Paladins accidentally uses Overwatch art to promote mobile game
Hi-Rez Studios, developers of Paladins, have inadvertently used art from one of Overwatch's maps to promote Paladins Strike, the game's mobile offshoot.
The city scape in Overwatch's Lijiang Tower map, which appears in the loading screen whenever the map comes up in the queue, somehow ended up in promo art for Paladins Strike.
A very perceptive Reddit user noticed the similarities in the background art. Arcieth, the user in question, even created a handy GIF to show it in a bit more detail.
Although the art itself could easily be original, or from a different source, the buildings in the background are unmistakable. The only difference is in clarity, with the Paladins Strike version being a bit more blurry to highlight the character art.
This is not in fact all in someone's head, as Paladins art director promised to look into how this happened. According to them, the art was outsourced to an overseas company and Hi-Rez didn't OK it before it went out.
"Moving forward we are well underway in a bit of a shift in how I plan to see our splash art executed to make things feel a little more unique to paladins that should hopefully allow us to control content creation better with a larger quality of output to boot, stay tuned," they added.
Elsewhere in the same Reddit thread, another user pointed out that there's another piece of Blizzard art in Paladins Strike. The user showed a screenshot of what they is a glitch that some players see upon logging into the game.
The short features a particular grid design seen in the splash screen of Heroes of the Storm.
It seems Hi-Rez just can't escape having Paladins be mentioned alongside Overwatch. When the former first hit beta, many compared its character design and roles to those of Overwatch.
It gained a lot of traction at the time, prompting developer response from Hi-Rez saying that ideas for these characters were in development well before similar designs appeared in Overwatch. The company CEO would later bring up the same subject to say that Brigitte is similar to Paladins' Ash.