While it is easy for gamers to get engrossed in the latest AAA titles and big-name, heavily advertised games, there are so many hidden gems waiting for you in the incredibly competitive market that will appeal to your favourite game genre, style of play, or even artistic preferences. In our monthly Indie Game of the Month column, we want to shed some light on the fantastic work done by the independent teams who pour their passion into their projects. After all, some of your favourite games, from Minecraft to Stardew Valley and everything in between, might be produced by indie developers without you even knowing it.
They may not be in the library of your standard RPG/action-adventure gamer, but there’s no denying the popularity and value of multiplayer online battle arena games. In a genre dominated by the likes of household names League of Legends and DOTA 2, there’s an indie with some big aspirations of challenging MOBA giants with a project of their own. UK-based studio Omeda Studios are all guns blazing with their title Predecessor, which is currently in its early access phase and promises to be an open door for newcomers and experienced MOBA enthusiasts alike.
Predecessor pits teams of five against one another in an action-packed jungle map split into three distinct lanes. To get ahead of the pack, you’ll need to earn gold and upgrade your unique character, which can be done by dispatching the swarms of AI-controlled minions, opposing players, or the heavily fortified towers that’ll put you in its crosshairs as soon as you’re in range. You’ll control your character from a third-person perspective as you try to destroy the enemy’s base, something that sets the game apart from its MOBA cohorts and lets you effortlessly lose yourself in the heat of battle.
Omeda’s take on a MOBA game might look a little familiar to fans of the genre because it was actually born from the ashes of Epic Games’ Paragon. Back in 2018, Epic Games decided to give away Paragon’s visual assets for free to funnel their focus into the behemoth battle royale that became Fortnite. Two studios decided to jump on this opportunity and have been working on their own version of Paragon ever since. Korean studio Netmarble decided to relaunch their version, with Paragon: Overprime, and London-based Omeda Studios programmed their own game in Predecessor from scratch, which in itself is quite a David vs. Goliath tale.
What draws so many avid gamers to indie projects is the ability for the community to have a voice in its growth, something that is not lost on Omeda. CEO Robbie Singh leads the charge on the game, stating the team is “extremely collaborative with their community” and is being rewarded for it. In fact, it was in response to their player base creating their own fan-made tournaments and streaming replay features were introduced to the game.
That’s far from the only change motivated by Omeda’s collaboration with their community. Recognising that MOBA players generally enjoy the grind of competitive play, the team have aspirations to introduce ranked matches as soon as they can. No matter what changes, updates, or improvements are in the pipeline for Predecessor, accessibility and ease of play for their community are at the forefront of the dev’s mind.
Omeda maintains the interest and involvement of the community with the frequent inclusion of new playable characters, known as champions. According to the team, the plan is the consistently deliver a new champion for players to put to the test every six weeks. When asked if they were concerned about oversaturation, they shrugged it off, given that MOBAs tend to thrive on having a plethora of characters to choose from.
While frequent new additions to the roster could be a huge cash grab for the company, Omeda has opted to reward player loyalty rather than swarm them with micro-transactions. Instead of reaching into your pocket, you can unlock new characters by simply playing the game and earning enough XP to access them. There’s no pay-to-play involved in Predecessor, with the exception of some cosmetic items, and there are no plans to change that.
MOBAs can be extremely daunting, given how much is going on at once, so Omeda was keen to make it as easy as possible for new players to get integrated into the genre. They manage to accomplish this with the likes of an auto-buy feature, which simplifies the game’s upgrade shop. They’ve made the whole process a lot more comprehensible for newbies in Predecessor, something that is wildly overlooked in other MOBAs. You can toggle the auto-buy feature on and off, but with it on you don't have to worry too much about buying the right enhancement with your hard-earned coins, because the game is intuitive enough to recognise what your character needs most.
They've also heavily focused on porting the game to consoles because it just made sense to the devs to get the console side of things sorted pretty much from day one in the grand scheme of early access. This also means that players using PC that prefer controller play - which accounts for a surprising 11% of the player base - can simply 'plug and play'. There's no need for pesky third-party systems like DS4 Windows with Predecessor, you can simply hook your console controller into your PC, and the game is ready to play.
Predecessor’s gameplay is incredibly crisp, which is a welcome surprise for a game still in early access, and is free of the clunkiness you sometimes find in third-person action games. With that in mind, Omeda makes it clear that their passion project is not just a MOBA, but an action-MOBA. The fluidity in gameplay, particularly the verticality that can be achieved with some champions' playstyles, sets Predecessor apart from other games in the genre, something that the devs are rightfully proud of.