Overwatch art used in Paladins Strike ad due to "not much oversight"

A piece of promotional art for mobile title Paladins Strike came under scrutiny yesterday when a Reddit user noticed the background closely resembled art used in Overwatch. Developer Hi-Rez Studios was quick to reply, stating that the ad's art was outsourced and was not scrutinized as thoroughly as it should have been.

The art consisted of the champion Lex in a new skin posing in front of a nighttime cityscape. That city background is identical to the official splash artwork for Overwatch's Lijang Tower map, which is shown every time a player loads into that location for a match.

"This art was created by a overseas partner studio for Paladins Strike and had not much in the way of oversight in its content creation by anyone internally at Hi-Rez. We will be looking into this immediately," replied a Hi-Rez art director using the Reddit handle ThunderArtBrush.

"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, which should hopefully allow us to control content creation better with a larger quality of output to boot, stay tuned."

Paladins (from which Paladins Strike derives its characters and themes) and Overwatch are both hero shooters that launched in 2016. Though the games have a history of their respective audiences remarking on the similarities between the two (down to the Hi-Rez Studios president, Stew Chisam, making a direct comparison as a joke on Twitter), this is the only instance where actual assets have been copied.