Player Preview - Paladins

Title: Paladins

Developer: Hi-Rez Studios

Status: Closed Beta

Official Website: http://bit.ly/1kVpHkw

Hey what’s up, Serpentine here taking a look at the multiplayer first person shooter, Paladins, developed by Hi-Rez Studios the same guys behind Smite and Tribes Ascend. Paladins combines first person shooting with MOBA like skills as well as a collectable card system that can increase your effectiveness out on the battlefield.

Paladins Title

The main game mode currently available in the beta has 10 players divided into 2 teams going head to head, trying to destroy the opponents Vault to win. Attacking an enemy’s vault directly is a poor decision though as there are 2 gates and multiple turrets preventing anyone getting to it. Instead you’ll need to recruit a siege engine to your cause, to weaken their defenses and finally get to destroying their vault. Enlisting one of these siege engines isn’t easy though, requiring you to capture a highly contested point as payment. There are 3 points spread across the map but only one point will be active at a time and both teams will be fighting for the capture to get that siege engine on their side.

Ruckus at the Gate

These capture points will be where most of the fighting will occur between the two teams, that and their respective bases when a siege engine is spawned. While outside of these points the map is quite open and mostly level, the structures and environment surrounding the capture points is a lot more interesting with buildings to take cover in, catwalks to get height advantages with and various environmental obstacles to work around. Newer players will be tempted to rush the point as that’s their main objective but splitting up and using the environment to your advantage is definitely the way to go, preventing any mass aoe damage to all champions and just keeping the enemy on their toes. Plus the point captures at the exact same speed with 1 champion on it as it does with all 5 members of your team so there really isn’t a reason to group up like that anyway. The distance between all the points and the bases is actually quite significant and if you were to just run back and forth it would take a long time, thankfully Paladins has taken a mechanic from Blizzard Heroes of the Storm with mounts, allowing you to get to places extremely fast, getting you straight back into the action rather than having long extended lulls as everyone tries to get back in the fight. These mounts work exactly the same as they do in Heroes of the Storm with you taking any damage automatically dismounting you and when you do dismount you won’t be able to mount again for a short period of time.

Fernando Charge

Once you or your opponent has managed to recruit the assistance of the Siege Engine the losing team will have a short passage of time to deal damage to it before it reaches their base and the first of their destroyable gates. If things go to plan the siege tank will only get through one of the gates before being destroyed however it is possible to destroy the engine before it reaches the gate while also possible for it to destroy the second gate as well depending on how well each team plays. The vault basically acts as another gate but destroying this one will win you the game, you are able to attack all the gates and the vault, at least as long as the siege engine is there, so it’s a good idea to focus fire on these objectives as opposed to enemy team members as you will usually spawn in time to contest the next capture point.

Pip Long Bombs

There are currently 7 champions in the game including Buck, armed with a shotgun, Barick, a Dwarven engineer, Cassie, and elven archer, Ruckus, a golbin operated robot, Grohk, a lightning shaman, Fernando a flamethrower wielding knight, Pip a potion lobbing fox and finally Skye a stealthy assassin. 2 more champions have been confirmed for the game with eevie being an ice mage and Androxus being a sort of military merc with a pistol and sword as well as a couple champions that have been data mined showing that Paladins plans to have an extensive champions list to pick from, all of which have been stated as being completely free to play.

The shooting mechanics of the game are what you would expect with machineguns instantly hit registering and arrows taking their time to glide across the battlefield. All the weapons in the game however have an effective range at which the projectile will simply despawn instead of just losing accuracy the further they go. It’s a mechanic feels a little odd especially as some champions have extremely short ranges with enemies health bar turning from orange to red once in range. I would have preferred that this kind of balancing stuck with a falling off accuracy style rather than the hard despawn but you do get used to it and allows for easier balancing of champions. Another shooting mechanic that Hi-Rez has stated they will be testing out is alternate fires for champions, to add a little bit more depth to what champions can do in fights, but that’s not expected for another month or so.

Buck Trapped

On the ability front, each champion has 3 activatables they can use from the very start, no levelling up required, one of these abilities will almost always be dedicated to movement weather that’s a dodge roll, a dash or a jump to help make the game a little bit more fast paced. At their base level with no card modifications applied to them, abilities act how you would expect them to act, a shield blocks damage, a turret fires on enemies and a healing totem heals allies, but with the card system in play you can actually apply quite a lot of additional effects onto these standard abilities along with your champion and their weapon, adding things like a burning effect to any enemies walking through your shield wall, increasing the damage output to allies standing near your turret or reducing incoming damage for any allies standing near your healing totem. These cards are also your only source of increasing your damage and health, if you look towards the bottom of the card you will see on the left hand side a percentage in red, this percentage is how much your damage will be increased if you pick this card and to the right is a number in green that is the amount your health will be increased. 3 of these cards will pop-up each time you level, being able to select only one of them to use so you have to decide how you want to build your character and hope that the cards you get later on support the build you’re going for. You only level 5 times during a game so your selection is extremely important especially as it’s your only source of gaining any kind of power or upgrades.

