Among live service games, Smite is an interesting case study. It doesn’t have the popularity of the biggest MOBAs, like League of Legends and DotA 2, but has weathered a volatile decade in gaming, one where appetites for live service experiences have dwindled considerably. Despite these trends, Smite has attracted a dedicated and passionate community, a community which developer Titan Forge Games hopes will follow them to the newly announced sequel, Smite 2.

The announcement of Smite 2 during this past weekend’s Smite World Championships was met with frenzied cheers from the live crowd at Esports Stadium Arlington. In many ways, it’s a brave decision. The disastrous trajectory of Overwatch 2 is a cautionary tale of how negatively fans can react to a half-baked ‘sequel’. On the day of the announcement, after playing Smite 2 myself, I sat down with a trio of developers from Titan Forge to speak about expectations for the sequel.

Titan Forge is not planning to pull support for the original Smite after Smite 2 is released. A smaller team will continue to work on Smite while the bulk of Titan Forge’s resources will shift towards the sequel. There’s a palpable respect for the core player base among Titan Forge, and they’re looking to make the transition as smooth as possible for these players.

A Herculean Task

“I think it will be a bit gradual, but we’re intentionally fostering that,” Vice President of Brand Marketing Alex Cantatore tells me. “There are going to be some people who don’t like the gameplay evolutions of Smite 2. We’re going to evolve based on the feedback we get in testing and hopefully, we make the best version of Smite we can for as many people as possible.”

Cantatore acknowledges that there will still be a subsection of the community who will keep playing the original game, especially those on last-gen consoles who don’t want to upgrade. “If Smite 2 is strictly better then we need to earn people coming over to our game, to ensure the game can grow and become a better experience,” chimes in Daniel “PonPon” Cooper, a game designer and former professional Smite player. “They’ll see what we can do and how we can work with them; we’re going to have a game that makes people want to come over rather than forces them to come over.”

In addition to their core community, Titan Forge also hopes that a lot of new players and lapsed players are excited about Smite 2 and get involved. “We’ve had about 40 million people play Smite over the years,” Cantatore begins. “It’s a free-to-play game, so a lot of people play for a bit and stop, but we’ve had around 5 million players who were serious fans of the game. We’re hoping they come back, take a look at the game and are excited about what they see.”

“We’re also hopeful a new generation of gamers gives it a try and sees it’s a fun, different kind of MOBA that scratches a lot of itches if you like shooters or MMOs,” he adds.

Unreal Upgrades

The most obvious benefit of Unreal Engine 5 is the clear visual upgrades, but the biggest advantage associated with the engine change will manifest in development efficiencies. Previously, prototyping could be a very time-consuming back-and-forth between designers and programmers. Now, Unreal Engine 5 enables designers like PonPon to prototype their own ideas before getting everyone else involved.

“When we’re working on internal stuff, things that should be relatively simple are suddenly incredibly difficult and time-consuming, and it takes a few days away from the active prototyping of a feature and getting playtest feedback on,” PonPon tells me. “That’s just draining and it makes it really hard to make new stuff so seeing that kind of stuff happen and fighting against those things… I knew we had to go to UE5 because it frees up so much effort.”

Travis Brown, Executive Producer, reveals that the first Smite 2 playtest in UE5 only took about five weeks to create. He called the experience “super empowering” as “designers are in control of creating the game” rather than relying on programmers to handle the complicated processes of UE3.

A ‘eureka’ moment about the need for an engine upgrade came to Cantatore during the team’s attempt to overhaul the HUD of Smite, which was built on Flash: “We had this old HUD that wasn’t the most pretty,” he begins. “It was very functional, but it made the game look older than it was. We worked on that HUD with a full team of ten people for a year and a half and when we shipped it, it still had problems. We had 10 people work for a year and a half on something the game really needs, and we just couldn’t execute to the level we wanted. So yeah, definitely rough.”

A Divine Legacy

Monetisation is always a contentious topic, and Smite 2 hasn’t escaped fan scrutiny in this regard either. Titan Forge won’t be porting over the thousands of skins from Smite 1 to its sequel because of the scale of that undertaking, so they’ve opted to compensate players in other ways. Players will receive a legacy gem for each gem they spent in Smite 1, and these are redeemable for up to half of the price of any content in Smite 2.

Additionally, players will also receive free skins based on what they achieved over the 11 years of Smite’s history through a system called Divine Legacy. Though many are satisfied with this compromise, others are upset their higher-tier skins won’t be coming with them to Smite 2. The team at Titan Forge are fully aware of how passionate their community is about the time and money they’ve invested in Smite.

“For Smite players, Smite isn’t just a game. Some people talk about it being a hobby and others talk about it being their life,” Cantatore observes. “You know, a Twitter bio could be ‘I’m 18, I live in Fresno and I play mid-lane.’ We couldn’t just say ‘whatever you did in Smite 1, forget about it.’ That was never on the table for us.”

Smite 1 has a lot of gods, 129 to be exact. Smite 2 is planning to port over every one of these gods, and add five additional ones. The playtest I participated in had approximately 12 gods enabled, and the closed alpha is planned to have about 50. Interestingly, one of the gods, Ymir, has been changed with his Wall ability now having added knockback.

“Ymir is a special case since we’re not going to have ‘Blink’ as an immediate option for him and that changes his dynamic. He really should be this Frost Giant warrior that gets in your face. I think we’re going to look at every character individually, and see what they need and what we can improve upon and what we can make better,” PonPon tells me. “We’re looking at each god on a case-by-case basis as they come in. Some kits are good as they are and just need small quality-of-life changes but we’re always looking to add cool, interesting gameplay that really defines what their role is.”

The initial 50 gods have been selected for various reasons; some are considered too emblematic of the game to not include, others are very popular in Smite 1, a lot of them are new player-friendly gods to retain newcomers and some have been selected because of how archetypal their kits are, allowing Titan Forge to effectively build systems that can be re-used for other gods.

Titan Forge is planning on hosting its first Smite 2 playtests this Spring, while a full year of content is planned for the 11th year of Smite 1. I’ve already played a very early version of the game, and I quite enjoyed it. It will be interesting to see how the community reacts when they get their hands on the game.

SMITE 2

SMITE 2 is the sequel to the decade-old MOBA from Hi-Rez Studios and Titan Forge Games. It’s a third-person 5v5 MOBA where the cast is gods from various mythologies and pantheons. 

Developer

Titan Forge Games