A eulogy for a forgotten game, 6 months since the day it died
And now, it is time to post more thoughts about video games. On February the 6th, 2025, a game nobody played was finally declared dead, after a decade of suffering in silence. This game was originally conceived as early as 2012 to be an early bid contender in the “overtaking Team Fortress 2″ scramble for Africa situation, when live-service games were in their infancy. In the mad dash to come up with a new, long-form gameplay model that could incorporate the lootbox economy garbage valve had invented (whoops,) only a few vague descriptors managed to stay in the design document between pre-pro and beta in 2015. It was a competitive, team-based multiplayer shooter: 5v5, class-based, objectives on the map. Everything else was up in the air. During those 3 years of chaos, we saw the release of not only Destiny, but also several betas for Overwatch, two technological innovations morally on par with the cotton gin, in relative terms, but also about as popular as Jesus. Now the class-based multiplayer shooter scene had some stiff competition. If you want to succeed where those two did, you need to have an aggressive DLC model on deck for launch, and you need to do cutesy, cartoony visuals for SFM porn artists.
This was a very unfortunate position for a lot of games. Many things that had already been designed and partially developed were now in a whole new market, and many of them did not survive. Battleborn, Dirty Bomb, Gigantic, just to name a few, all ended up D.O.A. when their gameplay models were deemed too complicated, or their designs too similar to what was already successful. But this game in question–this game whose death spawned this writing–managed to survive for over 10 years, despite facing all the exact criticisms that killed its peers. This game kowtowed to those requirements for successful shooters, this game had the same visual style as everything else, this game had an overcomplicated and busy gameplay model, and worst of all? This game had an even more predatory monetization scheme than anyone else in town, alive or dead. How did it survive?
The lead I’ve been burying is Paladins: Champions of the Realm, a game so ignored and ridiculed in its time that even when it was active, you would still be met with a hesitant “I think I remember that” if you ever brought it up. This is a game that from day 1 of public availability was considered an Overwatch clone: it was overseen by Hirez studios, the infamous creators of SMITE. If you aren’t familiar, SMITE is a third-person action MOBA that revolutionized the rip-off game, so thoroughly recontextualizing the gameplay models of DOTA and League of Legends into simpler terms that it managed to cheat itself into huge success as a more casual alternative for eSports people. Obviously, Paladins was seen the same way by people who were already used to Overwatch. It was going to be a derivative hero shooter with lower quality, less effort, and more microtransactions, and the only advantage it had over the Activision-Blizzard shoggoth was that it was free to play. That made the lootbox gambling-for-action-figures bullshit feel a little better, but it also carried a stigma of dysfunction, and cheapness.
But was it an Overwatch clone? As I said, it took a while to design, and came out essentially parallel to Overwatch, so it couldn’t have been completely ripping it off, right? And how would it survive for so long if nobody had any faith in it at all? And, what gave it the edge over those other games that died?
Let’s address the elephant in the room: I know a lot about this game because I played it. I played it a lot, and I’m a member of the few and the proud who did so. It was an on/off relationship, being that the live-service model meant that updates 4 times a year would sometimes make the game unplayable…at least until they ended up updating the updates. But it was a relationship nonetheless, and I’ll tell you how it all started. Somewhere around 2017, I had been playing Rainbow Six: Siege since launch, but along with my pals I had become incredibly disappointed with the lifespan of that thing. By the end of year 2, Ubisoft had torched all their good will by breaking the game with horrible, unbalanced updates and changes to the fundamentals that made the game feel alien from its original, unique concept. Analyzing the long, slow death of that game (I pray every day for it to permanently die but it keeps coming back, god please show mercy to this decade old codebase,) is a whole other mess, but the long and short of it is that we needed a new game to play. We had a thirst for competitive shooters that were complex, strategic, and thoughtful–it was going unquenched.
I was ready to hang up the gloves after a couple searches through the xbox games store, steadfast in my belief that I would rather just not play video games with the boys anymore than have to get back into Counter Strike. But my boy Chase, a lovely man with a big heart, very optimistic, suggested with tongue firmly in cheek that we try Paladins, because it was free and we had nothing else to do. I personally had never even heard of it, but I knew SMITE well enough to know that I thought it was fuckin gay. There was no way I’d like this knockoff crap, I despised Overwatch back then and I still do to this day, so that couldn’t be a path forward, right?