Card Selection

You only start off with a small selection of these cards that you can actually draw from for each champion, about 5 or so each, and there all basic common rarity cards. To get more cards you can use a purely free to play approach by winning games that will reward you with a basic 1 card chest as well as levelling up your account that will reward you with a radiant chest containing 5 random cards. You’ll be able to speed up this process by buying these card chests with real world money as well as using the in game currency of gold. With over 220 cards to collect too it is going to take quite a while and you will end up with a lot of duplicate cards, but you will be able to combine 3 of into a brand new card that you don’t already own. This card system however does bring paladins a lot of imbalance and, to a point, a pay to win business model similar to Hearthstone as legendary cards are just purely better than other cards both in their base stat increases and their bonus effects. Hi Rez has already tried to balance this somewhat with legendries not being a part of the first level card drops but I don’t think that will be enough, atleast not for competitive play. We still haven’t seen the constructed mode though, what will be the main competitive mode so they could be working on some more card balancing mechanics for that mode but as the casual mode stands now it’s kind of broken. Non damaging abilities can gain damaging effects, tanks can get more health and health regen and damage dealers can get more damage compared to another player playing the same character giving them an absolute advantage during a game. 

Card Comparison

Other features of the game not currently fully implemented include purchasable cosmetics for both your champions and for your mount with a founders pack mount skin already in the game and champions skins soon to be released. There is also account levelling as stated before that rewards you with card chests but this may be of more importance later on, maybe as a level requirement to participate in the competitive game mode.

Mount Skin

All together Paladins is an interesting and fun combination of the moba and first person shooter genre. It’s a game that carries that “Just one more game” competitive feeling of wanting to do better and perform more awesome plays. The card system is definitely a part of the game that needs some improvement particularly on the balance side and I can’t imagine it will be something easy to balance but it does add a lot of variety to the game and too how each champion can be played. I’d also like to see more player involvement with the siege engine like it only being able to move when champions are around it or something to increase the engines effectiveness based on how many players are escorting it, basically I wouldn’t mind seeing it turned into more of a payload. If you like Team Fortress styled fps’s, or like the ground level style of Smite, or simply just a really compelling and fun competeive FPS, then Paladins may be of interest to you.

Cassie Protecting the Point

Anyway, that’s been my player preview for Paladins. The game is currently in closed beta with access granted via the purchase of a founders pack for $20 or your regional equivalent. The game will also be coming to Mac, Linux, Xbox One and Playstation 4 at a later date. If you want to find out more about the game check out the links below. Thanks for reading and I’ll see you guys next time.

Player Preview - Rainbow Six: Siege

Title: Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Siege
Developer: Ubisoft Montreal
Status: Closed Beta
Release Date: 1/December/2015

Official Site: http://bit.ly/1LZ8CMb

Steam Page: http://bit.ly/1JzXeoc

Hey what’s up, Serpentine here taking a look at the multiplayer strategic first person shooter, Tom Clancy’s Rainbow six: Siege, developed by Ubisoft Montreal, the same guys behind Watch Dogs, Far Cry 4 and numerous Tom Clancy titles including Blacklist and Conviction. Siege is a game about tactics, strategy and using every utility available to your advantage in numerous Siege situations.

Siege’s closest relation in terms of base gameplay is Counter Strike, both games have teams of 5 taking turns in attacking and defending attempting to wipe out the other team or complete the objectives. However that’s just about were the similarities end with Siege opting for complexity and gadgetry as opposed to simplicity and gunplay.

At the start of the round each team will have a short setup phase that for the defenders entails barricading doorways, reinforcing walls and generally preparing for the attack. For the attackers, they will be piloting little spy drones attempting to find the objective and observe the defenders set-up. Once the short set-up phase is over it will mostly be the attackers moving in on the objective while the defenders lay in wait. The defenders do have access to the buildings numerous cameras so they can try to find were the attackers will be coming from but otherwise they will just have to wait for the attackers to come to them. Creating holes in walls or even in the barricades can give you line of sight advantages while not revealing your entire body to any approaching enemies however as an attacker, a hole in the wall or barricades is quite obvious and being a breakable wall taking a few blind shots through the wall can land you a couple of hits on an enemy. Once eliminated from the round you can still assist your team by spotting enemies and their movements using cameras and un-pilot able spy drones from the set-up phase. 

Each side has their own set of standard gadgets that they can use to their advantage along with their unique character based gadget. For the defenders they have deployable bullet proof shields to hide behind or even to block off certain areas of a room, razor wire that requires the enemy to move very slowly while traversing and finally remote C4 that can easily thin out their attack. For the Attackers they have frag grenades that can be used to clear out rooms of gadgets and defenders, flash grenades that when caught looking directly at the grenade blinds for quite a lengthy amount of time and finally a breaching charge that can be placed on barricades and breakable walls to destroy them in one blast. The attacking team also has a very unique weapon with the riot shield that is almost indestructible in the right hands. With the riot shield you can only have a pistol as your actual weapon but any enemy directly in front of you will have an extremely hard time shooting the person holding the shield or anyone else behind them for that matter. The pistol isn’t a bad weapon either with the games extremely quick kill time with only 1 or 2 shots being enough to down an opponent. It has been a source of some contention within the community with players asking for a way to deal with attacking teams playing mass riot shields and just brute forcing their way onto the objective. The strategy can be countered somewhat with remote C4 and a certain characters gas grenade, however it is extremely hard to get these counter measures in the right place and at the right time to be effective. The shield strategy does need a better counter and would probably be ideal to have a weapon like the shotgun be able to 2 shot and destroy the shield or perhaps even nerfing the pistol accuracy while not aiming down the sights. It is something that will need a lot more testing and with this type of highly competitive game I fully expect frequent balance patches to deal with these kinds of things.

