Paladins is a free to play team based hero shooter and has been in open beta for a while now. I started playing it earlier this week and I have to say I have been enjoying my time with it very much.
Link to the game on steamLink to the official websiteThe game currently has 18 playable characters. Initially when the game was being developed they were aiming for a game with fewer characters but higher customization for each character. However due to player feedback during the beta they have decided that they will be implementing more unique characters to the game and focus less on the customization.
Characters come in four varieties. We have our "Front Line" characters who are usually pretty tanky and have shields they can deploy to protect themselves or their team. Then we have the "Support" class which focuses on healing, debuffing and a bit of crowd control. We also have "Damage" characters who focus on... well you probably guessed it... dealing damage. Finally we have "Flank" characters that usually focus on burst damage and high mobility.
It is very similar to other games in the genre. If you've played High Rez's previous games or games from other developers like TF2, Overwatch or any sort of MOBA a lot of the characters will have familiar abilities.
Each character is customizeable through a set of collectible cards. You mix and match these cards to make a 5 card "deck". These cards often are centered around the character's abilities. Some examples would be "use X ability and gain 10% move speed for 2s" or "your shield has 500 extra health". Once you have your deck assembled you assign it points. You can buff each card up to 4 times, so say if you had a card that boosted your shield by 500, if you spend 4 points on it it might buff it by 1000 instead. You only have 12 points to distribute among the five cards.
I am not sure how I feel about the card system yet. It could be interesting but I have a feeling that it will often be a case that there are a few optimal builds so you'll always be going for the same sets anyway resulting in it just being another pointless grind. The nice part about it though is you pick your deck after you know what characters are on the other team so that might influence the way you customize your character. Now you might be wondering how you get these cards. Well you can either buy them outright with the in game gold currency or you can get them randomly from "radiant chests". Radiant chests can be purchased with the game's premium currency and are also earned as you level up your profile.
You can further customize your character during a match by buying items with points you earn while playing. They fall into four categories and you can only buy one from each category. The first category has items that will reduce CC and add damage mitigation. The second category has items that affect mobility and cooldowns. The third category has items that affect healing, such as lifesteal or getting a bonus to healing received. The final category has damage related items, you can choose to do more damage to shields, reload faster, reduce enemy healing etc...
There are currently two game modes in the game. Siege and Payload. In siege there is a central point that you have to stand on king of the hill style until you fill up the capture bar. The team that captured the point then has to push a payload to the enemy base to get points. You win when your team hits 4 points. You get 1 point for capturing the payload and another for delivering it to the enemy base. If you fail to deliver it to the enemy base the other team gets a point. However you can't win by only defending, you need to get your fourth point by capturing the middle or delivering a payload.
The second game mode is payload. In this mode one team starts of as attacking and the other defending. Your goal is to push the payload to the other side. Once the payload is delivered or the time runs out the team switches roles. The winner is the team who pushed the payload the furthest or if both teams successfully delivered the payload to the enemy base the team who did it in less time wins.
Now for the business model. Like many F2P games there are two kinds of currency. There is gold which you earn by playing matches and leveling up champions and then there are crystals which you pay money for. You can get a bit of the premium currency from login rewards (I earned 50 this week for logging in 7 days in a row for example). With gold you can buy champions, cards and some cosmetics (mostly recolours and voice sets). The premium currency can be used to buy cosmetics, mounts, to unlock champions or to buy radiant chests.
The cosmetics include champion skins, emotes and voice packs. Skins are divided up into pieces so you can mix and match if you wanted to. So if you liked a certain head and a certain costume you could mix them up. Or you can just buy a set as a whole. So far they come in three rarities, common, rare and epic. You can buy common skins with gold but rare and epic skins cost premium currency. Champion emotes are only available through Radiant Chests as far as I can tell. Which is pretty shitty since cosmetics seem to have a pretty low drop rate in chests. Voice packs can be purchased with premium currency or gold for the common voice packs. You don't actually start with a voice pack when you unlock a character, your voice emotes that you use in game is the standard Paladins announcer voice.
You can also buy radiant chests with premium currency (you get one every time you level up your profile). These chests give you either cards, gold or cosmetics. You're mostly going to be getting cards and gold from the chests. The cosmetic drops seem pretty rare. Radiant chests look like a big waste of money to me.
Many of the champions start off unlocked. You can unlock champions one of three ways. You can buy them with gold, premium currency or you can buy the founders pack. The founders pack is 20$, it unlocks all of the champions and will unlock every future champion as well. It also gives you an epic skin for the champion Fernando and an epic mount.
Anyway I've probably rambled on enough about the game. If you end up liking it feel free to add me in game, my player name is AngryOtter.
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Topic: Paladins: a team based hero shooter (Read 3504 times)