Still, it was free. He had a point about that. And when you’re young and bored, you can extract at least one fun evening from playing bad games as long as your friends are around. It was a “nothing to lose” situation, so I decided to indulge it. After all, the free space from uninstalling R6 gave me a little boost of confidence. Deleting a game you hate that took up a ton of your time is sort of like the geek equivalent of the rush you get after a worthwhile breakup.
So we gave it a whirl. I had low expectations, especially when I had to make a “Hirez Account” to play the game and track the eventual lootbox payments. Wonder where that data ended up? But the title screen isn’t exactly friendly: you ever played a free game? Or like a mobile game? There are 4000 menus, 37 trackers for various currencies, ads on the front page, and some CGI dragon standing there mugging at you. It was a lot to take in, and to give away the game a little bit, this messiness and insistence on keeping the cash flow front-and-center is part of what killed the game over time. In spite of this, we soldiered on, and declared to ignore all that mumbo jumbo to just see what the game looked like.
So we get in a little queue, the game is broken and cheap so it takes a couple tries to not have the game crash or server disconnect, and then a minute or so later we’re in a “match,” or so we believe. The default game mode was “siege,” the flagship game mode, where in you fight over a capture point and the team who wins has to push a payload. There are at least 2 rounds of this, depending on how successful one team is. As a TF2 veteran this wasn’t too complicated, so at the character (“Champion”) select screen, I picked this dude who’s a big lizard with a rocket launcher. This man was called “Drogoz,” and he was sort of an equivalent to Pharah in Overwatch, and early on played much the same as she did.
I don’t remember who everybody else picked, but two things are worth noting from here; first of all, no duplicates. You can only have one of each guy on your team, unlike TF2 or Overwatch. Also, more relevant to this particular story, your opponents are all bots for the first few matches until you level up your account enough from completing games, unbeknownst to us at the time. So we all load in, we’re all different guys, we don’t necessarily know what’s going on, but weirdly, we stomp the fuck out of our first game. It was sort of fun and we didn’t expect to win, so we tried another game, and then we stomped that too. We stomped maybe 5 games in a row before it occurred to us: “hey, we’re actually getting positive feedback from this, and its mechanically kind of fun, so this is more rewarding than the game we were playing before!” in so many words.
From there, it stuck. Not for all of us, but for me and a small cadre of my peers, the rush of having our shooter skills paying off in a new environment was enough inspiration to see what the meat of the game was like under all that garbage UI. What we found was an even bigger surprise than the wins we racked up on those poor robots–some actual depth! Part of what was so aggravating about Overwatch is that there was so little strategy. You pick a bunch of the same dudes, they do everything they can do right out of the box, and you just play dress-up with skins ad infinitum. The “variety” in the game comes from eSports metagame crap, if you’re actually willing to keep up with that, and if you’re smart then you’re not gonna fuckin do that. But this game had so many different systems in place, and so many strange design ideas hidden under the veneer of particle effects, player economies, and cleavage.
That all is what kept me coming back. This was a whole world to figure out and tinker with. The premise of Paladins is that it’s a class-based team shooter, sure, but the borrowings from other games suddenly stop seeming like ripoffs when you look at how they were woven together. Some of these characters were ripped from Overwatch, sure, but when they are given modifiers that you can build into separate loadouts, and a MOBA-style buy system to change how they function during the course of each match, and, as established, you can only bring one of them into each team? The thought process of actually winning a game of Paladins sophisticates forever and ever as you keep playing it and learning more, and what I played was actually the shitty, confused beginning.
The game didn’t fully release until 2018, so I was technically playing the beta. The big blocks were still in place: you built loadouts for characters by balancing decks of cards, you made buys with slowly generating credits during the match to get exponentially better buffs, and every character filled one of 4 dedicated archetypes around which your team had to strategize collectively. As time went on, the things that changed the most were the monetization system (never stopped being a mess, eventually settled on regular battle pass slop like everyone else,) and that loadout system, which evolved by launch into being a deck of 5 cards with 5 nodes of incremental power on each one, and you had to make the deck add up to 15. Plus, you got to choose a “legendary card” to pair with it, which would significantly modify one of your character’s existing functions, and your loadout was meant to work within that framework.
