English
Français
Deutsch
Español
Polski
Русский
Português do Brasil
Türkçe
中国
Play Free
Back
English
Français
Deutsch
Español
Polski
Русский
Português do Brasil
Türkçe
中国
Today we’d like to address a very common community question: Why don’t our skins look more like this?
In large part, it’s because of our “parts and pieces” system. This system allows players to mix and match bodies with accessories, by carving player models into several separate parts.
Unfortunately, this system is restrictive on our skin designs. Every head has to work with every body. A backpack can’t clip through the geometry on another skin. We have very, very small safe zones to work in when we design skins, as you can see from these images.
Sometimes we have great ideas, but they just don’t work. For example, this Grohk skin from early beta was never released — much to the community’s disappointment. That’s because of our “parts and pieces” system; We could never get the head and body to separate cleanly and place nicely with our other skins. It’s the same problem we’d run into on any of those Paladins Strike skins.
And the more skin we create, the more issue we face. A simple collar or ribbon can torpedo an entire skin…Or just make the finished product look a lot less cool.
This system also has significant impacts on performance. Instead of needing to load one mesh per character, we need to load several. As we continue to optimize Paladins, the performance hit of our “parts and pieces” system becomes more and more apparent.
Lastly, the system makes our UI very complicated. Our UI team has to maintain multiple screen, tabs, filters, and store functions that take valuable development time away from others issues.
We’re not happy about any of these things. We want to make better skins. We want the game to run better. We want our UI to be cleaner, less buggy, and easier to understand.
Taking all this into account, we have decided to eliminate the parts and pieces system, effective in OB68. We understand this may be upsetting to players who really enjoyed mixing and matching Champion Skins, but ultimately we believe the pros outweigh the cons. This is an important step froward to improve the overall quality of Paladins.
What does this mean for existing Skin owners when OB68 releases?
So what kind of skins are going to be possible with this new system? We’re excited to share some awesome concept art that our team has been working on.
No more hairband recolors here. These skins are transformative, unrestricted by our “pieces and parts” system. For now, these are just concepts — skins we may or may not actually make — but we hope you are as excited about the future as we are.
One final note: As part of our overhaul to the “pieces and parts” system, we will be changing how Voice Packs work.
We will continue to improve quality and perfomance throughout the year, and this is a big first step. See you in the Realm, Champions!