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.