Greetings Champions! This Developer Insight blog is all about Wave Defense: its development, its release, and where we’d like to take it and alternative Paladins game modes in the future. Along the way, we’ll be sharing clips from the development version to give a glimpse as to how far the mode has already come from its original prototype.
Development
It’d been a long while since Paladins received a new mode with the last “core” mode being King of the Hill, released in 2019. Ever since, the team has thrown around ideas and concepts for new modes and spins on existing experiences. However, with Siege being by far our most popular mode compared to all others, we wanted to ensure we were providing the most support possible for Siege, then add occasional fun LTMs to rotation.
This eventually led to Siege Beyond, considering changes to the Siege gamemode to keep it feeling new and fresh, similar to how MOBAs change their core mode format season to season. Some players didn’t resonate with those ideas either, so that pushed us to look into another route to adding a Siege-like mode: restoring Payload. Payload, however, is both an older mode with severe development limitations due to the age of the mode & its unique level design compared to modern gamemodes. Not any more popular than Onslaught, TDM, or King of the Hill also means balancing its support with all other side modes. This is what got us to begin exploring the original Siege maps and projects like Siege Remixed and Swift Siege as we looked to make LTMs more like mode variants.
During Siege Remixed’s development, our former level designer Shak had also been working on a side project a few on the team were passionate about: a small horde gamemode running on Primal Court. When they originally showed it to the team, it looked like this:
This video was recorded with God mode enabled as testing was mainly centered around spawning at this stage.
As you can see, it was very much a prototype & mainly played around the studio as a fun lunch break game. Over time, however, several people would poke at the prototype and add various features or aspects to it. Artists would recommend skins, a designer curated the bots being utilized, and a programmer was beginning the shell of a GameClass (basically what tells our game that something is its own game mode). As we entered Winter of 2023, the Primal Court prototype looked like this:
It was around this time that the team was planning for 2024 and the official pitch was made to create Wave Defense, at the time simply called “Horde”. (It got a little confusing internally when talking about Horde, the Item Hoard, and the Wild Hoard update.) We got the go ahead & after Moji’s rework was fully complete we went to work.
Over the latter half of Spring & early Summer, we added the two other maps players would see and unique bots for each. We added its own rules and settings, officially branching it off of Onslaught. We also brought the powerups from a previous LTM back to emulate the feel of an arcade experience. Our goals with Wave Defense were simple and hopeful: create a PvE experience for Paladins; one that was quick, approachable, and replayable. This version was the one that was released in Public Beta.
Release
Our hope when Wave Defense was released into Beta was that its popularity (measured by number of unique players) would start near Onslaught and over time become less played while we worked on a more refined version based on feedback. Instead of describing how it performed, here’s a chart of our main game modes during Wave Defense’s launch week:
Note: Competitive KBM is actually all of Ranked since we switched to Crossplay required.
Wave Defense launched at nearly double the players as Onslaught, and despite known performance issues and bugs managed to fall in line with our other main modes. This was beyond our initial expectations and encouraged the team to look into further improvements and PvE ideas. However, as Wave Defense has been developed over a year at this stage, those improvements will take some time & we’ll communicate when they are ready.
A brief tangent: Having 4 side modes that all are similar in player count is an honor, but also comes with issues. Rotating modes in and out has been our solution in the past to offer every mode players would like to see some of the time; but with Wave Defense being added and none of the modes less popular than each other, it’s a temporary solution. An idea being considered to make the Arcade LTM a full-time mode and merging modes like Team Deathmatch, King of the Hill, and Payload into it so we can continue to offer more modes while not harming matchmaking quality or time further. We’d be curious about player thoughts on this topic!
What’s Next
Our current goals with Wave Defense are to improve performance & continue to iterate on what the mode offers. On performance, we’ve already noticed an interesting trend where consoles perform much better than PCs, especially the current generation of consoles. We’re planning to dig into this and see if there are optimizations we can spread to last gen & computers, but it’ll take more time than we’ve had this specific update.
Wave Defense will be less frequent from our August update until October, replaced by an Event mode we’ll share more on soon. However, we wanted to make something to offer those looking for a harder challenge and something to earn. For select weekends during this period, Dark Tides: Champion Difficulty will be available! This is a harder version of the current Dark Tides experience, featuring stronger bots with some added abilities, as well as a new final wave that brings back Death Speakers from the original Dark Tides Event.
Those who defeat this mode during one of these weekends will earn the Limited Title Champion of the Tides to signify their conquering of the Kraken. We’re excited for players to play and maybe work towards a high-score!
We’ll continue to share updates on Wave Defense’s development and availability over time as we balance improvements to this mode as well as taking care of other modes. We’ve got changes coming to the map pools of Ranked, Siege, and TDM as well…but we’ll chat about those another day soon. Until then, enjoy Wave Defense!