Paladins now supports crossplay between PC, PS4 and Xbox One, with other Hi-Rez Studios games Smite and Realm Royale set to introduce the capability in the near future. It marks a small increase in the total amount of games that support play between all major platforms, with Sony's console lagging behind the Xbox One in terms of support.

While Microsoft is famously willing, at least lately, to allow crossplay between platforms, Sony hasn't quite opened up as yet. Currently the list of games supporting multiplayer between all devices includes Rocket League, Fortnite and Dauntless, though the coming months will also see Call of Duty: Modern Warfare join that list, as well as Smite and Realm Royale. 

That said, there are plenty of games that support crossplay between PC and PS4, but not Xbox, including DC Universe Online and Street Fighter V. Crossplay between Xbox, PS4 and PC (and Nintendo Switch, where relevant) will roll out for Smite next week, and for Realm Royale in early October.

Sony chairman Shawn Layden said in February that the company is "open for business" on the matter of crossplay, and that "all it takes is for publishers and developers who wish to permission it." But some devs, including the CEO of Chucklefish, later chimed in to say that it wasn't quite that simple.

Hi-Rez Studios has announced that it is establishing three new, separate developers.

The company, known for its free-to-play multiplayer games such as Paladins and Smite, is dividing its resources into a trio of new studios that will be overseen by a general manager.

The three new studios are Titan Forge Games, Evil Mojo Games, and Heroic Leap Games. Each of these will be responsible for handling one of the company’s ongoing projects. Titan Forge Games will man the helm of Hi-Rez' MOBA Smite. Evil Mojo games will oversee the Overwatch-like shooter Paladins, while Heroic Leap games will develop Realm Royale, its Battle Royale spinoff originally known as Paladins: Battlegrounds.

Chris Larson, formerly the executive producer of Smite and Paladins, will act as general manager for first party studios, overseeing the three teams.

“The establishment of Titan Forge, Heroic Leap and Evil Mojo as standalone studios enables each of our development teams to fulfill their maximum potential and stay hyper focused on serving their individual player communities," Larson said. “Our games are built to provide near constant updates over many years. By giving each major game its own dedicated studio and identity, we empower them to control their own destiny and focus exclusively on their player communities.”

Hi-Rez’s support for Paladins, Smite, and Realm Royale has been pretty consistent. “By structuring ourselves in this manner, we allow the organization to scale to multiple games more easily, while ensuring our existing game communities receive a better, more focused service than ever before."

The free-to-play online FPS Paladins, which began open beta testing in 2016, will go into full release on May 8, developer Hi-Rez Studios announced today. The studio also released the mobile shooter Paladins Strike today for iOS and Android devices, which will enable players to unlock two free skins in Paladins. 

"We are so excited for the official release of Paladins," executive producer Chris Larson said. "We really want to thank all of our dedicated Beta players for the time and effort they have put into helping Paladins grow. This Launch Celebration is about our players—only with their feedback were we able to make Paladins the amazing game it is today, with drastically improved UI, console aiming, presentation, and gameplay." 

There were a few bumpy patches on the way to release: An update in early 2017 resulted in "pay to win" complaints, and then near the end of the year there was a similar eruption of anger over loot boxes. Despite all that, user reviews on Steam are "very positive" and more importantly, it remains well into the top 20 list, with a peak concurrent player count today of 25,000. 

Hi-Rez is also looking to expand Paladins into the sweet, lucrative Battle Royale genre: The studio announced a BR mode called Paladins: Battlegrounds in January, but decided shortly after to spin it off as an entirely separate game, Paladins Realm Royale, which is now in closed alpha testing. 

Anyone who played Paladins during the beta phase will also be given 200 Crystals, a premium currency used for purchasing cosmetics, for logging in between May 8-31. The beta will continue right up to the full launch, so you've still got most of a week to be eligible for the freebie. All of the game's Champions will also be unlocked until May 7, which makes this week a particularly good time to try it out. And there will be an Esports Superstars: Paladins launch tournament running May 5-6, with six teams including Natus Vincere, SK Gaming, G2 Esports, and Fnatic battling it out for a slice of a $100,000 prize pool. 

