in every role. It creates more buy-in from the entire team to play as a team.

Favour rewards teamwork, it rewards early timings and rotations. If you're not playing as a team or you're not going for these objectives, or your jungler isn't going for these objectives and calling it out, you're not going to get the full potential of how strong you can get in Fault.

Our map has a lot of verticality. The jungle goes down, there's lots of ledges you can jump on or over to escape stuff, and there's these really high points in mid-lane. Having these rewards stuff like Steel ultimates, Greystone jumps; abilities that give you verticality.

It would be a waste to have a flat map with all these abilities that can lead to sick plays. I was a huge fan of the Legacy map because it had so much verticality; you could go down in the jungle and it felt really immersive.

The problem was, everything was too tight. From an esports perspective, spectating that is a headache. You bring your cam into the jungle and there's trees everywhere that block the camera, plus the lanes are super tight. Then we moved to Monolith which was huge and open. It still had verticality in some areas, but it wasn't the same in my opinion.

With Fault, we've the opened up pathways in the way Monolith did, with the verticality of Legacy — though it is our own design; we weren't trying to be Legacy or Monolith when we made this.

We've reintroduced verticality in a way that doesn't interfere with the ability to spectate — a big plus for esports!

Ryan Red: Hype!! —and fun!

Our goal is to make the game fun for the casuals, while we continue to focus on the competitive. We don't want to shut out anybody.

If you just make a competitive game, sure you would have a lot of interest, but not everybody is striving to be the next best MOBA player. For the casuals, we want to reward them with grindable stuff — that's why you can get your skins and your heroes, and your avatars and wards, with just Matter.

For esports, our basic plan that I've put into motion since joining the team was saying "no" to everybody telling me to run a tournament this early. I've been doing esports stuff for a long time and I'm not going to let us fizzle out by going into an event that we aren't ready for.

That said, the FaultHub Network, which is a third-party group ran by the community, has announced they're hosting the first Fault tournament in the Fall.

Grass-roots orgs that pop up will have support from us, and will eventually be our team pool for a major league event. In a sense, they will be the minor league.

We'll help them with promotion, and doing so lets us build the hype for esports, see who is involved, and improve balance. The more comp players that come in, the more super-critical balance information we're going to get back.

We have stat-tracking on our website, we have custom lobbies already, we have ELO and MMR for you to track, we have our leaderboard, and we're working towards our spectate and maybe other tools you've seen on other websites as well.

By the time a major league event for Fault is ready, we will have everything we need to make a lasting and big first impression on the esports scene in general.

Another main thing I want to say is that comp events aren't the only events we're going to be putting out.

We are going to have classic MOBA community events for everybody to join in. I won't say for sure, but examples are Winterfest, Halloween, Master Skins... I'm not saying those will come out 100%, but it's about producing more stuff that people want and won't have to pay for.

We've done this before; at one point back in the alpha we were streaming and there were a couple of other people streaming. We decided to talk to them, to see if they wanted to do this and they said yes, so we turned off mana costs and cooldowns.

You could jump around the whole map spamming Gideon Q's, teleporting from base to base, Muriel ults were going off left and right, non-stop Murdock laser beams flying through the map... everybody was spamming their abilities.

The whole game worked! A lot of people said: "that's URF!" from League of Legends. That's Paragon URF mode and Paragon didn't have that stuff; we have that capability.

The possibilities are endless when it comes to giving our Fault community more stuff to enjoy; we could do URF or ARAM or some new mode that isn't even thought of in MOBAs, like FPS kill streak stuff.

There's so many people who don't play League but come back for URF mode, or the mirror mode; they don't touch the normal mode. If we had ARAM we'd have the same thing because they don't necessarily enjoy long MOBA matches but do enjoy the game.

That will be a big help in the future — it gives the casuals more to look forward to and more to engage themselves with.

Ryan Red: Our big challenge at launch was that we got hit with anything that could go wrong.

Our cloud servers were attacked, our main AWS was DDOS'd, Steam had issues with keys for friends. When CloudFlare went down, it brought a big chunk of the internet down with it — right after we clicked "send" on the EA.

We had to grind down and fix things as fast as we could, whatever we could; and we did. We've gotten to know each other, we know our strengths and weaknesses and are comfortable giving advice to other members. We have weekly meetings and brainstorm a lot of stuff together.

When an issue comes up, everyone's in the team discord all day discussing it. Then, I'm in there trying to figure out "what are we saying to the public?", because we're a very transparent company.

It's definitely an interesting experience being part of the team. Since day one I've been blown away by these guys, and how they're able to tackle all this stuff. These guys are just, they're nuts!

There's a lot of people who stay up as late as it takes to get problems resolved, there's people who work and work and work until they look like zombies; the team is insanely devoted and motivated to make this a reality.

It's not money that drives us. Obviously that's a thing — we want to all be able to pay ourselves and finally make a career out of a passion we all had and many other gamers have. We all want to make it, everybody has their own thing they're chasing after. For us, it's to become game developers — to become an actual game development team!

Of course, the big challenge for any game is player retention. We have pushed our tutorial to help new players, and have a lot planned for new player onboarding and more to keep players entertained and craving another match.

But if we need to grow or learn, we'll do so. We're not afraid to admit that we need to improve certain aspects, and always strive to better ourselves and the company.

Fault by Strange Matter Studios is now available in early access on Steam!