Free-to-play hero shooter Paladins is getting a battle royale mode called - wait for it - Battlegrounds.
Developer Hi-Rez announced that Paladins: Battlegrounds will be free-to play, and drops 100 players into 20-minute matches set on a large map. There, teams of players fight over the loot of "more than four dozen outposts" and chase "zeppelins that drop legendary gear" as encroaching fog corrals them into ever-tighter skirmishes. The last team standing wins.
Paladins: Battlegrounds was "designed from the ground up to be played in teams," Hi-Rez said, and will retain the main game's class-based team composition. Mounts will also be usable.
Ahead of its battle royale mode, Paladins will also receive a content update this month (January 10 on PC and January 17 on consoles) which includes another new game mode: Team Deathmatch.
Team Deathmatch is exactly what it sounds like: a mode where your only objective is killing enemy heroes. It will launch alongside the new Trade District map.
A new hero is also coming in the January update: Moji, a Flank hero who rides a two-headed dragon. Moji is Paladins' 35th hero, not to mention a member of the new Leipori race.
Finally, a new mount type, Battle Cats, is coming in the update. The first of the Battle Cats is the Primal Prowler, which will only be available to Twitch Prime subscribers.
Paladins is the latest game to hop on the battle royale fad kickstarted by PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds' runaway success. PUBG, for reference, recently hit three million concurrent players on Steam, an unprecedented figure.
Last September, base-building survival game Fortnite launched a free battle royale mode of its own. Fortnite Battle Royale put a construction-driven spin on the genre but still borrowed wholesale from PUBG's formula—so much so that developer PUBG Corp. (then Bluehole) considered legal redress.
"After listening to the growing feedback from our community and reviewing the gameplay for ourselves, we are concerned that Fortnite may be replicating the experience for which PUBG is known," PUBG Corp. vice president C.H. Kim said at the time.
While nothing came of these concerns, one wonders if Paladins: Battlegrounds' numerous similarities to PUBG will again rub PUBG Corp. the wrong way. Just last month, PUBG creator Brendan 'PlayerUnknown' Greene spoke out against derivative battle royale games, calling for better copyright protection.
"I want other developers to put their own spin on the genre ... not just lift things from our game," Greene said, adding that "if it's just copycats down the line, then the genre doesn't grow and people get bored."
Paladins: Battlegrounds also comes on the heels of a controversial Paladins update: the Cards Unbound crafting system. This system made sweeping changes to the way cards are earned and used and was immediately unpopular with the Paladins community.
Pointing to similarities with Star Wars: Battlefront 2's much-maligned loot box system, many players argued Cards Unbound added unsavory grind and made Paladins' popular quickplay mode flagrantly pay-to-win.
Austin Wood is a freelance writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter.
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