Format external hard drive

Am I correct in that if I want to use my new external drive for a time machine backup on High Sierra I need to format it as HFS+?

The other her option is to use the included Paragon for Mac software included with the drive. I noticed of my two current external drives the older one is Mac OS X Extended which I presume is now the HFS+, and the other is NTFS. I haven’t noticed any issues writing to the NTFS drive on my Mac and I don’t recall installing any specific software on that drive although being a Seagate maybe it had something installed by default?