Paladins is Making Skins Better and UI Cleaner By Removing Parts and Pieces System

One of the most popular features of Hi-Rez Studios' Paladins is its parts and pieces system, which allows players to mix and match different Champion Skins as they please. If you're one of those people who enjoy this feature, I have some bad news: Hi-Rez is getting rid of it.

The news comes via a new blogpost where the developer goes into the various issues and cons the system presents, all which according to it, weigh out the pros, and thus it makes sense to chop it. The developer – who acknowledges the move may upset some players -- believes "it is an important step forward to improve the overall quality of Paladins."

According to Hi-Rez there has been a lot of chatter internally and externally about why the game's skins don't look great, especially compared to other games like Overwatch. Well, it's largely the fault of the parts and pieces system that carves player models into several separate parts so bodies and accessories can be mixed and match. Hi-Rez notes that this system makes the team restricted in its skin design. For example, every head has to work with every body and a backpack can't clip through the geometry of another skin.

In the past this has restricted great ideas from being implemented. For example, the popular Grohk skin from early beta was never released, much to the community's disappointment. According to Hi-Rez, the issue was it could never get the head and body to separate cleanly and play nicely with other skins, so it had to be canned.

The system has also plagued performance. Instead of needing to load one mesh per character, Hi-Rez needs to load several. Further, the system also makes the game's UI very complicated, as the UI team has to maintain multiple screens, tabs, filters, and store functions that take valuable development time away from other issues.

Hi-Rez continues:

"We're not happy about any of these things. We want to make better skins. We want the game to run better. We want our UI to be cleaner, less buggy, and easier to understand."

So the question is: when is Hi-Rez going to make this change? The answer is very soon. Starting with the patch of OB68 (OB67.5 just released this week), the parts and pieces system will officially be history.

Hi-Rez also makes note that all players who own any part of a skin collection will receive the rest of the collection. Meanwhile, all players who own Accessories without an associated Collection will receive a new full skin.

If you want, you can read more about the changes, as well as view early concept art of some new skins coming to the game, here.

Paladins, a free-to-play first-person hero shooter still in Open Beta, is available for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PC, and Mac.