Titan Forge Games made a big splash with their community at the Smite World Championship this weekend, announcing Smite 2 after ten years of success with its popular third-person MOBA. I sat down with members of Titan Forge’s leadership team to talk about the development process for𒉰 the sequel so far and the factors that have brought them to this point.

Surpri𒊎singly, Smite 2 has only been in the works for about a year. “We have been thinking about something else in the Smite IP for a few years now,” says Tra🦋vis Brown, Smite’s General Manager. “We were really focused on what kind of new things that we could do using the UE [Unreal] 5.2 engine that we got our hands on in 2022.”

The team spent four weeks looking at creating new game modes in Unreal 5.2, but nothing quite clicked. There were some great ideas, but none were what Titan Forge was looking for as its next title. It was at that point, Brown says,ꦛ that “it made us think, if we’re able to do this level of development this quickly, what if we just try to make Smite in UE5?” After another four weeks, a team of five had created a Smite playtest in the new engine.

Realizing that it had the next iteration of Smite on its hands, the studio expande🐻d the project, ultimately turning it into Smite 2. “It was more a passion project that turned into something that we just knew we had to get into the hands of players,” Brown explains. “It’s really only been eleven months, because we locke🐠d this build a month ago.”

“We had a lot of benefits that allowed us to move quickly on th♛is,” chimes in Executive Producer Alex Cantatore, “We have a decade spent developing Smite, we unde🎃rstood what the goal was.” Studio leadership had long been thinking about what Smite 2 would look like if they decided to produce it, so the vision was already there. “Everybody was united on day one.”

Part of that v✨ision comes from having a development team comp💯osed of fans. “Everyone really feels attached to [Smite] and has a really personal connection,” says Daniel “PonPon” Cooper, a former pro player and current Advanced Game Designer. Not only does the internal playtest team know what players want the game to be, but Titan Forge also maintains channels of communication with players.

“We have a pro player Discord where they let us know all of their thoughts all the time, we have our Olympians, who are our player-elected council; we also have a Discord for them and we have regular meetings where they can bring up their questions and we can present things and get feedback on them,” explains Cantatore. The Olympians program is something unique to Smite, and speaks to the game’s commitment to community-forward development. “168澳洲幸运5开奖网:EVE Online has a similar group called the Council of Stellar Management,” Cantatore continues, “but as far as I’m aware we’re the only two that do… We did it in Paladins as well for a brief period of time.”

“It’s just really good to have a group… that you know the community respects, that they’re willing to treat as their🌜 representatives.” The Olympians program has been in place for about five years, and allows Titan Forge to learn about player concerns that they might not otherwise hear. “We get to have their raw, unfiltered feedback… and communicate how we might address those issues and what our goal with certain changes are.” adds Cooper.

As I’ve learned personally, Smte can be a bit daunting for new players -there is ten years’ worth of content alongside the usual MOBA learning curve. The team at Titan Forge understands this; “It is a mid-core/hardcore kind of game, I like to say it’s the Souls-like of multiplayer games,” Cantatore admits. “You’re gonna die a lot when you’re learning it, there’s a lot of things that you need to figure out to really start to unওderstand all the depth that’s there, and appreciate it, and be able to play with it… then you’ll see that there’s nothing else that gives this twitch combat where I’m in the action, and I need to aim, and I need to dodge… but I also need to be making really strategic choices the whole time.”

From team composition to selecting items and upgrades, Smite offers a huge array of possibilities, and that number will grow even more in Smite 2. As Cooper points out, “For a game to be playable for thousands of hours, you need that variety of skill exp🥂ression… There’s just so much there to explore that even when you feel like you understand it all, some new permutation will happen and you’ll think - ‘oh my gosh I didn’t even know that was possible’!”

“If you like action combat, but you’re looking for more strategy, more depth, more thought and tactics to the way that you’re playing your games, there is no other game that gives you that same feeling that Smite does,” says Cantatore. It attracts players of all skill levels, so a focus of Titan Forge’s community development is balancing the needs of hardcore players with casual and mid-level fans. They make heavy use of analytics - in this case, ten years' worth of data from forty million players - to make the right design choices.

Brown offers an example: “We’ll find that new players might win only thirty percent of the time when they pick Thor, but the pro players, they might win sixty percent of the time with Thor. We have to look at changes for Thor to increase the win percentage but doesn’t impactౠ the win percentage of pro players.” The goal in these situations is to make it easier for casual players to execute the strategies and combos that take the pros to the top, which is in keeping with Smite 2’s stated design philosophy of letting players feel like gods on the battlefield.

Looking back at the launch version ♏of the original Smite, the developers exuded a sense of nostalgia and hope for the future. “The goal so far in developing Smite 2 is to give players a new, fresh experience that takes Smite to the next generation,” says Brown. Cantatore jumps in; “When you look back at Smite 1, ten years ago - the broccoli trees, all the issues that it had - I never would have imagined that Smite would be where it is now.”

Just as I’m about to ask what the next꧅ ten years of Smite look like, a roar of applause erupts from the arena across the hall, where the semifinals of the World Championships were taking place; the Jade Dragons have just won a do-or-die game against the heavily-favored Styx Ferrymen, kicking off a reverse sweep that will carry them to the Grand Final. Cantatore’s response is fitting; “If we still have all these fans here, screaming and having a great time, then hey, man, we’re successful.