listen, I know ya’ll love yourselves some overwatch. But get this: the only think I wanna watch…is how over that freakin game I am man!
On a whime after playing through Bad Free Games on PSN last week, I decided to finally bite the bullet and play Paladins. My twitch-reflexes have been degrading since I got into my mid twenties but I can reasonably slam and jam with the best when it comes to shootmans that require more coordination.
Y’know: Paladins gets a bad rap for marketing heavily with a bunch of characters that are really close to or pretty much rip-offs of Overwatch characters. I’d like to note that that’s actually a pretty smart idea: there’s no better way to catch an audience who would be frustrated with Overwatch or curious about it but not committal with the promise that they’d be able to find something familiar to play as. There’s also the fact that in addition to those characters, Paladins roster now is probably a dozen or so heads larger than Overwatch’s.
What I’ve enjoyed about Paladins so far is the fact that every ability a character has can be boosted with collectible cards or have certain functions changed. You also get to buy new versions of ultimate attacks like swapping your style out in SNK vs. Capcom 2
Let me tell you about the 4 or 5 iterations of the card system HiRez went through while I was in during early closed beta and how the current one that they settled on is an extension of the one that made me throw my arms up and stop giving a fuck (and also OW came out a month later). Pretty much the only thing I like about Paladins over OW is that HiRez designed their supports to be aggressive as fuck (though fuck making my boy Grover a support instead of the silly melee bruiser Spiderman he was back in closed beta) (also I miss the beacon).
I like it because if there’s a hero I like that doesn’t perform exactly how I want them to, there’ a good chance I can get them there through tweaking the card sytem
goddammit no, I want to see a character and be able to know the realm of their possibility space without having to tab to check loadouts or finding out on my own in-game
people just roll with the good/overpower card combos anyway because, well, there’s probably a good reason the players on top of the leaderboards use them
I still have nightmares about the card build that let Buck jump in someone, blow them up, jump out and then mount up while in combat like it was nothing
I think I like Paladins more than Overwatch. Maybe it’s because I’m broke, but Paladins doesn’t have THAT many ripoffs (I think the only real one is Fernando, and even he’s pretty different from Reinhardt), and it’s just…FUN to play. I think the big thing is the maps - Overwatch’s maps are super weak for me.
I’m not even looking at this from a “these things/concepts/characters/mechanics are vaguely like this other game with way more publicity/mindshare/percentage of being a Blizzard game” perspective. I liked the game at one point, then the constant changes just wore me out and what they’ve seemingly settled on doesn’t do much for me. It’s still a perfectly fine game, it’s just I’m over there, liking the arguably stupider interactions in OW more and also I’ve got a beefier CPU so I can play me some BF1 on 64-player servers without my computer dying so I’m pretty good on shootmans, thank you.
I’m ready for the rumored F2P Battleborn release, if we’re gonna anchor ourselves to bad games
Quake Champions is, by all indications, Not Bullshit because it’s steeped enough in Quake gameplay and the champion stuff has a very light touch on that