Focuses development on SMITE 2.
Continue reading “Hi-Rez Announces Layoffs, Ends Major Development On Paladins”
Tag: Paladins
Watch Paladins On Mixer, Get Rewards
Hi-Rez Studios wants you to play Paladins, but they would also like you to watch Paladins. This month, Hi-Rez launched the Mixer store in Paladins that incentivizes players to watch game streams for rewards. By linking your Mixer account and watching Paladins streams, you’ll receive coins that can be redeemed for skins and other cosmetics.
- Link your Mixer account at https://my.hirezstudios.com/#link and instantly unlock a free Mixer Spray.
- Watch mixer.com/paladinsgame throughout the week to accumulate Mixer Points.
- Use your Mixer Points to score skins and other cosmetics from the in-game Mixer Store.
Players who link their accounts will receive a quest for a limited Khan skin (as shown above). The mixer store is only around for a limited time, and points are obtained at a rate of 1 per 12 minutes.
Source: Paladins
Hi-Rez To Roll Back Card Unbound
Hi-Rez Studios this week announced that the controversial, albeit apparently successful, Cards Unbound updated will be removed from Paladins over the next major release cycle.
Cards Unbound is a controversial update that changed the way that cards (which can affect power) are collected. The update was criticized by long-term players who saw the update as a method of shoehoring players into the game’s cash shop by pushing the card leveling system to random loot boxes.
“Our team will be working over the next major release cycle to remove Cards Unbound from the game. We will be replacing it with a new system that I believe the community will be really excited about — including the re-introduction of the deck building point system, and a method for obtaining cards that will be way less grindy.”
Some points on how the new system will work are as follows. This list subject to change.
- Legendary Cards will now be called Talents.
- Talents will only have a single level.
- Talents will be unlocked for free by earning XP and gaining Champion levels (for example; level 1,5,10,15).
- All Champion Cards will now be free (No cost or grind).
- Deck creation will return to a point system where players can distribute 15 points across the five cards they select for their loadout. Each Champion Card will have five ranks to choose from.
- Talents will not have ranks, and are not included in the loadout point cap.
- Talents and Decks will continue to be chosen at match start to allow players to tailor their playstyles based on their opponents.
- New Talents will be added over time and give further varied playstyles.
- Champion Mastery will no longer be capped at level 25. Instead, it will work similarly to Player Account leveling (which has no cap).
- Card chests will be removed from the game.
- We are evaluating the best options to compensate players for their previously earned cards, and hope to share details soon.
More information can be found at the link below.
(Source: Google Docs)
Hi-Rez Studios Announces $150,000 Paladins Tournament
Paladins has had a massive response, and Hi-Rez Studios has wasted no time in announcing the first major tournament with a grand prize that could only be described as…grand. Teams from Brazil, North America, Europe, Latin America, Australia/New Zealand, and China will all compete over $150 grand from January 5th through the 8th, with 8 teams battling it out to see who makes it to the finals and walks off with that sweet cheddar.
“The Paladins Open Beta had an explosive first weekend with well over 100,000 new accounts created in the first 24 hours”, said Todd Harris, Hi-Rez Studios co-founder and COO. “We’ve also seen a very strong interest in Paladins from competitive players and esports organizations worldwide and are therefore extending the Paladins Invitational to include more regions and more teams”
More information on the tournament can be found at http://www.hirezexpo.com/
Rant: The Miserable Experience of Paladins
I’m writing this while viewing my profile page on Paladins, the latest title by Hi-Rez Studios and something of a cross between a MOBA and modern day Team Fortress 2. It’s a pretty simple concept, one that has been in beta for the better part of the last year. Two teams fight over control of a capture point, with the winner then escorting a payload to the other team’s side.
Your character is customized outside of the match using a collectible card game style “deck” as well as inside the match by buying MOBA-esque items that boost certain stats. It is a popular game, well received by the Steam community with an 84% positive rating, and by all means it is turning out to be a solid game.
But after playing for nearly five hours and never winning a single match, Paladins has been the most miserable experience I have had with a game in recent memory. Not frustrating, miserable. A losing streak in Overwatch is frustrating, being perpetually locked out of my online banking because customer support is rubbish is frustrating. Paladins is miserable, it’s like a delicious slice of pizza that comes out of the oven only for someone to immediately walk all over it.
If you haven’t played Paladins, the primary focus of the game is on objectives. You have to capture the point in order to raise the payload and you must escort the payload in order to successfully deliver said payload. Killing the enemy and not dying to the enemy is a big part of this, however you’ll notice that at no point does killstreak or kill/death/assist ratio come into play in the terms of victory.
This is Hi-Rez’s fault, according to the forums and Reddit community. The game gives too little point incentive to focus on the objective, outside of the obvious winning/losing the match. So my experience with Paladins hasn’t been miserable on account of losing every match, but the moments where I die and watch my team clear out the capture zone, only for all four of them to completely ignore the objective and run off individually to be picked off so the enemy team can waltz right in and take the capture point.
