Predecessor Interview: Omeda Studios Built Predecessor With The Help Of Its Community

Hello everyone, my name is Robbie Singh, Co-Founder and CEO of Omeda Studios, the developers behind Predecessor. Having started this project with two other friends back in 2018, I am happy to be now overseeing almost 90 dedicated and passionate developers putting together the game of my – and many others’ – dreams.

After Paragon was discontinued in 2018, Epic released the assets for free on their assets store. This allowed me and my friends to work on what would be our dream MOBA. Paragon was a heavy initial inspiration, as one of my favourite games of all time, and we released most of the original Paragon characters as Predecessor Heroes now, so there’s a lot of love and respect for the source material. Also, we’ve now reached the point where we are making our own unique Heroes, like Kira and Zarus, and making sure the new Heroes coexist with the already existing assets was an important visual direction for our team.

A lot of playtesting, feedback, and balancing. We believe the shooter-action gameplay brings players epic moments of split-second decisions and rewards them for their skills, while a MOBA strategy will require players to also be aware of their surroundings and the development of the match as they progress towards the enemy’s core. We found that the mix of intense team fights and intelligent strategy-making is creating a unique gameplay experience in Predecessor, and our players seem to agree.

The Crest system is a unique system in Predecessor. We believe that it gives another powerful tool under players’ belts. While it took some time for our players to find the best way to use the Crest System, we now believe that it’s a defining aspect of how you can build your Hero and take advantage of the surge or power that upgraded Crests have.

With Predecessor’s 1.0 Launch, the game is fully free to play. Players can acquire heroes by simply playing the game, and no gameplay-changing content is being added to the game. Players can support the game by acquiring cosmetic content in-game to better express their personality or to enjoy a new skin for their favourite Hero.

We see Predecessor as a game that will be here for many years to come. With that in mind, it made the most sense for us to use the latest technology in order to provide a better experience and better graphics to our players. It took a few months to move the project to Unreal Engine 5, but after that initial work, our team has now been able to create amazing-looking assets and use the latest features in game development to continuously raise the bar for Action MOBAs.

With the Hero Affinity system, players are rewarded for taking their time to hone their skills with each character and being rewarded with unique content like loading screens and exclusive skins. Apart from that, our team is working on implementing more features in the future.

Matchmaking balancing is an ongoing process, as new players enter the mix, new features and new gameplay systems are introduced that change the overall rhythm of the game. With the inclusion of the Ranked queue, players should expect more competitive matches that have a lower flexibility on MMR disparities.

The community has primary importance for Predecessor and Omeda Studios. We listen to very in-depth feedback from our various channels, which have their own unique communities, concerns, and suggestions. We are in constant communication with our community, and many decisions were based on direct input from our community (like choosing the next Hero in our pipeline) or even our team deciding the next feature to be implemented based on community feedback. One good example of this was the implementation of our replay system that allowed our players to run community-focused tournaments even during Closed Beta.

With Predecessor’s 1.0 Launch, we’re seeing an incredible new wave of players joining our community, having already surpassed over 2 million players worldwide and still growing. We understand that the more we open the funnel for new players, the more different those players will be, and their previous knowledge of MOBAs might greatly vary. We have completely overhauled our onboarding tutorial to really help newcomers get into the game and start exploring all of the heroes and epic battles in Predecessor.

Any game development project goes through a large number of technical challenges, as pushing the bar is part of what makes games great. One interesting challenge for Omeda Studios was initially publishing Predecessor on consoles. With each publisher having their own certification process, technical requirements and approvals, it was a big learning curve for our team, and we kept getting better at it with each patch and update and will continue improving on the process as we have a goal to always have a cross-platform game available for free for everyone.

We believe that our team has worked on a very solid foundation for a great game that is allowing us to create ever more creative heroes. Aurora, a character who can build ice bridges that go over walls for her and all teammates, is a good example of that. Bringing creative Heroes and listening to our community has been the most important part of how we envision continuing to push the envelope of MOBAs.

If you haven’t tried Predecessor yet, now is the best time to jump in. With our latest 1.0 Launch, Predecessor is available for free on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series S|X and Steam. Also, the best way to explore Predecessor is by joining our Discord server, where a lot of the Devs, including myself, are always participating in conversations about how to continue improving our beloved Predecessor.