Hi-Rez President Defends Naming Paladins New Mode “Battlegrounds”

Yesterday, Hi-Rez announced a new gameplay mode for Paladins: Champions of the Realm called Battlegrounds. The new mode would be 20 minute matches on maps “over 300 times the square footage” of a standard Paladins map, with 100 players competing against one another in a free-for-all to be the last one standing. There would also be fog that slowly creeping in throughout these matches that gradually limit the size of the map.

If any of that sounds familiar to you that’s because the entire thing was inspired by the wildly PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds. The new mode even shares the game’s name, and as you could imagine, this didn’t pass without comment online. Reactions ranged from confused, to belligerent, to cries that Hi-Rez was ripping off the popular PUBG.

Today at the Expo, president of Hi-Rez President Stew Chisam chose that specific name.

“We actually had a lot of conversations,” Chisam says, his full comments posted by PCGamer. He continued: “We thought if we call it something completely out of the blue people might not know what it was, or if we call it Survival which we previously had [as a mode] people might think it was the previous version. But Battlegrounds—we actually settled on Battlegrounds because—I don’t know if you got the same feeling when you played but when we got to actually playing the mode, you’re in your four-person team with your classes, it felt like an MMO raid party.”

Chisam goes on to say that the name is meant to evoke “the old MMO battlegrounds” with players “getting on these horses and you’re galloping through this big fantasy landscape.”

Paladins: Battlegrounds will be free for everyone to play later this year.

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