Of course, this loadout business was on top of the fact that your character already had 4 abilities and an “ultimate” that built up over time, and some characters also had bespoke movement techniques. Everyone had radically different health pools, movement speeds, sizes, looks, and gameplans that were all subject to change under the buy system. And there were like a million game modes. This was a complicated beast of a game, and it took a very long time to wrangle it all in. In retrospect, it’s closer to a MOBA than it was to something like Overwatch, but it sidestepped the problems of both comparators by being simpler than the former (matches were like 40 minutes tops, which for a MOBA is nothing,) and deeper than the later. It bridged the gap, and it filled a niche that nobody knew existed. At least until Battleborn failed, but they were basically coming out at the same time.
See, before I even get into why the game ended up dying, that’s something worth addressing. I believe the game succeeded where some others failed because it simply took the challenge of designing “complex, but not too complex” head-on, and nailed it by spending a long time workshopping tweaks to a solid gameplay model during the beta. But I also posed the question of “was it an Overwatch clone,” and there is a part of me that has to admit it: sometimes, it sort of was.
The gameplay model is obviously different. The gunplay action was the second banana to the team-based, deck-building strategy element, and the intense movement and fancy shooting ended up losing in all cases to grouping up and playing defensively. The similarities are more superficial, things like the visual styles of characters and some of those characters’ archetypes individually. The game itself, though cartoony UE5 grist that has piled up in unbelievable quantities in the days since TF2 first came around, sets itself apart from Overwatch by being far from futuristic. It’s this weird, brassy fantasy, where guns are powered by magic crystals but are still guns, and everything is a cozy magic village of some kind. It was all part of this oeuvre that Hirez was trying to develop called “The Realm,” which had its own take on vaguely steampunk sword and sorcery–if you want an easy laugh, go read about the history of “Realm Royale,” see how that turned out lol.
So the main comparisons were the characters. That, and the lootbox system, which is actually distinct from Overwatch’s because it has this incredible, user-friendly feature where you can’t get fucking duplicates. Crazy how uncommon that is, we have to have this pseudo-gambling crap in our games but we have to waste money on rerolls? Come on now. Anyway, the characters; when Paladins was first starting out in November of 2015, the closed beta released with 8 dudes, and a new one every month for about the first year. Keep in mind that this release was exactly 1 year after the announcement of Overwatch, and around the same time as the release of the first closed beta for it. Among these 8 characters, at least 5 of them have direct analogues to Overwatch. To say that there was some homework shared around would be an understatement.
I would describe it as “cross-pollination,” as it was less common for an Overwatch idea to come around then for Paladins to just take it. Their developments became parallel during the first year, and as similar as many ideas in Paladins are to existing Overwatch ideas, it may surprise you to know that it went in the other direction just as frequently as time went on. I won’t deny that Skye is supposed to be Tracer, or that Barik is supposed to be Torbjorn, or that Fernando is supposed to be Reinhardt. But there was eventually a point where not only did Paladins have quite a few original designs that were way more fun to use than in Overwatch, but the wildly more successful Overwatch decided it liked some of its friends’ ideas more. For example, Moira, a healer in Overwatch cobbled together primarily from the gameplay abilities of Seris, a healer from Paladins who released half a year earlier. Another good example is the Overwatch character Sigma, a man whose primary kit was sort of bastardized from Paladins tank Inara, but his interesting ultimate ability ended up being reused 2 years after his release by Paladins tank Azaan.
You see what I mean about cross-pollination? These two games borrowed heavily from one another, and in a better world, Paladins could’ve stuck around as the hardcore, nerdier alternative for people who didn’t like Overwatch (me and my nerd friends.) But the fact of the matter is that Overwatch hit first, and in the old days the exchange was usually Paladins stealing from them, not the other way around. The stigma of being a f2p game with lootboxes that also copied off of the big guy’s notes was something Paladins seriously struggled to escape from, even when Overwatch was at its worst, and even when they announced they were killing their servers for a sequel nobody wanted. I personally believe that if anybody had given Paladins a chance, they would’ve realized that there was so much more to do in it, and it was way bigger than just a few stolen ideas.
