Hi-Rez's Todd Harris Refutes Allegations That Paladins Cloned Overwatch

It's no secret that Paladins resembles Blizzard's extremely popular character shooter Overwatch. We ourselves commented on the similarities on our this week's Sunday Funday video for the game. Many characters appear to have many of the same abilities as their Overwatch counterparts; some even have similar overall designs. For example, Paladins's Barik resembles Overwatch's Torbjorn in more ways than just their stature.

Hi-Rez COO Todd Harris has taken to Reddit to refute such allegations. He recounts that Paladins was originally spurred by 2012 project called Aurum. Aurum was "a Fantasy based Global Agenda PvP like game" that was later scrapped, but ended up serving as the foundation for Paladins.

According to Harris, the rest of the story is as follows.

• Overwatch was announced. We were shocked and not sure what direction to take. We were already so far along with Paladins, but we didn't want to compete directly against Blizzard.
• We initially tried to find different ways to differentiate on game-play (different TTK, different style maps and game modes, different theme, etc), but the feedback from our tests, stats, and surveys showed that only a small part of our population was enjoying that style of game. In the end we said screw it and just made what we thought best, and closest to our original vision, even if people would think it's too close to Overwatch.
• We created almost all the Paladins classes and abilities using Global Agenda and Smite as our template. We used our Aurum fantasy theme from 2012 and Smite characters as placeholders (although some like Grover the tree just stayed).
• As a last point, it would be almost impossible for a studio of our size to 'clone' Overwatch in a year, but Overwatch did have some nice features that we decided to incorporate into Paladins (Kill Cam, Improved Lag comp, some verbiage like 'eliminations')

The post is accompanied by a number of videos from Aurum, Global Agenda, and other sources. I've included two of the Aurum videos below.

Commenters have since included extra details, such as the fact that there was footage of Paladins's Evie using her Ice Block ability before Overwatch's Mei was announced. While the similarities are borderline uncanny at times, perhaps it is plausible that many of them are merely coincidences.