Smite dev unveils genre mish-mash Paladins

Paladins is a new game from Hi-Rez Studios, the team now best known for Smite but also responsible for Tribes Ascend.

A free-to-play affair for PC, PS4 and Xbox One, Paladins apparently "combines a rich fantasy setting with the fast action of a team-based first person shooter", but also "offers deep strategy and in-match character progression through decks of collectible cards, which amplify and augment a character’s core set of abilities".

So it's a competitive, team shooter with a card-collecting meta? Okay. Players enter battles with a primary weapon, a set of combat and movement abilities, and a mount, Hi-Rez said, and can activate and upgrade their skill cards as they level up in-match.

Hi-Rez has spun off a second team to work on Paladins, so support for Smite will continue uninterrupted. Paladins has been in the works for over a year and is expected in 2016. In the meantime you can check out a webs- oh, actually, the supplied domain is well and truly parked. Well, take a look at some character art below.

Funny how everyone's making team shooters at the moment. Also, the deck-building part makes it sounds like it has some similarities to Digital Extremes' mysterious new project, Keystone, and the upgrading mid-battle thing sounds like Gearbox's Battleborn.