And also, while I’m thinking of it, the stolen ideas were honestly one of the draws if you think about it. Not only were they taking gameplay ideas from more boring, less thoughtful games and implementing them with extra fix-ins, you also got to use those ideas on the playground of loadouts and buys that their original creators never built for them. Once Paladins had enough players to warrant a full release date in 2018, the thievery had become a known and ironically embraced phenomenon, and the game ended up with an insanely unique sense of humor. Most of the cosmetics and voicelines–there was a huge array of these, every character had a ton of personality–were either references to or jokes at the expense of existing games, movies, shows, or franchises. Paladins went for the Venture Bros. strategy of doing Gen X “remember this?” humor, but it ended up working when you realized they had a rock solid game to back it up. I think Paladins is one of the funniest multiplayer games ever made, besides obviously TF2, and until recently nothing new even gave it a contest. Helldivers 2 is really pretty funny though.
Now, I say rock solid. That may be exaggeration. Up until now, I’ve only discussed the game’s design, art style, and relationship to F For Fake style forgery. If this game was so fun to tinker with, and so irreverently funny, why did it die? Was it just the stigma of being Overwatch’s resident copycat? Well, having broken servers and no sense of direction didn’t help, and alienating everyone in the playerbase by refusing to ever care about the quality of the product didn’t either.
Obviously there’s more to it than that. A lot more actually, but it’s easier to explain. Many games have survived allegations of plagiarism, and many games have survived being undercut (or perhaps overcut) by bigger studios. Paladins had all the makings of a fun game to last the aeons, but it was born with a severe illness that had nothing to really do with the game itself, or the market. Paladins was horribly mismanaged. Tip to tail, top to bottom: everybody in charge of that project couldn’t possibly have given a fuck about its success. Let’s try to hit the big points.
Unfortunately for any would-be historians, the timeline of events for Paladins is pretty murky looking back. We know when all the patches and stuff came out, and we know what builds came when, but as for who was where and why behind the scenes, it’s mostly “oral tradition,” to be charitable. At a distance, the general trend is that the producers at Hirez were sharks for quick and easy returns without much investment, and that could be for any number of reasons. Of course, the popular conspiracy among the players was that Tencent, a large investor in Hirez and their short-lived eSports league, was directing them to turn and burn faster, and the quality of the game simply went down in order to please Chinese sharks wringing it out until it died.
I’m not a raging sinophobe though, so I don’t personally subscribe to that theory. You will generally find at the root of every racist American’s generalized framework for the enshittification of video games some sort of impulse to blame the Chinese for everything, it’s very strange. Hirez is a privately traded company from the US, and I don’t think it’s really outside the realm of possibility that in 20 years of operation, they may have made some normal management errors outside the nefarious influence of the conniving yellow devils from the Orient. If you look through their roster, you’ll see that things like SMITE and Paladins were neither first nor last endeavors for Hirez. They have tried and failed at essentially every type of trendy multiplayer game you can think with every kind of monetization model in existence. And now, SMITE 2, the hyped-up sequel to their only successful game, is starting to flounder only a year after launch–could it be that these guys just aren’t great at running a business?
No, no, I’m sure they know what they’re doing. “After all, every studio that shuts down its longest-running game, splits itself into 4 subsidiaries, and then lays off a quarter of their employees is a place where the money is being distributed smartly and creative people are being valued for their input,” you may have surmised in 2018 when all that happened. But think again! Yearly layoffs, sudden shutdowns of servers, and random reassignments of creative directors were regular fixtures of the Hirez model all throughout the Paladins full-release period, which began, funny enough, in 2018. This is the MO for Hirez it seems: do more with less. They are an early adopter, then, of the mantra that now dominates the managerial class of America, which is ironic considering how often they were late to the party.
That’s another great management gaffe–doing everything way after it was cool. Paladins already came out a bit after it would’ve been a stronger competitor in the market than it was, but through sheer, surprising quality it managed to stick around longer than you’d expect. How exactly was Hirez gonna capitalize on this? Again, the design that I’ve praised is not enough, and the f2p microtransaction stuff is gonna grind on people over time. Constant content updates aren’t really gonna be enough, because as the game adds more and more bells and whistles, it actually becomes more standoffish to potential new players, which the live-service model demands be constantly brought in to finance the game’s existence. See also Bordiga’s Murder of the Dead.