The misery of yet another 0-4 loss because more than half of the team did not bother at all to play the objective. It’s like I’m back in little league soccer, playing on a team of kids who don’t want to be there and don’t give a crap. This isn’t the same problem that I have with standard MOBAs, where public matches are a crapshoot of random people who don’t really know how to play a game where five people are supposed to be juggling three lanes and a jungle area. That’s a complicated game to consistently get five random people to work together on. Paladins is not that complicated.
And I’d be remiss if I didn’t say this: I played a couple more games before finishing this piece off and, you know what? I lost. My team lost, but it was a very long game because both teams were fighting their best and the capture point was in a constant state of overtime as the bodies piled up and nobody seemed to be able to get an advantage. We lost 3-4, but we put on a hell of a show. The second game, I won, but it wasn’t fun. This time I wound up on the winning team, watching as none of the players on the other team even bothered approaching the capture point over the course of the match. That isn’t fun either.
One other thing I will say about Paladins is that the community is hell of a lot better than those I’ve encountered in MOBAs, SMITE included. Despite our heavy losses, I haven’t seen a single rage quit, nobody went afk in protest, and there wasn’t any trolling going on in chat. Barring this one, exceptionally major issue with people constantly not playing to the objective, I think Paladins will be the kind of game that could even give Overwatch a run for its money. It is, for all intent and purpose, exactly the fantasy spiritual sequel to Global Agenda that I always wanted.
Otherwise I have no opinion on the matter.
Paladins Ditches Heavy Customization
Paladins is a MOBA game that puts emphasis on players being able to customize their characters via collectible cards, at least until Hi-Rez decided not to. While originally billed as a game that would carry a small number of highly customizable heroes, a recent interview with Erez Goren has revealed that the developer plans on limiting just how much the cards can change a character. In the interview, Goren points to play tests revealing that players wanted more heroes, but heroes that were easily identifiable much like they are in Dota or League of Legends.
“People don’t seem to appreciate the variation on a character as much as they do having a new character that does things that particular way.”
Check out MMO Fallout’s coverage of Paladins here.
(Source: Rock, Paper, Shotgun)
Beta Perspective: Paladins
Hi-Rez Studios is one of those “follow the trend” developers, one that doesn’t seem to have an explicit purpose like Treyarch (first person shooters), Obsidian Entertainment (role playing games), or Sergey Titov (shovelware). Instead, the company’s development history can be summed up as whatever seems to be most popular at the time, with its first two ventures turning out to be financial sinkers. With the success of Smite on PC and Xbox One, it was likely guaranteed that Hi-Rez’s next product would be something along those same lines. Introduce Paladins.
I like to think of Paladins as the love child of Team Fortress 2, Smite, and Hearthstone. The game is a Frankenstein’s monster mash of first person shooting, MOBA objectives, with a splash of collectible card game customization that keeps people awake (and spending money) on Hearthstone.
First, the SMITE part. The meat of Paladins plays out nearly exactly like its MOBA counterpart (at least in the one game mode currently available), with two teams of five players of unique class fighting for control of capture points. The team that captures said point spawns a siege weapon of incredible strength that lumbers towards the enemy base. With the help of the siege weapon, the team must knock down two layers of base defense before destroying the core itself and claiming victory. Once the siege weapon is destroyed, the timer restarts and a new point opens.
Paladin’s characters are bound to be familiar to anyone with MOBA experience. You have the turret and shield-laying engineer-type, the bow-wielding ranger scout that can reveal hidden enemies, the healing paladin, the tank, etc. Each class has three powers plus a mount to allow for faster travel around the map, and even the maps themselves seem to be structured similar to the three-lane system present in MOBAs.
But where Paladins is similar to SMITE, it is equally different. Like any other first person shooter, you have to aim your attacks. You won’t find trash mobs to grind money and experience on, in fact there is no money as the inventory and item shop didn’t make the roll over either. Rather, players can gain points through capturing objectives, dealing damage, and defeating enemies, in addition to a rolling experience that keeps poorer performing players from falling too far out of the loop. Finally, the level cap is 5, with much of the power difference coming from cards that become available as you level up.
The Hearthstone level of customization is ultimately what sets Paladins worlds apart from MOBAs and other team-based first person shooters. In one match I was able to turn my archer into a mean green killing machine, not only capable of landing major hits that slowed down targets, but healed me at the same time. My engineer in another match was capable of a shield turret combo that healed me while the shield damaged anyone who dared to get too close.
I also have to hand it to Hi-Rez for adding in a casual version of the game to even the playing field. The standard game mode doesn’t allow you to choose which cards you go into battle with, instead picking them randomly out of your inventory. It’s a nice idea to keep the game fair for everyone, rather than forcing newer players to go up against seasoned veterans with stacked decks, but the effect can be frustrating. While the game is still being heavily balanced, the game mode does make it possible to go into battle with none of your useful cards.
The more you play Paladins, the more you unlock cards, and the more tinkering you can do with each individual character. I heavily enjoyed my time playing in the beta so far, and look forward to the new characters and game modes that will be coming out in the coming months.
As with previous Hi-Rez games, you can nab a beta key by buying a founder’s pack ($20), by registering for the beta, or by begging someone in the community for one of their extra invitations.
MMO Fallout 