As part of HRX 2018, Hi-Rez Studios announced a battle royale game mode for their free-to-play title, Paladins.
“Riding on a mount through this massive fantasy-themed map, looking for gear and cooperating with your team, Paladins: Battlegrounds delivers some of the feel of open-world MMO PvP but all within a 20-minute match,” said Todd Harris, Executive Producer of Paladins.Dubbed as the "first hero-shooter battle royale", players must work together to survive on a "massive" map that is 300 times the square footage as a Paladins' Siege map. Each player will have their own mount, which they can use to explore the map, with more than "four-dozen" outposts for the player to loot. The airplane mechanic of the game is replaced by a zeppelin, which will drop legendary gear.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esVvWctfTPg
Different from other battle royales, Paladins: Battlegrounds is designed to be played with four-person teams. Each side will have Supports (Healers), Front Liners (Tanks), Damage Champions (DPS), and Flanks (Rogues).
Interestingly, the reason that the name 'Battlegrounds' was chosen was not because of the crazily popular PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds. Instead, Hi-Rez President Stew Chisam states that it was because of the old MMO term 'battlegrounds':
For us it was more evocative of the old MMO battlegrounds. And so to us, choosing that name versus battle royale was more of an homage to those big MMO battleground-type settings."Chisam also states that Battlegrounds is nothing too extreme for them, as for Hi-Rez, the new mode is "just a game mode", and that it wouldn't play a "major role" for marketing the game in the future.
Paladins: Battlegrounds will be a free mode upon its release, with an alpha that was playable at Hi-Rez Expo and a full release set for later this year.
What do you think of this news? Are you going to give Paladins Battlegrounds a try? Let us know in the comments!