The gunplay in siege is honestly a little disappointing, feeling more like call of dutys gun play of spray with very little recoil then something that takes skill to be good. The problem stem from the game combat being close quarters so most of the guns in game are SMG’s with a lot of them feeling very similar to each other. It also doesn’t help that the games hitbox and weapon damage system is also very similar to Call of Dutys which promotes a spray and pray play style due to only 1 or 2 shots downing players, the only time you would need to be really accurate is when trying to shoot the exposed parts of shield bearers. At the moment Sieges competitiveness isn’t found in its gunplay instead it’s in the games communication, gadget usage and positioning. Speaking about positioning, micro movements are almost impossible to do in siege as even the slightest hit of a directional key will  move you quite drastically which can make it hard to just lean your head out of cover instead of your whole body.

Another important part of the game is its character feature and this is a lot better than the games gunplay although there are some areas or rather some characters and their gadgets that could use some more work. Firstly though, let’s go over what the character system is exactly. When you first play the game you will have no character unlocked, instead you will play as a recruit with no special gadgets. By completing a game, depending on you and your teams performance you will earn renown, an in game currency that can be spent unlocking characters or alternatively can be spent upgrading and customising one of your existing characters. The rate at which you obtain renown, you’re almost assured a character unlock every 2 games, at least for your first few character unlocks as the price does add upon itself for each character purchased in each units selection. The unit selection being outfits like the FBI, GIGN and other branches of law organizations. With so many different characters to select, 7 in total for each side, there are going to some character that are better than others. There are some that feel like they are meant to counter gadgets that are still to be added to the game like IQ, a character that is able to detect enemy electrical equipment. She doesn’t really have a solid use that you would expect from ability like that where she would be able to locate claymores, trip mines or traps. Instead she can only detect things that are either blindingly obvious to players already or equipment that has already served its purpose like signal jammers. IQ is an example of just a couple characters that there purpose may need to be looked at. Other factors to consider when selecting characters outside of their available gadgets is their stats of which there are only 2, move speed and armour.

The customization of characters is reserved to gun add ons like scopes, silencers and grips along with cosmetics in the form of gun skins and patterns. The gun add-ons are fairly cheap costing around half a games worth of renown to purchase, the cosmetic skins however are a little bit pricier requiring you to play around 10 games to be able to unlock. I would love to see some sort of cosmetic customization available for the shields in the game, both the riot shields and deployable shields but the gun skins are enough already really.

During the closed beta phase there were 3 game modes available to play, 2 multiplayer competitive modes and 1 Co-Op mode. The 2 multiplayer modes were honestly very much the same with the Disarm Bomb mode having 2 bombs in different rooms that can be defused while the Secure Area Mode has 1 area that can be captured by the attackers. It is a little worrying as to how different the multiplayer modes will be as we have already seen the hostage game mode showcased numerous times that has very similar game play as these other 2 modes. The Co-Op mode however called Terrorist Hunt Classic does provide a different experience where a team of 5 players take on a building full of AI terrorists. The mode can be extremely difficult especially if you get caught out by the suicide bombers that will rush your position.

Other features of the game include character lifetime statistics where you can see your kill death ratio, wins and more to do with that particular character. I would expect later on that there would be competitive rankings along with something tied to your overall account level which doesn’t do anything at the moment. There will be a total of 20 different operators available to play, 4 for each Special Forces unit. There was only 14 operators during the beta phase, the ones excluded included Glaz that has a sniper rifle, Tachanka with a mounted Light Machine Gun, Ash who can deploy breaching charges from a distance and Thatcher with EMP grenades along with 1 other unannounced operator for the spetzsnaz forces.

Altogether Rainbow Six: Siege provides an exhilarating strategic experience with many of its features and mechanics really well polished. The game does have a much slower pace than most other shooters requiring slow cautious movement and set-up but when the breaching begins it does quickly step up a gear in terms of speed and intensity. The gunplay is an unfortunate downside to the game with guns feeling very similar to each other and simplistic mechanics that promotes spray and pray rather than skilful aiming. If you’re after a really well polished strategic shooter that is competitive and relies on good communication then Rainbow Six: Siege is definitely worth a look however you should take into consideration that there won’t be any single player mode.

Anyway, that’s been my player preview for Rainbow Six: Siege. The game will be officially releasing on the 1^st of December on PC, Playstation 4 and Xbox One for $60 or your regional equivalent. If you want to find out more about the game check out the links below. Thanks for watching and I’ll see you guys next time.