SMITE 2’s Closed Alpha test has begun, bring with it 23 gods, 21 returning and two new ones, new items, Ascension passes, new ways to play your heroes and a much needed upgrade to the UE5 Engine. We were lucky enough to sit down at Gamescom recently to talk to executive Producer Alex Cantatore to go over some of the finer details of what its like working with the new engine, how it speeds thing s up and how its going to enable them to make SMITE 2 all that much better for everyone involved.
With SMITE 2 coming out it gives you freedom, does it change the rules internally of how you approach the game?
Completely, one of the big issues with SMITE 1 was that it was on Unreal Engine 3, and this is on Unreal engine 5, so its a big jump not just in the quality of the tech but also the ability of our devs to interact with it and make awesome stuff. One of the big changes from Unreal 3 to Unreal 5 is the gameplay ability system it has, and SMITE is a game about Gods with abilities, suddenly all this power is in our developers hands, the can experiment with kits and try new things. In a single day our developers were able to stand up the kit for the God Kulkulken, it’s a very simple kit but previously that took 6 weeks of programming time, and so now because they can stand up things they can experiment and we can try new interesting additions to each Gods kit and if it doesn’t work out we haven’t committed weeks of development to it, we aren’t stuck to that path. We can now go OK that didn’t work, we lost an afternoon, we can try something else completely different, we feel so empowered with these new tools
Does the design Philosophy change with that?
Yes, because we are able to move faster and try more things what we’ve pushed towards is making Gods viable in more roles. So if you play as Zeus, he’s a midlane mage in SMITE 1, that’s all he does and you’re going to build the same 6 items every game. In SMITE 2 you can play him in a lot of different roles because we’ve changed the way you scale with items so its not like you can only buy magical items any more, now each God scales off of Strength and Intelligence, and they scale different abilities. You can be like OK I’m going to be an in hand attack build, I’m just going to throw lightning bolts at you and I can be a hunter. You can still focus on damage and be a mage, you can even potentially be a jungler with some of the weird things that you can do with him. There’s so much more freedom for players to with the way we’re able to add more details to a Gods kit.
So from a player perspective SMITE 2 has that aspect of its a big graphical update, but are you looking at how you change the play style of the game slightly, because you want to keep that core the same, but now you have the new engine and freedom does it mean you can start to shift the goalposts on what SMITE2 is?
The interesting thing has been figuring out what makes SMITE magic and we shouldn’t touch, and what are the things that we should evolve for a new game. When we first announced SMITE 2 a lot of people asked why didn’t you add verticality, why didn’t you make SMITE into a completely different game. For the main reason was we needed a new technical foundation, we were so slow with UE3, and out tech was so far behind – the UI for SMITE 1 is built in Flash which is not a supported tool and it takes forever to do anything and it looks like garbage. Now in SMITE 2 we can do things a lot differently. One of the things we are adding in SMITE 2 is that in SMITE 1 the only way that you can interact with something is by killing it. In SMITE 2 we rethought the way the button binds work and there’s now an interact button that you can use to do special things at different places in the worlds. There’s a door at the back of the fire giant pit where you can pay 20% of your life to open the door and interrupt a fire giant fight. New Gods are taking advantage of the interact button to have their buttons function differently. Hecate, one of our new Goddesses, her ultimate she makes two portals on the ground and enemies are swapped from being in one place to the other, but your allies can choose to interact with the centre of it and decide if they want to go one direction or the other. It gives you a lot more flexibility, a lot more strategy with how you play the game. This interact button plus being able to play in more roles plus the whole item system has been com0pletly reworked beyond just Strength and Intelligence, there’s now the concept of active items. So its when you’ve brought items they all just had passive benefits, now you can actually have new abilities, new buttons, you can press, so if Aries is going to chain pull your whole team you can buy Talisman of Purification and give your whole team a CC Cleanse. There’s a lot of depth and Strategy there about how you counter build and you’re not just building the same 6 items every game.
