Game U.R. : Paladins and the need of onboarding

Version française

“Paladins: Champions of the realm” is a First Person Shooter (or Hero Shooter) made by Hi-Rez Studio. The goal is to win an objective (capture a point, escort a bomb …) in 5 versus 5 matches. Each playable character has his own specificity.
The “Hero Shooter” genre is exploding in 2016, with a lot of new games like Battleborn or Overwatch. In this mass, Paladins is free, which makes it accessible to more people than paying games and it should expect a lot of inexperienced players to try it, and maybe stay if they are handled well.

For now, Paladins is in Open Beta, it means that it still may change and maybe some of the topic we will talk about will be fixed afterward or don’t exist anymore. For the review, we used the 0.35.1340.0 version, on the 13^th of October 2016.

One day was enough to review this game and to end with these findings:

1/ Playability

Choice

At the start of each game, each player chooses his character from a list, depending on his likes and what his team chooses.

Good	New players can play in two clicks
Warning	BUT they end up with no advice on what to play. During this phase, the players only sees what the characters looks like, there are no informations about what his abilities are except his “type” (Front Line, Damage, flank, support).
Advice	Add a quick description of the character and a list of his spells when the player select it.

 

12/21/2017:  You can now press “K” after selecting a character to see his abilities. 

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Affordance

Warning	Some characters don’t look like their roles. For example Bomb King is huge but only have 2500hp and Fernando is slim and gracious (especially on his portrait) but has 6000hp. The player has to understand that Bomb King is a bomb and can explode easily and that Fernando has a plate armor to resist attacks.

Advice

Be carefull that characters looks explain their roles. For the examples Bomb King’s armor could be less smooth and look more “ready to explode”, with cracks or smoke. Fernando could have a bigger armor. Changing whole 3D models at this point in the development could be pretty hard, so it could also suffice to modify their portraits : Bomb King’s could show him ready to explode and Fernando’s could show more of his armor.

 12/21/2017: Some portraits were modified, Fernando has now his helmet on.

2/ Usability

Help and guidance

When you begin the game and until you reach lvl 5, in the main menu, some recent videos from the “paladin” youtube channel are displayed. We can see tutorials and explanations about the game.

Good	This method is good to avoid looking for informations in the depth of the menus
Warning	BUT here, only some videos are available.
Advice	Since the youtube channel has a lot of tutorial and explanations videos, it could be interesting to have acces to more videos from the game. For example in the character informations menu.

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Feedbacks

“Feedbacks” are the game’s response to player’s actions, so that he can understand what happen on screen. For example, in Paladin, when you shoot at an enemy, his health bar drops to show to show the damage dealing.

Good	When attacking, players have good feedbacks about the damages done to the enemy, the healthbar drops and red numbers float to show how bad it is.

Warning

When healing, the feedbacks can be harder to notice, the  allies’ healthbar and the floating numbers disappears on a short distance.

Advice

Enhance the healing feedbacks for support heroes, to encourage healing at least as much as dealing damage. For example highlight the allies’ healthbar when they are low with blinking, lights or embiger them a little. This way the game would incite more teamplay from the support class.

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Information’s perception

Good	The ennemy’s healthbar becomes red when they are at the “maximum damage” range of the base attack. In a 3D video Game, depth is hard to manage on a 2D screen. This technique is a good way to help the player see when it is best to attack and deal the most damage.

3/Gameplay

Failure

Good	After the player’s death, the game automatically displays a “killcam” to help him understand why he died, it also suggest to buy items to enhance some abilities and acquire an advantage for the rest of the game.

12/21/2017: The “killcam” can now display a recap of the death.

Conclusion

Paladins is a pretty good « Hero Shooter » and it’s free ! It can be a good way for players to discover the genre without spending anything. That is why developpers needs to be really careful to guide and content the new players. Because they may come to discover the genre, but they also may stay if they understand enough and the game fits them.

This review was but only a peek of our Paladin’s assessment (It isn’t even its final form !!). We can do a lot more thanks to our tools and expertise, contact us if you want to know more.
If you have questions or opinions, please tell us In the comments. See you next time!

That was GameU.R. the review ergo of jeux vidéos.