Over the past several months, the Evil Mojo development team has been 100% focused on improving the quality of Paladins. Today, we want to share our plans to continue this focus on quality throughout 2019, while delivering the new content our players want.
We’ve already quashed hundreds of bugs through a deeper commitment to our bug fixing initiative The Hunt, led by our new Executive Director Dayle “Xienen” Flowers. The team is not done yet: We plan to continue making The Hunt our top priority throughout 2019.
As we’ve focused on The Hunt, we’ve questioned all of our existing processes and tried to root out as many sources of bugs as we can. One key issue that remained to be addressed was our update schedule.
You may have noticed that updating brings risk. By updating too frequently, we introduce some level of unavoidable instability to the game – and divert resources from fixing, to shipping. This was clearly demonstrated in our most recent update, which Xienen wrote more about here. Our recent shift from a six-week update cycle to a four-week update cycle only made things worse, and our goal is to prevent these issues, not exacerbate them.
In addition to Xienen’s focus on quality, we’ve also learned a lot more about what our players want from the game. We’ve seen several skin-only events perform quite poorly, despite positive feedback on social media. And we’ve heard concerns that these skin event-only updates are not substantial enough to justify an update.
Going forward, we intend to release a polished Paladins update with a major new gameplay feature – such as a Champion, map, mode, or significant balance update – every eight weeks. In addition, each update will have a new Battle Pass, and at least one other new cosmetic available for purchase. If we patch in between these major updates, it will typically be just for bug fixes or critical balance adjustments.
2019 Roadmap:
May
- New Siege Map: Bazaar
- Steel Forged Battle Pass
July
- New Support Champion
- Beach Bash Battle Pass
September
- New Game Mode
- New Battle Pass
November
- New Frontline Champion
- New Battle Pass
We’re excited about this new schedule, but the details are still subject to change. We will remain focused on quality and content that we know our players like.
This schedule will affect a few previously announced items:
- We now intend to release the Community Skin Contest winners in January 2020 as part of a Battle Pass.
- At this time, Evie will not be getting a skin in 2019. We will be reducing our skin output for the rest of the year by 50%, and the event containing the Evie skin was regrettably cut. We will try to get Evie a skin in early 2020.
- Late last year, we released a video stating we intended to release six champions in 2019. That pace was slowed down when we reallocated our programming resources to focus on quality, rather than new content. However, we intend to honor this intention for those who purchased the 2019 Season Pass expecting six Champions to be released; you will also receive its benefits for the first two champions of 2020
Thank you so much for your support, and we can’t wait to share the rest of 2019 with you.