Blizzard solved this the same way Valve did: an eSports league. Overwatch eSports was a huge success early on, providing significant insight into the potential for the game to people who didn’t play it. Good deals with Twitch and Youtube made the game look, from the outside, like it was fast-paced and exciting, and in comparison to like, Starcraft or League of Legends, it was something with action and skill involved, that was more than just spreadsheets. A whole throng of casuals, bored with their old toys, were suddenly interested in trying to seem good at this new, colorful thing because they saw some other guy do it. This is the basic premise behind eSports really, and for Blizzard, who had the most fucking money in the world from eSports already, simply waltzed into a new market already knowing what to do.
Naturally, Hirez responded by attempting to launch a Paladins eSports league. Not as stupid as it sounds, considering SMITE was actually pretty high up on the eSports card for its entire existence, so why not coast off of your sister’s success? Well…you have to actually build a whole separate league with new players, and accommodate them in some way. That’s hard! Hirez certainly thought so, because when faced with that challenge, they instantly folded: the league lasted a couple years, but they were using secondhand hardware that would fail during practice and during real matches, the players themselves were often not compensated if they were even given hotels to travel in or told where to go during tournaments at all, and the servers for the game were just as shitty as always, and allowed to simply fail at random during pro matches. Just like we had to put up with during our casual matches! Or our ranked matches, or our private lobbies, or anything.
No, Hirez was too cheap to make the lightning strike twice. There are already a few decent postmortems on the Paladins pro circuit on youtube, and they compile the bewildered, betrayed thoughts of the players and promoters pretty well. The moral of that particular part of the story is that Hirez was never willing to put in any effort to make things seem professional or important, whether it mattered or not. The pros, the affiliated content creators, the devs of the game themselves; everybody got the same treatment, which was cheap servers running constantly changing builds of the game, and nobody was ever paid to maintain anything full-time. The dev team was always half social media managers, and among the other half maybe 1 guy would get the janitorial duty every quarter while everybody else had to make the new character for that update. The pace was too fast, and even when everybody playing agreed that things needed to slow down, they just wouldn’t. Not until the money actually ran out, which happened a few times.
The real death knell for the game happened actually around the time of the open beta’s end in 2018, when the original dev team and game director, who stuck with the same gameplay model and design philosophy through thick and thin, weathering every storm of mass player exodus following new monetization policy or broken new character, was suddenly ejected from the game. As a player, I’m not sure how many of the departures were voluntary, but by 2019 nearly the entire roster of game designers and devs was completely new, left to pick up the pieces of a very dense and poorly optimized codebase sustaining an incredibly complicated game. In fact, the only reason we even know so many things changed so often because what few people stuck around (mostly art directors) would comment on things on twitter when they happened.
The blurring of the lines between official communications and social media posts only became worse over the years. Like I said, everyone who worked on the game was basically a social media manager for it, so even though we got daily posts about worthless lore or future updates (most of which would just not happen at all,) we also got daily insights into every single person’s opinion of the game inside and out, and the few “influencers” close to the game came to have staggering influence over its direction. This all came to a head in the middle of 2019, when Hirez completely gave up after the failure of that eSports league and decided “okay, YOU guys figure it out!” They created the “Assembly of Champions,” which was a team of content creators, former pros, artists, and game designers who would act as an advisory committee to the actual dev team throughout the year. It was an unelected committee, and membership basically just stemmed from “do people reply to you on twitter or do you have a big youtube channel,” and as far as I know, they never got anything meaningful done.
By 2020, the game had just been endlessly churning out drivel. New characters that cheated the game so new players could feel powerful, more bugs that were never gonna be fixed because who could fix them, new skins and cosmetics for purchase that were infinitely uglier than the ones at launch were, the removal and alteration of existing game modes into shittier, more gimmicky ones, changes to the underlying buy system that ruined the pace of the game, and most confusingly was the restriction on queueing a full team of 5 in ranked games, which went unchanged all the way up until the day the whole thing died. The Assembly did nothing but provide fuel for the people involved to make long, indulgent youtube videos about why the direction of the game was going wrong, but not a single person involved could agree on where to go next. Hirez themselves didn’t give a fuck, they just kept the lights on until the money stopped. So I guess the game was anarchy? Random motherfuckers popping in and out throwing bad ideas at the wall to see if anything would stick, but the whole game at that point had been chopped and screwed into something unrecognizable.
