Paladins announces free-to-play battle royale mode called Battlegrounds

Fortnite wasn’t the only game attempting to cash in on the battle royale craze. Hi-Rez Studios, the developer behind Paladins, has announced that the free-to-play hero shooter will be getting its own battle royale mode, aptly named Battlegrounds (via IGN).

Paladins: Battlegrounds drops 100 players onto a large map for 20-minute matches where they are free to fight over loot located at over four dozen outposts. As encroaching fog limits the playable area, the last team standing will win.

Hi-Rez says that Paladins: Battlegrounds was “designed from the ground up to be played in teams.”

This game mode will launch later in 2018. Before that, a new content update coming out later this month (January 10 on PC and January 17 on consoles) will also bring Team Deathmatch. A new hero and mount type are coming this year as well. Moji, the game’s 35th hero, is a Flank hero who rides a two-headed dragon. The new mount will consist of Battle Cats.

Fortnite found itself criticized by both PUBG Corp. vice president C.H. Kim and creator Brendan Greene for being too derivative and attempting to replicate what PUBG was. Greene even said that the genre wouldn’t grow if developers just copied everything from other games, and called for better copyright protection. Seeing as Paladins not only shares a similar game mode but will now share a similar name in Battlegrounds, it will be interesting to see what comes of this.