A lot has happened since Hi-Rez Studios announced Battlegrounds, a battle royale mode for hero-shooter Paladins, in January. A month and some player testing later, the developer decided to rename the mode and split it off as a separate game, called Paladins Realm Royale. That involved some "aggressive changes" that halted testing for a while. Now it's back, and Hi-Rez is inviting players to a closed alpha.

Keys are going to be difficult to come by: Hi-Rez president Stewart Chisam tweeted a link to a sign-up page yesterday with instructions for how to take part, but within hours there were no keys left. Hi-Rez says that it will be "accepting sign-ups for more testers soon", so keep your eyes peeled on the Paladins forums.

As for what Realm Royale will look like, players that sign up aren't allowed to post any video or images of the game, so expect detail to be sparse. However, Hi-Rez gave us a peek at the game's weapon crafting system and its map in a forum post yesterday. Players will be looting weapons, armour and abilities across the map, and as they do so they'll have the option to break any item down into Shards. Collect 100 Shards and you'll be able to visit one of the forges dotted around the map to craft a random legendary weapon or ability.

I like the sound of the system, because it gives you a reason to interact with loot that you'd normally leave alone. As Hi-Rez says, some players might end up guarding forges in the hope of catching other players in the act and stealing their loot, which means every trip there will be a balance of risk and reward.

You can see the forging system in action in the screenshot below, alongside a picture of the game's map. It's split into five larger sections, the most interesting of which look to be Badlands—a sandy area to the top left—and Everfrost, an icy zone in the top right.

Yesterday at Hi-Rez Expo 2018, free-to-play hero shooter Paladins: Champions of the Realm announced a new battle royale mode named Paladins: Battlegrounds. In the face of the rising trend, more games are adding similar modes to their makeup, however this one's name raised a few eyebrows—given how closely it reflects PUBG Corp's megahit PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds. 

Now, Hi-Rez Studios president Stew Chisam has explained why he and his team opted for 'Battlegrounds' over, say, battle royale, or a similar appendage.  

In conversation with Pip on the expo show floor, Chisam suggested that the term better reflected MMO battlegrounds—such as WoW's Alterac Valley—than anything perhaps more obvious.      

"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."

Chisam also admits that opting for Battlegrounds is sure to "get a little bit of buzz" in the current climate, and that "no one will have too many doubts" about what kind of game mode Paladins: Battlegrounds offers. 

He adds: "You have to remember that for us too it's just a game mode, like Siege or Conquest or whatever, so it's not really going to play a major role in the marketing of the overall game over the long haul… I think whether we call it battle royale, whether we call it Battlegrounds, whether we call it anything else, there was always going to be a little bit of—there's always going to be that one element. When you actually play the mode you see that it is quite different from the other modes."

Additional reporting by Philippa Warr. 

In the wake of PUBG's spectacular and ever-growing success, we've witnessed an opportunistic flurry of battle royale games and game modes over the last several months. We predicted this trend was almost certain to spill into 2018, and now free-to-play hero shooter Paladins: Champions of the Realm has assumed the mantle. 

Announced today at Hi-Rez Expo 2018, Paladins: Battlegrounds bills itself as "the first-ever hero shooter battle royale", that combines "ability-driven combat with survival gameplay and a fantasy setting to create something new."

Following a familiar structure, the complimentary "genre mashup" mode drops 100 players into a sprawling map—"over 300 times the square footage of a typical Paladins' Siege map"—and has them facing off till death, while an all-encompassing fog shortens the size of the battlefield in stages. Players band together in teams, ride mounts and search for weapons and loot in matches that last 20 minutes. 