I feel like writing all this hasn’t even made anything clearer, it’s that much of a mess. I haven’t even brought up every individual controversy and failure of direction, like the firing of the popular art directors because they were too expensive, or the horrific pay-to-win “OB64” update that went unreversed for at least 10,000 lost players’ worth of community distaste. In the end, the game was sleepwalking for the last 5 years, and the real game died around the time it released in the first place.
Playing in the open beta days, we got to experience something utterly, insanely different from everything else on the market, held up by a cheap but reliable enough engine. It was like nothing else ever made, and even the bad new ideas would eventually go corrected, and community feedback was tempered and valuable to a concise, experienced team that cared about direction. It was so much fun to learn and there was a lot of hope for the future when Overwatch didn’t immediately kill it. Internal turmoil simply proved too damaging to recover from.
Those years I just passed over, 2019 and 2020, they were embarrassing and strange, and things were uncertain for us as players. But the game itself still sorta worked, and there was enough to it to make it fun to play. In fact, I think I achieved my highest rank during that time, and branched out into trying most of the characters and game modes I hadn’t in the past. I and all my pals were determined to stick around, but then the years of fucking lead really started.
I said “sleepwalking” and I meant it. Nobody was at the fucking wheel from 2021 onward. Every new update completely altered the game fundamentally, gutting out old features and introducing new characters with bespoke meter mechanics that made no sense, and no communication from the devs was relevant. They tried to crowbar in extra lore for this game with no story mode, and the direction of the lore itself was 100% different every quarter, like it was somebody else’s turn to write their fanfiction or something. They would often just lie about new things coming to the game, and then the next update would do something totally different. Every fun game mode was steadily taken out and every new feature stomped all over the original design document that I and everybody else still playing had fallen in love with years prior. By 2023, even the Assembly of Champions had admitted defeat, and was disbanded. The game was left adrift, but somehow new characters were released every few months, all of them designed for some completely different game that we weren’t playing. New maps stopped showing up eventually too, and so did new game modes. Things were just random limited time events and FOMO “get this skin exclusively from this chest at this time” kinda shit, like a gacha game.
By 2024, we had stopped playing. The community was so small that at that point, me and the people in discord with me were probably the most experienced and tenured people around, and we were probably the highest ranked players who weren’t just straight up cheating (another thing Hirez never cared to fix, they used Easy AntiCheat lmao.) People started recognizing us toward the end, every match would be us and a couple bots versus some guys with “TTV” in their gamertags and their bots. It was totally pathetic, and beyond fucking boring. We were all in the middle of our 20s by that point, so it was like “what’s the point of this anymore?”
After we put both barrels through ourselves and uninstalled, a year later the devs took the game itself behind the same shed and followed suit. It was very sudden news: one day, Hirez just said “we’re laying off 70 people,” and then kicked everyone off of the Paladins team. I think within that week, the news was handed down via the official discord (lol at that) that no more updates were ever gonna happen. We actually have still never been given a date for the servers to go down weirdly enough, so you can actually still log in and play the game in its zombified state. It’s literally like the rapture happened, the battle pass has just been sitting at the end of its timer for months, none of the ranks have reset, all the ads from January are still sitting there discussing a shitty patch that will never come out. It’s just gonna be frozen in time until someone at Hirez trips over the plug that keeps the servers on. Or, more accurately, they get hungry enough to cook and eat the potato into which the serves have been plugged.
This is a sad, pathetic story. It’s a classic Ion Storm tale of “I’ll make my own game studio with blackjack and hookers,” then horrendously underestimating how much effort that takes. Early success, immediate crashing and burning, and everyone in charge just shrugs and roasts weenies over the fire until the embers die out. Part of what makes it fascinating is the relative obscurity, and how at the zenith of its popularity it was almost a David that could slay the Overwatch goliath. It fell and broke its neck long before it ever even encountered goliath though, and now goliath and his nephilim buddies have looted his corpse.
