After launching into open beta on PC earlier this month and riding Overwatch comparisons to a steady spot on Steam’s “top games by player count” list, Hi-Rez’s hero shooter Paladins is gearing up for its PlayStation 4 and Xbox One debut.
Fun fact: I played Paladins long before I got my hands on Overwatch, so the accusations of cloning that led to an extended Reddit “nuh-uh” from developer Hi-Rez tickled me to no end. Either way, the videos and cries of “Overwatch clone!” seem to have gone pretty well, all things considered. The free-to-play arena shooter is in good company on the aforementioned Steam list, and has been since last week.
Now the game will be joining Hi-Rez Studio’s other successful title, Smite, on current generation consoles. Paladins was developed from the beginning with console play in mind, so it should be a pretty smooth transition. Interested players can sign up for closed beta access on PlayStation 4 or Xbox One today.
Paladins is an online shooter in which a mix of fantasy and sci-fi characters battle over objectives in the name of earning points to open treasure chests. Those chests contain skins and collectible cards that can be used to personalise a character’s look and skill loadout. Only most of that description also applies to Blizzard’s wildly popular Overwatch, but at this point putting its name in a Paladins’ headline is pretty much required.
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2 responses to “Paladins Is Coming To Consoles, Just Like Overwatch”
Imagine that. Maximising your consumer base…. Can’t believe their copying blizzard again!
I haven’t played Overwatch, but Paladins feels to me like TF2 with much more random, unfocussed and, frankly, mostly piss weak character design.
It might just be that it’s in beta, but Paladins sits in an odd middle ground between the elegance of TF2s well defined, simple, classes and the glorious complexity of SMITE, and not in a good way.
I’ve been playing off and on since launch and purchased the founders pack, so I’ve obviously got something out of it, and yet…
Only a couple of the Paladins heroes can be compared favourably to any SMITE hero. None have the sheer awesome power of something like slamming a giant ice wall into the ground, for example. And compared to TF2, well, the characters just don’t have the ‘crispness’ that TF2s characters do – the Paladins version of the Demoman, for example, is just odd.
Populations on the Australian server are also now way down since launch. Launch day I was waiting 20 seconds for a game, max, whereas now it’s closer to a minute and a half.
For what it’s worth, graphics are nothing earth shattering – it feels very late naughties. And skins are almost all completely horrible – mostly just different pastel shirt colours.
Basically, I think after last night’s four hour Paladins binge it’s now back to SMITE and TF2 for me, no regrets.
Designating over half the article as a “fun fact” reads pretty obnoxious.