Here's a trailer:

"Designed from the ground-up to be played in teams, players must work together to survive in Paladins: Battlegrounds," says Hi-Rez in a statement. "Supports struggle to keep their Front Liners alive, while Damage Champions let the bullets fly and Flanks look for any possible assassination. 

"Players spawn into a massive map—over 300 times the square footage of a typical Paladins' Siege map. Then they hop onto their mounts and begin exploring, looting their way through more than four dozen outposts and tracking zeppelins that drop legendary gear."

Paladins: Battlegrounds is due at some stage later this year, whereas an early alpha version is playable at this weekend's Hi-Rez Expo. Our Pip has boots on the ground there, so check back for her thoughts on the new mode in due course. 

In other Paladins news, Hi-Rez has announced plans to introduce a new champion named Moji, a new Team Deathmatch game mode, and new Battle Cats mounts. Expect these in the coming weeks and months—with the "first wave of new content releases" to land on PC on January 10.  

Hi-Rez Studios is testing some big changes to its free-to-play hero shooter Paladins, and an awful lot of players are not very happy about it. Essence, the in-game currency the studio rolled out early this year to much complaint, is gone, but it's been replaced by a loot box-based system that critics say will force players to either grind their faces off or spend real money on chests. 

The new system, called Cards Unbound, unlocks all cards in the game—Basic and Legendary—for all players. But those cards now have levels, from 1 to 5, which can be advanced by collecting duplicates. And you will definitely want to upgrade them, because the power differences between level 1 and level 5 cards are significant: Evie's Cold Acclimation card, for instance, reduces self-damage from weapon backsplash by 20 percent at level 1, but goes all the way to 100 percent at level 5. 

The duplicates required to level up cards will only be available from opened chests, and the numbers required are significant: 42 cards are required to take a common card from level 1 to 5, ( the open beta 64 patch notes had it at 43 but it's since been adjusted) while legendary cards require just 4 but, as redditor Battlekid18 put it, "we all know how rare they are." Given that the system is RNG-based, that means an awful lot of chest-popping to put together a specific build. 

Compounding the issue further is that the system only applies to Quick Play, which will replace the Casual queue. In Quick Play, decks have no point limit, so players can put together loadouts of up to five level 5 cards. In Ranked play, however, all cards will be automatically set and locked to level 3. "This ensures that Ranked is all about player skill," Hi-Rez said. "There is no longer any grind for cards in Ranked." 

But as redditor UncleCarnage pointed out, Quick Play is where players go to learn new Champions (or pick up the basics of the game, if they're just starting out), so that they can be competitive in Ranked. Without level 5 cards to keep them from being demolished on a regular basis, players will end up forced to grind with their main in order to earn enough duplicates to make the new Champion viable. 

"And then you're ready to hop onto casual and play that champion/deck and learn him, but wait, you're doing that with a completely unbalanced deck that you wont be able to use in ranked," they wrote. "Or should I just quit casual completely and play ranked exclusively, and even when I want to play a new champion for the first time, I'll just do it there and ruin my team's day?" 

The Cards Unbound system is currently in testing, and Hi-Rez said in a statement that work on the new system is still underway. "The Cards Unbound system has been released to our Public Test Server, with no microtransactions allowed, so we can work with the community to refine it before it goes live," the studio said. "As we continue to develop this system, we do so with three key goals in mind:

•  Creating the ultimate Competitive mode that is 100% fair and 100% free. No matter how much time or money is spent, everyone will be on equal footing.
•  Enhancing our Casual mode to be less restrictive and more over-the-top to serve our many players who have asked for a fun-first experience.
•  Ensuring the free-to-play experience is excellent. We recognize that 90 percent of our players will never spend money with us and those players are the lifeblood of our multiplayer game.

"We plan to update and adjust the PTS version approximately every two days, with changes driven by community feedback and surveys. What is being played on PTS is very much a work in progress, and we will iterate on the Cards Unbound system until we meet the goals above."

