Ripped Wings: Paladins
Though I hope to post about literally anything else moving forward, I think it's only fitting that the beginning of a new era for me start by paying respects to the prior one. Paladins was so many things to me: a formative video game, my first solo CM job, my first design role, and above all the outlet for my passion. Every day working at Evil Mojo was one spent pouring who I was and wanted to be into this misunderstood gem of a project.
From the moment I started my internship at HiRez, I had begged to be placed on Paladins. It's not that I didn't enjoy SMITE or their other titles but instead was because I knew at my core it was the best fit. The community it had built over years of living at the most niche of intersections between fantasy, hero shooters, and build crafting spoke both to my personal taste as well as my fledgling queerness. It took over 6 months and came only out of the first of many layoffs, but I eventually got my shot.
I came onto the team at a very tumultuous time, internally and externally. The yearly tentpole update was mid-announce, the community had lost their CM over a month ago, and my first task was to spin down a creator program. To this day, I'm not sure how large a role my own skill played versus the amount of luck needed to survive that moment (in reality, it's always both). Over the first few months, I would have to prove to the player base that I was cut out for the responsibility while also working internally to mend a rift between CM and the development team. Everyone pitied my position, thinking Paladins was basically already on death's door, a potential reality I chose to ignore as all it did was serve to distract.
I worked with every single discipline to ensure player concerns were known and in turn that we communicated them in a way that started to see sentiment improve and more importantly the people behind the game being seen. Paladins was Evil Mojo, its culture and identities directly informed the game it had become. By leaning into who we were and the existing internal belief that the team was unique, we achieved a level of success thought impossible a year prior.
The Anniversary Update was something the team nearly didn't do, but myself and several others pitched it as a core part of our plan. We needed to make Paladins and the act of playing it something to be proud of again. I'm still hugely grateful to everyone on the team who backed us and admittedly overly-crunched ourselves to ship it...which made the fact that another set of layoffs happened a week later only sting more.
It's in that moment of falling from grace yet again, this time harder and as a part of the team itself, that I understood why everyone else involved from developers to players felt the way they did. This was Paladins' history. A constant battle between success that defied all odds and tragedy either within or existential that tore it all down. It was an echo of the general strife the entire industry was going through, but for us a painfully familiar circumstance.
We would never reach Anniversary again. However, once again I couldn't let that likely outcome decide how I moved forward. I took on more responsibility, I started working directly with the design team, I took the lead of narrative. It was an insane opportunity that I couldn't ignore and though many would think it not worthwhile, that's exactly why I felt they needed to be shown love.
Even as things continued to get rougher and the team fought for any chance at a more secure future, I fought on the frontlines as well as our defenses. I was promoted to a designer while still maintaining my CM workload, a fact that made most of my peers shudder on my behalf. I wrote over a dozen flash fictions, designed countless modes and ended up finally giving in and doing game balance (I fought to avoid it for several months to not mix CM/Design too heavily). Others on the team took similar multifaceted roles, either equally as dedicated or insane as myself.
This entire time, we had to project our confidence in Paladins. Every week, it felt like there was some discussion in the community that was about "the final straw" that buries us, and even in moments where we feared the same I had to pull myself together and be the first step into the future I wanted. Nothing ever lasts forever, but that doesn't mean you give up on it.
Our team was a skeleton crew refusing to lose our flourish, a dying star destined to go out in a beautiful supernova. When the final layoff came, it was met with us begging that they still ship what we had been working on yesterday. Even after we had been whittled down and beaten, our final concerns were not ourselves but making Paladins the best we could.
That's what made Evil Mojo so special. I've never known a group of people so willing to go out of their way to try and make something better absent praise...in fact, we often got met with hatred for our effort. None of that mattered in the little moments: when a new player would try the game and been shocked how much they missed out, community members who would discover who they were through our Champions and stories, creators who would lead events for charity with us as a headlining title. We loved Paladins more than I ever could convey.
Evil Mojo is gone, and Paladins will never be what it was again. I have hopes it will live on through community preservation and HiRez's recent track record of keeping games up as long as feasible. I wish my work wasn't so likely to fade into history, however that's a deeper industry problem. All this was to say...I don't regret a moment of it all. The pain, the stress, the fighting to exist that often left me exhausted in bed. We gave a game with hundreds of thousands of fans extra years on its life, memories that cannot be taken away from us.
The story of Paladins and Evil Mojo is exactly why I wanted to start this blog. Its spirit was that of finding hope even in the darkest of times, believing that no moment is in vain if it ends up making someone smile. Even if that era is over, that's a part of my identity I never want to lose. I would often tell team members of my optimism: "It's not that everything isn't going wrong, it's that there's something we can get right." As long as there are ways to make the world a better place, I'll be damned if I'm not there making it so.