All of us remember the backlash that the Paladins devs got when they first released their multiplayer hero shooter. Everyone called it a bad Overwatch clone, and they have been fighting to prove otherwise. But, you kind of screw up everything that you’ve done when you make a mistake as big as this. For those of you that don’t know, Hi-Rez Studios used Overwatch art in a Covert Ops skin teaser for their mobile title, Paladins Strike. The background art for the skin was the same one for the Lijiang Tower, so as you can imagine, when people found out about this, a lot of accusations were thrown around, and this whole situation made things awkward for Hi-Rez Studios.
The whole thing is really hilarious, as we can’t figure out how you manage to take art from another game, let alone the game that people constantly say that you copied when you made your own title, and use it for a background for your skin. The chance of that happening must be like 1% or something like that, but the art director from Hi-Rez Studios said this in a Reddit post:
This art was created by a overseas partner studio for paladins strike and had not much in the way of oversight in its content creation by anyone internally at Hi-Rez. We will be looking into this immediately.
Moving forward we are well underway in a bit of a shift in how I plan to see our splash art executed to make things feel a little more unique to paladins that should hopefully allow us to control content creation better with a larger quality of output to boot, stay tuned.
Whatever the case may be, this is just going to promote the “Paladins is a blatant copy of Overwatch” discussion, and that is bad for Paladins, while it doesn’t affect Overwatch at all. Hopefully, Hi-Rez Studios manage to clear all this up so there aren’t any misunderstandings.
