Pa l a d i n s : R e a l m R OYALE
Champs turn chicken in Hi-Rez’s battle royale
If you do get taken out by an enemy it’s not an instant exit from the game
Way back in the mists of time (well, January 2018), Hi-Rez Studios unveiled its own foray into the popular battle royale genre. Battlegrounds was initially a mode within the hero shooter Paladins: Champions of the Realm but it has now transitioned into a Fortnite- esque standalone project called Paladins: Realm Royale. RealmRoyale is going through technical alpha right now, so it’s possible its developers will make more big changes, but at the time of writing the setup shares many of the trappings of other battle royale games and modes.
100 players jump out of an airship onto a chunk of land and use a combination of hiding, killing and looting to ensure they are the last person (or people in the case of the four-person team Quad mode) standing. The main point of difference is currently the ability to disenchant loot for credits, and use those credits to obtain legendary items and consumables at Forges.
Forges are the only places you can get these top-tier bits of loot, and thus they create flashpoints. Players must balance the reward of those legendary items against the risk of controlling the Forge while the item is being made, leaving them vulnerable to attack.
In its Battlegrounds incarnation, this battle royale was more closely linked to the existing Paladins game dynamic, so you would have teams of four built around the classes of character in that game— front liners for tanking, flankers for flanking, supports for healing, and so on.
Currently RealmRoyale is geared around everyone starting with the exact same generic beefcake soldier dude template and the same starter weapon (a knife), then using your decisions around found loot and Forged items to build them up. Currently the weaponry is borrowed from the main game, but those bits of kit might be placeholders while the team figures out the essentials of play.
Your character has two weapon slots and two ability slots. The ability slots allow you to augment your character by adding options like Blink—which lets you teleport forward a short distance. There’s also an armor system, which lets you further beef up your beefcake by applying greaves and gauntlets and the like.
If you do get taken out by an enemy it’s not an instant exit from the game. Instead, you get transformed into a chicken with a 30-second timer. Survive the timer and you’re back in the game, but if you get blown to bits you’re out for real, disappearing in a cloud of feathers.
Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes
Executive producer, Chris Larson, explained the switch to a standalone game as a necessary step as the needs of a battle royale mode came into conflict with the base game. Instead of continuing to try to reconcile the two, Hi-Rez split the project into two sections each developed by a separate team.
As someone who has played both, I was more interested in Battlegrounds because the idea of taking on team roles in a battle royale fits with how I like to play games in general. RealmRoyale seems far closer to existing battle royale options, but with the addition of a risk-and-reward crafting station, which brings a control point element to the game.
Larson’s announcement of Realms Royale as a standalone project also included info about how the game is likely to be monetized: “We expect it to be free to play, with monetization around skins and visuals.” I’m curious to see whether the Forge will be enough to either tempt players away from existing free-to-play battle royale behemoth, Fortnite, or lure in existing Paladins aficionados.