Why Paladins: Battlegrounds? Hi-Rez president explains the name

Paladins is the latest game to jump on the Battle Royale bandwagon, and unlike Fortnite, which opted for the pretty specific Battle Royale name, Hi-Rez Studios decided to go straight with Battlegrounds. Just like Playerunknown's Battlegrounds, exactly. Anyone who tells you that this shooter isn't responsible for the current Battle Royale craze is either lying or an idiot.

Anyway, the name choice for Paladins: Battlegrounds is surely going to “get a little bit of buzz”, as Hi-Rez Studios president Stew Chisam told PCGamer:

“We actually had a lot of conversations,” says Chisam. “Do we call it Battle Royale, do we call it Battlegrounds, do we call it something else? 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.”

“Then you're getting on these horses and you're galloping through this big fantasy landscape, right? For us it was more evocative of the old MMO battlegrounds. And so to us, choosing that name versus battle royale was more of an homage to those big MMO battleground-type settings.”

He added that “no one will have too many doubts” about the kind of game when looking at the Battlegrounds word, and that in the end it's just a game mode, like Siege or Conquest, and that it won't make the bulk of the game.

Paladins is often criticized for taking inspiration from Blizzard's Overwatch, but the huge player base defends its qualities without questioning. In the always hot topic of ‘who copied who', the roots of the problem are almost untraceable, so let's just acknowledge the fact that the Battle Royale mode is hot right now and everyone wants a piece of the cake. We'll see you later this year with the next trend.