kinessie is canon king

the game has been notorious for ignoring the lore of older champions and instead focusing on the stories which fuel the main story going forward, which is both a good and a bad thing.

its a bad thing because me and many other players have favourite characters who were added to the game during its beta and alpha stages really havent gotten much spotlight or exploration of their part of the story, and personally it leaves me pretty indifferent towards the new champions. if i had it my way there would be events about certain past events, or comics, or short videos, literally anything to give background to the world and characters theyve already created. i feel that the lack of this has made the worldbuilding in paladins quite poor? the best thing that happened in regards to the lore was the ‘a realm divided’ video which gave us that background, but it kinda ended there.

theres a lot of questions to be answered that i think would benefit the worldbuilding, such as more info on a lot of the nonhuman characters, the stallaga, the vulpin, the summer court. to be honest a good handful of champions mention nature as a big source of power but that just hasnt been touched on yet?

a problem that i’ve talked about for years is the way they haphazardly throw random, and sometimes quite important pieces of lore, at us on places like twitter or discord. only a few weeks ago was mal’damba revealled to be a ska’drin in a reply to a tweet by the community manager, which now that we know that, is a major piece of his character. other examples include buck being confirmed a past member of the thousand hand guild in a lore question on twitter. as someone whos been following paladins for years, the only place i trust to get all the paladins lore knowledge i need is myself, because i’ve kept up to date with everything from everywhere, and there isnt really a place where its all accurately recorded. and thats a major problem.

in regards to the current continuing story, it feels to me that conflicts and storylines are never really resolved? we jump to one threat to another without any real conclusion. gods and incredibly powerful keep coming to the mortal realm and you’d think that would be a major thing but it seems to happen so fucking often that nobody bats an eyelid. hell, corvus summoned raum who is a literal destructive demon from hell and...... then what? we just jumped to story about the darkness. from a marketing standpoint, this continuting story and constant conflict is good for the game because it gets new players interested in the next big action packed event, but honestly its really overwhelming.

octavia’s addition has been a momentary breath of relief because shes the first champion in a year who hasnt been associated with a god or a higher power, shes just a woman with a gun, and i missed that so much. i think if the game’s story continued with the conflict brought on by the crystal war then it would have been beneficial to the worldbuilding, older characters, and story as a whole. presenting the resistance and magistrate as both morally grey sides in the debate would make for a very interesting point of exploration (if you want a story that handles grey morality of opposing factions fantastically, i recommend picking up arknights).

overall, i understand why the lore is like this. they need to release these big, powerful, crazy looking characters because at the end of the day paladins is a free-to-play game that needs engagement and characters like the huge abyss worm yagorath bring that engagement. i get it. but viewing the lore as it is, it is messy, poorly handled, and the only reason i’m still indulging in it is because i’ve been here too long and i want to see how it ends.