In a brief moment of respite, we stopped to chat with Alex Cantatore, Executive Producer for SMITE 2, about all things alpha at Gamescom 2024.
SMITE 2 unlocked 24/7 testing at the end of last week, but it’s been a long road getting from an initial announcement into 24/7 carnage. Days before the floodgates opened to brawling in the wee hours began, we stopped by Gamescom 2024 to talk about starting this sequel right.
For anybody that is new to the MOBA scene, this SMITE 2 dev interview cornered Executive Producer Alex Cantatore. Alex is part of the team at Titan Forge Games, the developers behind the original SMITE and the brand-new incarnation of the second in this series. While it’s obvious that the follow up is on the way, there’s got to be a reason to start out on the long road to launch, and Alex addressed this before we even got into t what it takes to continue a legacy that’s managed tens of millions of registered players and even more hours streamed on Twitch.
Alex: SMITE one has been a great success over the years, right. It's been around for about 10 years now. It's hard to believe. We've had like over 40 million people that have played the game, but SMITE was built on Unreal Engine 3 and over the course of the past couple of years we started noticing a couple real issues that we ran into because of this. One of the many things we ran into is that the original UI is built in Flash. Yes, that Flash. As you might know, it has now been end of life for some time and you can't actually download flash legally to be able to work on. So, one of the many issues that we face.
Explaining that this wasn’t the primary reason but an example of the problems faced, Alex pinpointed that this, among other things, impacted Titan Forge’s ability to effectively make a quality experience for players.
“With a lot of other things, like trying to bring smart one to PlayStation 5 and Xbox series and doing anything to modernise the game, it was taking forever, and it wasn't turning out well.”
So, SMITE 2 was born, or at least the idea.
Alex: The idea was never to reinvent the game, but to take what we all love about SMITE, make a few innovations based on things that we know we could be doing better and really just build this great groundwork that is ready for the next generation.
In that respect, it’s clear through previous blog posts, that Titan Forge has been trying to take time to listen to the community when starting on the Alph journey, with Alex noting that:
“We've used kind of this early Alpha testing period that we've been in to really experiment and find out what are the things that make SMITE amazing and those are the things that we know we need to carry over into SMITE 2.”
That doesn’t mean that everything’s all been rosy. There’s been plenty of community pushback, with discussions about progression carry over among the very early headlines. Thankfully, that doesn’t mean that development has simply focused on copy-pasting from the original game.
Alex: One of the things that we could do better is the way SMITE one is very restrictive in what a god can do. So, if you are playing like Zeus, for example, Zeus can play in the mid lane and there's one build, maybe two builds that work on it. There's not a lot of variety. In SMITE 2, we know that our players like when they have the opportunity to play various roles, to be more creative, and express their own unique play style. So, we're enabling gods to work in a lot more roles with a lot of subtle balance in the way we approach Items. We are trying to make this experience a lot more flexible and open, without impacting the core gameplay people love from SMITE.
Players jumping on board for the latest phase of Alpha won’t just find a port of the first game. Instead, those changes to the way Items are implemented this time are entirely re-imagined for this update. Rather than limit a physical god type to a specific set of viable options, players can pick to build using items that give either strength or intelligence. Different abilities brought to bear by a god can then scale from different stats, meaning that that flexibility as mentioned earlier in play style is at your fingertips.
Alex: In SMITE, you can never buy an item that gives you an extra button to press. Now, you have more strategic options. Let's say you're up against an Ares. They have an ultimate that pulls everybody and stuns them.
Now, you can build an item called Talisman of Purification, which gives everybody on your team in an area of control immunity briefly so they can't be pulled in there. So, there's more strategy in that whole system.
Who’s it all for?
With the rework and rebuild of those sorts of item systems, it’s conceivable that this also makes gameplay more difficult for the developers and players. Certainly, Alex noted that it likely makes things more nuanced, but that’s okay.
Alex: We think that it's OK to have hard video games, and that complexity is actually a good thing to a point, right? The hard part is finding where the line is when it gets to be too much for players to be able to manage.
We actually kind of found that a little bit during our earlier alpha testing period. I mentioned that you can now build these active items that give you a new button to press, well in the earliest stages of alpha. You could build all six items in your inventory were active items and that was too much. So now we've changed it to where you can only have three active items at a time, to balance strategy and playability.
While the team are trying to find that balance, and not overwhelm players, the new player experience isn’t the primary focus yet. Instead, recent matchmaking changes were added before 24/7 servers went live. There are some assertions that inexperienced players can leap in and bash things in the face. SMITE is a third person brawler after all. Whether it’s for the 1% or players leaping in on Xbox to hit something in the arena, the core of the focus seems to be about getting SMITE right.
Alex: I think the majority of people that have been playing our alpha so far are hardcore SMITE player and I think you know right now going into our closed alpha, we are very light in terms of new player experience. Our goal for this phase is we need to make a game that the SMITE run community loves first and foremost.
If the current players don't love the game, then they're not going to tell their friends to play the game. We do understand that onboarding new players is very important. I think the main thing that you'll see right now for new players is the kind of auto building and auto levelling systems mostly.
With that focus, the team are busy working on a ton of small detail, form recent UI skill bars right down to the volumes of attacks, and getting small details right.
Alex: There are people that have played so much SMITE that they know every detail about a god. I played thousands of hours, but they know these little edge case of a character that we never noticed or never thought of. We recently brought over, Susano to SMITE 2. However, there's a couple little things about the way his kit works that we just missed because nobody on the dev team I guess is a good enough Susano player to notice that things felt weird. The community told us we didn't do a very good job running him over and we went back, and we fixed what didn’t feel great.
We've done a lot of audio work too, so the sounds by themselves are a lot better but sometimes that can make it harder to follow what’s happening. So, one of the things that we’re updating right now is the volume difference between when you hit somebody with attack and when you miss with an attack. Previously, that was not different enough and in order for it to really feel great when you hit somebody and to knowing you missed it must be definitively different. It's a lot of that little subtle stuff that we need to get right to make SMITE.
Build Back Better!
With everything from audio direction to entire character reworks, it once again raised the question of why go to all that effort? But tooling seems to be another key factor in the rebuild of SMITE.
ALEX: In Unreal Engine 5, we're able to do so much more. For example, we can include the sound in combat, so it's more realistically located. Every god has effects too, and Unreal Engine 3 and Unreal Engine 5 effect systems are completely incompatible. You have to remake every effect from scratch for Unreal Engine 5, but we would want to do that anyway because you really want to take advantage of the power of Niagara (the effects engine in Unreal Engine 5).
Despite all that effort, SMITE 2 is still a work in progress. During our discussion, Alex touched on the fact that that team are still dialling back and tweaking those same effects to make them more visually balanced in team encounters, across the tower defence portions of the game and the enclosed arena.
Whether you bought a Founder’s pack to try out one of the 23 gods on offer during 24/7 testing or just signed up for testing, you’re likely to find a work in progress. A victim of its own success, Titan Forge Games and Hi-Rez are casting off the shackles of Unreal Engine 3 and clearly working to make sure that this playground of the gods is still a battlefront we are all familiar with for many more years.