Hi-Rez also said, in the Cards Unbound announcement, that it won't allow direct purchases of chests "until we have time to tune the economy after seeing real-world results." It expects to begin allowing purchases in open beta 65, "but we may delay this."

In response to loud and long complaints about the new Essence currency in its free-to-play hero shooter Paladins, Hi-Rez Studios said today that it will modify the system by reducing the cost of Legendary cards from 18,000 to 12,000 Essence, increasing the amount of Essence granted by duplicate Common cards from 60 to 250, and upping the amount of Essence given to players for performing tasks in the game. 

Essence, as we covered yesterday, is now used instead of Gold to unlock Legendary and loadout cards. But the cost is tremendously high, and the rate at which Essence is doled out so low, that making any sort of real progress through the game without dropping cash on it is effectively impossible. Nor is dropping cash any guarantee of success, because all you can buy are temporary boosters or chests, which are subject to the vagaries of RNG. As one unhappy player put it, "spending money wont get you ahead, unless you spend a fortune."   

The changes are meant to alleviate the need to blow cash on the game to gain access to the good stuff, particularly for newcomers. Veteran players were allowed to keep any Legendaries they'd accumulated prior to the rollout of the Essence currency, but newbies are going into it completely empty-handed, which puts them at a serious disadvantage.   

"We are committed to ensuring new players can earn the cards they want at a very reasonable pace and get rewarded for the time they put into the game. As such, in a future patch we will begin granting 1000 Essence for each achievement earned, and will be retroactively granting Essence for achievements earned when that change goes live. We will also be adding new achievements in a future patch for new players that provide a boost in Essence—an example might be 'Build your first custom loadout' which will provide 12,000 Essence," Hi-Rez said. "Additionally, we will be increasing the First Win of the Day (FWOTD) reward Gold from 300g to 450g which can be obtained 3 times daily." 

The studio said that anyone who purchased Legendary cards at the old price will be given a refund for the difference. It also apologized for the delay in getting out Radiant Chest refunds for changes in the Mastery Rewards system in OB44, explaining that its servers are simply unable to cope with the strain of opening all those chests at once. Hi-Rez has thus decided to hand out Essence directly at a rate of 2250 per owed chest, a process it said should be completed by the end of today. 

"In the coming updates, we will be evaluating Legendary card balance and making adjustments to bring them all in line," Hi-Rez said. "We appreciate your continued feedback on this system as we move towards a further balanced state!" 

Patch notes for the next update, OB45, are expected to be ready for reveal next week. 

Players of Hi-Rez Studios' free-to-play hero shooter Paladins are venting their anger on Reddit and elsewhere over a recent change to the game that's widely seen as a blatant change to a "pay-to-win" system. The complaints are rooted in a new in-game currency called Essence, introduced in the open beta patch 44 that was rolled out last week.   

It sounds innocuous enough in the patch notes: Radiant chests are now purchasable for 3000 Gold, an in-game currency earned playing the game, and so instead of awarding gold for any duplicate items they contain, players now get Essence, which is used to unlock high-end cards. Under the previous system, gold did the trick, so players willing to do a little grinding could advance at a reasonable rate without having to spend any money.

The trouble, as Ten Ton Hammer breaks down, is that the ratio is entirely out of whack. The cost to do anything meaningful with Essence is tremendously high, exacerbated by a new "rarity" ranking for loadout cards. The site states that even after unlocking every card for every Champion, 36,000 Essence per Champion is required to access all their Legendary cards, an astounding 756,000 Essence in total. The amount of Essence awarded for a duplicate Common card? 60. 

The net result, according to multiple complaints in the Paladins subreddit, is that gold has been made effectively useless, and Paladins is now a pure pay-to-win proposition: You either fork over money for Crystals (the real-money currency), or you live without the bonuses and advantages that are granted to those who do. The new system is especially hard on new players, because veterans will keep the cards they've acquired under the old system, while newbies will have to start off with nothing.