Is there any abilities that are coming up for some of the new Heroes that wouldn’t have been possible in the old engine?
I would say its less that its wouldn’t have been possible in the old engine technically, it would have taken a lot more time and we don’t have some of the same core systems that enable. So we could put an interact button into SMITE 1, but that’s changing the core of what SMITE 1 was, we could change the way stats scaled in SMITE 1, but that’s changing the core of what SMITE 1 is. What we found over the years, we’ve done 10 years of live service updates and there’s only so much that you can change a game while its still called SMITE 1 that people are going to accept and they’re going to be willing to take the journey with you. We’ve gone too far sometimes in the past with things a lot less influential then adding an interact button and changing the way items work completely. This for us was an opportunity to fix some long standing problems, and the community be a bit more willing to accept it than if we were to try and do that still within the SMITE 1 world.
In SMITE 1 you’ve had so many very cool crossover with companies and I was wondering what that was like to be able to get these Partnerships?
Its been awesome, we’ve had a great business development team, SMITE fans are very passionate and are out there telling people they want their IPs in our game and they’re helping us along the way. It’s been really neat to work with some of these IPs that we loved our whole life, like the Avatar the last Airbender collaboration was really huge for us and really neat. Our art team, we are of the age we grew up watching the show and it means so much to us to be able to do that and hopefully honour and get it into SMITE 1. I am pretty open about the things that are good and bad about making the transition and one of the things that is hard is those business deals don’t jump between games. We’re hoping and we are already in talks with some people about some exciting new opportunities for SMITE 2. One of the things I love about how we handle it in SMITE 1 is that some of the stuff is obscure and wacky, its live we have the crab from crab rave, we have the Runescape characters, we have the no child. The turtles, it was very fun, as we were doing the turtles and working with their team they were like its really important that all 4 turtles are playable on a feasible team comp, so you could make a team of all 4 turtles playing together. It took a little, and its maybe not the greatest team comp in every mode, but we have seen a lot of all turtles team comps. We have Transformers, Stranger Things has even been in SMITE 1 right, we’ve done a lot of those crossovers and its been exciting because what we find is that just because you do a crossover with another IP it doesn’t mean that everybody who love Stranger Things is going to come play SMITE, but if its something that your fan base loves and if its something that there’s some interest between that fan base and your fan base, maybe you’ll get a couple of new players but you reinvigorate your own players and they get to see this fun new thing in the world that they love.
SMITE 2 is still a way off, but you have started to ramp things up in consideration of public. Theres a closed test?
Yes, starting Tuesday August 27th we’re going to be entering closed Alpha on Xbox, PS5, Steam , and Epic Game Store. Its kind of an Early Access release, but its a little bit earlier then a lot of games will choose to go, like Early Early Access. The way we go about it is we really do want to listen to what the community has to say, we want to be willing to make drastic changes to a game and we’ve implemented some new features that need to be up for a longer time in this more of a state. We have an early draft of ranked where we want to test out our new matchmaking. We have some new God progression systems where are you master a God you’re going to unlock a lot of free cool new kinds of rewards like stat trackers and global emotes and things that we didn’t have in SMITE 1 that we want to make sure these new systems are working in SMITE 2. For us this is the new phase of testing, if you want to be an early adopter, if your in, if you’re excited about the idea of a 3rd person action MOBA come play the game and help shape it. Then by the time we go free to play, hopefully early next year, we think it’ll be a great experience for new players to jump in and really get their feet wet.
If people do want to keep up with SMITE 2 and follow you mentioned keeping an eye on things, is there a discord, is there social media, where is the best places to keep an eye on SMITE 2?
Our discord is a great place, if you go to our Twitter (or whatever its called now) account @smitegame there’s a link to our discord an you can join in and take part in the conversations. We even do these small flash tests where we turn the servers on for like an hour to get feedback and will post to our discord to go hit the servers and see what’s up. We are very closely integrated with our community. Check out the discord, check out our Twitter account and play the game. If you want a free key hit up our website, or else you can buy the Founders edition to get in.