Yes, not only has Blizzard continued to scavenge the bones of Paladins for new ideas in Overwatch 2, but even Valve has seen fit to join it with Deadlock, the garbage new pseudo-MOBA that from the outset seemed far, far beneath Valve to make. Dota 2 was over a decade ago, and nobody outside of like, Scandinavia gave a shit. Stop trying! Talking about their cheapness is yet another entire, other story, but you can see ghosts of Paladins‘ few successful designs bouncing around inside it. The one that stuck out to me the most was their character Ivy, who is a grotesque portmanteau of their own TF2 class, the Scout, and the once fan-favorite Paladins flank Maeve. Same voice actress doing the same fake accent, too. It’s perverse! But this character was actually the breakout hit among fans of Deadlock, and now that the game is somehow still gaining traction despite being boring, derivative, and at least a decade too late, nobody will ever know that that character, or any character, has Paladins DNA running through it.
That’s the real pain of Paladins. So much fucking potential, and so many people in the industry knew it, but nobody could save it from itself. It’s like when you know someone is abusing their child but you have no proof, it’s like you want to say something but who can believe you? That’s pretty dramatic actually and really only kind of makes sense, but to me? The feelings are strong. I spent a lot of time with this game just to watch it choke and die in slow motion, and hardly anybody else in the world is ever gonna believe me that there was something to it. The hilarious public failings of the game are now its only legacy. Nobody else will ever know the joy of a long Paladins ranked match. Nobody will know that feeling we got the first few special events came out, or when the payload queue came back, or when some of our favorite characters first released. Plus, there’s no way to check! The current dogshit build that nobody likes is stuck in place in eternity, and once those Hirez account logins stop registering, it’s gonna be actual, honest to god lost media.
There’s a fan attempt to make a launcher that can preserve the old builds, and I truly do hope that that works, but it can’t bring the magic back. Playing games that have stopped being continuously updated does, sickly enough, feel bad now, because you know everyone else has already moved on. It would be pretty tough to make myself put another 1000 hours into something by myself, alone in time. This thing that took up so much of my time at one point, it’s just fuckin dead and gone.
If you want to know anything more specific, as I implied earlier there are quite a few youtube videos out there from the handful of other guys who bothered to remember any of this shit, like I did. They’re pretty descriptive for the most part, that AndrewChicken guy made one a couple days ago and he’s a smart guy. He was actually on the Assembly of Champions I think, but don’t quote me on that. Not that you ever would, because when would you be talking about this game to anyone else.
If you read all of that, as always I appreciate you indulging me. The big takeaway at the end of Paladins is that it was probably the most unique and well-designed multiplayer shooter of all time, but nobody will ever know because it went into hiding for years, and then unceremoniously killed itself. The specific brand of unprofessionalism from Hirez as the managers of the game is bitterly funny to reflect on, but obviously I wish it hadn’t turned out that way. I wish more people could’ve seen it when it was great, and the memory of its 15 minutes of fame as an Overwatch copycat could’ve been replaced by a successful launch and a surge in popularity. Too bad for me! And I just kept drinking that garbage for years, which I guess is on me.
If you take nothing else away from this, please just remember that Paladins was NOT just an Overwatch clone, and it wasn’t really a pay-to-win cashgrab either. I’m sorry to everybody who ever missed the boat on it, I’m sorry to the devs who were shafted at every turn by Hirez, and I’m mostly sorry to my friends and brothers, who I dragged through years of competitive multiplayer at a pretty high level, even when some of them didn’t want to, just for it all to amount to nothing. If anyone from Hirez ever reads this, I have one wish: can you go back and give me that steam achievement for playing in the beta? I started out on xbox and then moved to steam, so it didn’t count. I just want to be able to say I have the platinum. Thanks guys.
Just for fun, here’s a look at my profile at the time I quit. I never reinstalled after I left the final time, and don’t intend to. This data has gaps in it since these stat tracker sites missed some data in large volumes through 2018 and 2019, but I took periodic breaks from the game around then anyway. The XP and levels are all correct, but this is basically only data from when I played on steam, so my first couple years of playtime are missed. Read em and weep:
Triumph In Blog 
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