Paladins Beta Impressions

Hi-Rez Studios’ latest project Paladins is quite the intriguing one. At its core, Paladins is an objective-based team shooter but various MOBA trappings are layered on top of its shooter elements. It's an odd combination of two genres that—unlike many other titles attempting to combine the two—tends more towards a shooter than a MOBA. The question is whether the combination works.

Paladins is already presented exceptionally well. While there are still many cards that have placeholder art—and Hi-Rez themselves are calling it a “true beta”—the team has clearly spent a lot of time on the user experience. The menu is sleek and modern, with large tiles providing most navigation. Opening new chests provides an elaborate animation before cards show up. Everything is organized intuitively so as to be easy to find. The graphics are somewhat behind the curve, but I imagine this is to allow the largest number of players possible to play the game without needing an expensive computer. The voice acting is consistently good, and it seems that many of the voices are repeats from Smite, but none of the voice actors and actresses that worked on the game have been confirmed as of yet.

As in a MOBA, you must choose one of several characters—often racing to choose the one you want before someone else does—before beginning a match. Each character has their own unique weapons and a set of three abilities. Most characters have one core ability, one support ability, and a movement-augmenting ability of some sort. For example, Pip can throw a high-damage bomb at enemies, place a slowing field, and become “weightless” temporarily, allowing him to jump higher. Grohk, on the other hand, can place a healing totem, temporarily make his lightning staff chain to multiple players, and become temporarily invisible.

In place of any sort of running the player is given a horse. Every character has two movement speeds—their speed on and off their horse. Mounting your horse takes a small amount of time and getting hit will immediately dismount you. It’s very clearly meant to be used to get around out of combat and you will need to be mindful when you mount up, lest the enemy draw first blood.

Once you get into the game your objective is simple. You wait for capture points to spawn, ride out to them, stand on them until your siege engine spawns, defend your siege engine as it attacks the other team’s gates, and attack the other team’s gates when you can. If the other team manages to spawn a siege engine, you destroy it before it can do too much damage to your base. You repeat this cycle until one team has destroyed the other’s keep. Capture points spawn at several random locations, but the cycle largely remains the same.

At times it can almost feel too simple. It rarely takes more than four good runs with a siege engine to destroy the other team’s keep. And it’s rare that the first run doesn’t destroy the first gate. Furthermore, the system encourages extremely simplistic tactics when fighting the siege engine. One team focuses on destroying the siege engine, paying no mind to the other team, while the other team focuses on killing them as fast as possible before they can destroy the siege engine. Nearly every game I have played has turned out this way. The game gives you no reason to make use of any other strategy because, ultimately, the other team can’t do damage to your gates unless the siege engine is attacking alongside them. Similarly, you can’t do damage to the other team’s gates if they destroy the siege engine. It’s an odd imbalance of priorities that starkly contrasts with the all-out–head-on battles for capture points.

Capture points spawns don’t do much to ease the feeling of simplicity. Capture points spawn randomly, but there are a small number of them and I have never seen the same capture point spawn twice in a row. There comes a point in each match where it becomes relatively easy to predict where a capture point will spawn based on eliminating the last two and splitting the team across the rest. The system almost feels as if it betrays the inclusion of randomness.

Battles don’t feel nearly as urgent or engaging as they should. Teamwork is required—and you will assuredly fail without it—but it’s rare that you need to tell another player what to do. The roles of each character are very clear cut and the objectives simple. Generic orders can be barked at teammates via keyboard commands, but these are rarely used. You will often find that your team knows what to do. You will simply win or lose based on who plays better. In this way it is a lot more like your average arena shooter. The best teams may have impeccable teamwork on their side, but random groupings of players can jump in and play without the need to feel like they are dragging their team down by not communicating well.

What truly sets Paladins apart is the card system. Paladins adopts more of its MOBA elements from Heroes of the Storm than it does Dota 2. Rather than using an item shop, each time you level you are given another choice of three cards drawn randomly from a deck of your character’s cards. In Casual mode the decks are randomly assembled by the game. The cards you choose from will augment your abilities in various ways. Perhaps Grohk’s healing totem will also reduce damage by 50% for all teammates within its range. Maybe that same healing totem will root enemy players for two seconds. Perhaps Pip will heal significantly while weightless. There are a number of options and no shortage of builds that you could create within a single game.

You can also craft more cards from duplicate cards. The game will automatically pull from your reserve of all duplicates, showing only a number that indicates how many duplicates you have of each tier. Various tiers will cost a different amount of cards. For example, you can craft a common card for three common duplicates or a rare card for five. You will not have to pick and choose which duplicates to use on each crafting session. The simplification is a welcome addition, as you only need one of each card anyways, and makes the entire process less tedious.

Paladins also uniquely allows grouped players to share cards. The game will pull a card at random from another player’s deck and share it with you automatically. It’s a nice feature that gives a small incentive for grouping, but I imagine it will have its limits. At some point you will have every card and the feature will end up being relatively useless.

Unfortunately, you cannot manually activate cards. Cards that require activation and cooldown will activate on a context sensitive basis when relevant. At times, this can be frustrating, as cards you want to save will activate themselves without asking. Other times, the cards simply won’t activate at all. I have yet to figure out exactly how the system works, but I would largely prefer being able to activate them myself.

At present, Paladins provides a unique take on both the MOBA and shooter genres that can be quite fun. It can feel a bit simplistic at times, but, with matches usually lasting no longer than 15 minutes, it is a quick bout of fun that is great in small doses. The card system adds quite a lot to the game and I am glad to see more MOBA-like games taking on—and, in this case, improving—a system similar to Heroes of the Storm, rather than introducing a complex item shop.

Paladins will likely appeal more to casual fans of MOBAs and shooter fans than fans of more traditional MOBAs. Each character has a unique set of abilities, but they are few in number and easy to learn to use, as most don’t need to be used in a specific combination. The fact that cards activate automatically maintains a low level of complexity, albeit at the cost of the loss of a certain amount of control over your character. There is a good game here, but it can feel too simple at times. Hopefully, Hi-Rez will work on that over the course of the beta.