That’s kind of preserved here with our system in Realm Royale. If you look at SMITE, there’s a lot of different build paths and ways that you can play each character in different roles. If you look at Paladins, there’s the whole card-building deck building system to customise your loadout. One of the big things for Hi-Rez Games in general is a lot of opportunities for player choice and expression. It’s more like you’re picking a path to go down rather than being locked into ‘this is the only way I can play this class’. You can use the same abilities as other classes but the Mage is going to use it better.
The Hunter is better with the bow, and the Mage has an ability that lets you fly through the air. Mick: The classes are Warrior, Hunter, Mage, Assassin. Then we figured out a way to make a class system that can use everything but wants to play a certain way. The way Paladins is made doesn’t allow one character to have another character’s gun, so we built a game where that was possible – to get you different weapons, different abilities. James: One of the big things that we wanted was to get tactile with the loot and when we were in Paladins: Battlegrounds that was a problem we had because we couldn’t give you a new gun. The way Paladins is made doesn’t allow one character to have another character’s gun, so we built a game where that was possible So, we quickly branched off of Paladins, stayed within that universe and IP, but began to explore the relationship between classes and finding your loot, and then also introducing more objective-based gameplay with the Forges, which we thought were an innovative step in the battle royale genre. It became apparent during the production of that game mode that where we wanted to take it with objective-based gameplay - the way that classes would work with an open-ended battle royale experience - that the Paladins characters were a little too compartmentalised for what we wanted to do with the game and when we released it, it wasn’t necessarily bad – actually, a lot of players started flocking to it to try it out within Paladins – but it was apparent that we couldn’t really go far with where we wanted to go being within Paladins.
From the get-go we knew we wanted to make a fantasy themed, class-based battle royale.
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We did demo the first iteration of the Paladins: Battlegrounds battle royale mode at our annual HRX Event in January 2017 and got very positive reception there and then we went full force on making that a game mode within Paladins.
Mick: I was involved with that whole process, on that prototype and game mode, and then when we went into full production on Realm as a standalone game.
What was behind the decision to rebrand the game when it spun out into its own thing? Realm Royale started out as Paladins: Battlegrounds, a mode inside Paladins. The number of players will whittle down until there’s one player or one team ending victorious. We take a large number of players against each other - they’re going to choose classes with different abilities and different end goals and play styles to try and gain an advantage over the course of a match. James: Realm Royale is a class-based Battle Royale. How would you describe Realm Royale to a Switch gamer who perhaps hasn’t seen it on other platforms? First, a little history for anybody who isn’t familiar with the game.