Ironically, a post on Blizzard's Overwatch forums provided one of the most concise explanations of the core problem: Under this system, players are going to have to spend a ton if they want to get ahead. 

"The previous system was a winner, you could choose whichever card you wanted, for 1200 gold, and it didn't take long to grind that much by playing, usually 3-4 matches, not counting win of the day bonuses etc. Now they have a system where you have to spend gold on chests for RNG cards, and the only way to buy a card is with a new currency, which is only given when you get duplicate cards in the chests," author Zalamael wrote. 

"They allowed us to keep our cards, so long time players have every card available, with the exception of the new ones, but new players are screwed if they want a good deck. They can't even spend real money to level the playing field, because all they can do with real money is buy chests (so still suffer RNG) or buy boosters, which leads to the same problem. This isn't even a P2W system, because spending money wont get you ahead, unless you spend a fortune." 

So it's not pay-to-win in the absolute strictest sense—you can't straight up buy the powerful Legendary cards you want—but players will likely have to put in a good deal of cash just for a chance to obtain them.

Youtuber Joshino spent a few minutes at the start of this stream showing of how quickly even veteran players with more than 100,000 Essence can burn through the resource crafting Legendary cards, and explains why the system will be especially punishing for new players.

Most of the complaints on Reddit are calling for a return to the previous system, although at least one argues that the new system could be made to work by dramatically increasing the rate of Essence rewards, reducing the cost of Legendary cards, and doing away with the rarity system entirely. So far, Hi-Rez hasn't indicated which way it will go, or if it will simply stay the course, and that hasn't made players any happier. I've emailed Hi-Rez to find out more about the situation, and will update if and when I receive a reply.

Is your Tyr insufficiently kingly? How conventional is your Ying? These are questions we ask ourselves every day, and this weekend we will do our best to ensure that you need never ask them again. Thanks to Hi-Rez, we've got 1000 codes for Smite and Paladins to give away.

If you're unfamiliar, Smite is a free to play MOBA with a mythological theme that is played from a third person perspective. Heavy emphasis on skillshots and the fast pace of the play set it apart from other games in its genre, as does a generous free-to-play model that lets you pay once to unlock every character, including new ones, forever.

Paladins is a team FPS with MOBA and card game elements. It wears its influences on its sleeve - it's squarely in the same territory as Team Fortress 2 and Overwatch - but after a long period in beta it has established its own identity. Being able to customise your character mid-match adds a strategic element similar to a MOBA, and there are some really cool character designs to be found beyond the familiar tanks, healers and damage heroes (you'll find a skin for one of them below.)

All you need to do is fill out the forms below to register your interest. You've got until 17:00 CEST / 08:00 PDT on Sunday January 22nd to do so. At that point, 1000 lucky entrants will receive an email with their code. You're welcome to enter both giveaways, but we can't guarantee that you'll get both codes. Good luck and have fun!

King Ar-Tyr for Smite

This Monty Python-inspired skin for Norse warrior Tyr gives him an Arthurian makeover, including new spell effects and new voice lines. It'd normally cost you 400 gems, which is $7.99 in regular money. For a chance at getting it for free, fill out the form below. For more on Smite and to download the game, click here.

Convention Ying for Paladins

This skin was part of the Digital Loot Pack that Hi-Rez sold as part of their promotion of HRX 2017, and it's no longer available as part of the in-game store. That means that we're currently your only hope of getting an orangey-blue Ying if you don't already have one. That's not a sentence we've had to write very often.

Ying's a versatile, high-skill support character whose abilities revolve around the use of illusions. These (mostly) stationary duplicates heal nearby allies, act as teleport beacons for the main Ying, and can be activated to pursue nearby enemies and explode. Playing her effectively means staying on the move, ensuring that you have illusions on hand to help your team, and luring enemies into traps. If you don't play support because you find it too passive, give her a try.

Fill out the form below for a shot at getting a key. To find out more about Paladins, click here.