Hey gamers! How's everyone doing? I hope everything is going great out there. So, this time I want to talk about something that's been on my mind lately, and it has everything to do with Predecessor and whether or not I actually want to keep playing it. And look, this isn't a hate post at all, because the game is genuinely really good, but there's a particular aspect of it that's starting to wear me down in a way I didn't expect, and that's the ranking system.
So let me give you a little context first. Predecessor, for those who don't know, is a third-person MOBA developed by Omeda Studios, inspired by the legacy of Paragon, the old Epic Games title that got shut down. It runs on Unreal Engine 5, and yeah, it looks absolutely stunning. The game has been growing pretty steadily, with over two million players, and they've been dropping solid updates, the most recent being V1.12 which introduced a brand new hero called N3ON and even a new map called Daybreak in a limited-time Labs mode. So the devs are definitely putting in the work, no doubt about that.
Now, back to the ranking situation. The ranked mode in Predecessor works through a Victory Points system, where you earn VP by winning matches and lose VP when you lose. To move up through each rank division, you need to accumulate 100 VP, and once you hit that in the final division of each rank, say Bronze 1, you still need to win one more game to actually promote to the next rank. So it's not just about grinding, it's about winning consistently, and that's where things get complicated and honestly a little frustrating.
The competitiveness of a MOBA is extremely demanding. That's just the nature of the genre, and I knew that going in. Playing unranked matches is fine and enjoyable, but the moment you step into ranked, the whole vibe shifts. It becomes a different beast entirely. And this is something I've been noticing lately with online-only games that don't have a campaign, and it's that if you're not advancing, if you're not climbing the ladder and actually ranking up, the game starts to feel like it doesn't have much to offer. In games with a campaign or an RPG structure, even if you're having a rough time in PvP, you still have that sense of progress, you leveled up, you unlocked something, you moved the story forward. With a pure online title like this, the ranking is essentially what gives you that sense of real advancement, and if you're stuck, well, you're just stuck.
Getting out of Bronze is no walk in the park. You'd think Bronze is the starting point and it shouldn't be that hard to move past it, but the reality is that the matchmaking puts you in situations where the skill gap between players can be massive. Something the community has pointed out repeatedly is that ranked matches sometimes pair people with wildly different skill levels, which leads to either completely one-sided games or matches that just feel unfair from the start. That inconsistency makes climbing feel unreliable and honestly kind of arbitrary at times. You can play well and still lose because someone on your team had no idea what they were doing, and there goes your VP down the drain.
And look, I understand that this is part of the MOBA experience and always has been. League of Legends players have been crying about this for over a decade. But knowing that doesn't make it any less exhausting in the moment. The thing is, MOBAs by design eat up your time. A single match in Predecessor can easily run 30 to 40 minutes, sometimes longer depending on how the game goes. And when you're grinding ranked, you're not just playing one match, you're playing four, five, six matches trying to claw back VP you lost in a bad run. Before you know it, your entire gaming session has been swallowed up by one game and nothing else.
This is exactly what I mentioned in a previous post, the time consumption factor. Unlike jumping into an MMO where you can log in, do a quick dungeon, level up a bit and log off feeling like you accomplished something, the MOBA demands full attention and full sessions. If I'm going to spend three hours gaming, and two and a half of those hours are Predecessor ranked matches, that means I'm not playing anything else. No other game gets touched. And honestly? I don't like that feeling. I like being able to rotate between different experiences, try different things, jump into a story, explore a new world. With a ranked-heavy MOBA, that freedom starts to disappear.
So the question I keep asking myself is, do I actually want to keep playing Predecessor? The game itself, the mechanics, the heroes, the visual fidelity, the shooting and MOBA hybrid feel, all of that is legitimately great. The developers are active, updates keep coming, and the community is there. But if ranked is what gives the game its sense of purpose and direction, and ranked is making me feel like I'm on a treadmill going nowhere, then maybe it's just not the right game for me at this point in time. It's not that I think the game is bad, it's that I think the investment it requires doesn't match what I'm willing to give right now.
Maybe the answer is just stepping back from ranked entirely and playing casual modes, but then again, in a MOBA, if you're not ranking, what exactly are you building toward? That's the question I don't have a clean answer to. So gamers, if any of you are playing Predecessor, let me know how your ranked experience has been going. Are you stuck in Bronze too or have you managed to push through? Drop it in the comments, I'd love to know. See you in the next post!