SMITE 2 Dev Discusses Early Access Release And Making A Successful Game

Alex: SMITE’s had an incredible decade, growing as a MOBA. We went from PC only to Xbox and PlayStation and Switch and new PC and streaming platforms. We grew from a handful of gods to 130. And we just continually evolved the game, welcoming 40 million players to the Battleground of the Gods.

But over the years, we realized we were starting to be held back by Unreal Engine 3. There was only so much we could do with the tools we had, and SMITE was beginning to look – and worse, feel – quite dated. But we were hesitant to move on from a game we’d spent a decade building.

We only started SMITE 2 when we felt like the tech had progressed to the point where we could do a true sequel justice, bringing the SMITE player’s know-how and love into the modern era while making refinements and gameplay evolutions that were never possible with UE3.

Alex: Overall, I think it’s been a great experience. UE5 allows the team to move much faster and at higher quality. In particular, the Gameplay Ability System has allowed the team to develop new gods and items at a much faster pace than possible in UE3; a god that took months to implement in UE3 can be done in days in UE5.

I think the hardest part is balancing visuals against performance and readability. It’s very easy to go too hard on the new, high-tech visuals and end up with something that can only run on the top-end machines. And it’s easy to make effects that look cool for you standing alone but become overwhelming in a team fight. It’s been a process to tweak those things over the course of our Alpha testing, but we think the game is now walking a good line of visuals, performance, and readability.

Alex: Completely, and that’s what our studio is all about. We very intentionally released SMITE 2 very, very early. Essentially just the barest shell of the game, so we could start to get player feedback on what was good and what needed improvement.

What we found was that some of our core ideas for SMITE 2 were great, and some were not so great. We took that feedback and made drastic changes over the Alpha so far – changing core systems like items and relics, changing the visual direction of the game, and changing our development schedule to focus on getting more gods in quickly.

I don’t think you can make a successful game without developing it alongside an early access community unless you’re a megastudio with enough funds to get the equivalent feedback through market testing.

Alex: Release is a very nebulous term for a game like SMITE. We’re never going to be truly done. We’re always continually improving it. We’re always making changes and trying new things. We think it’s important to be very clear about the current state of the game, and let players decide if they are interested in the game in its current state.

Right now, we are in 24/7 Closed Alpha on PC, Xbox Series S|X, and PlayStation 5. You can buy a Founder’s Edition to get in and start playing today. And we feel like if you play, you’ll say, “That’s a good alpha – there are things that are clearly not done, but I’m having fun playing.”

Early next year, we’ll enter Open Beta. The game will become Free-to-Play and at a state where we think most players will enjoy it. But there will still be things that will be rough around the edges and systems that we want to build out before full release – if you’re the kind of gamer that needs to have every feature and everything polished to a shine, it still won’t be quite ready for you.

We’ll only drop the Beta tag and do a full release when we think the game is ready. There’s no ETA on that, other than “when the game meets player expectations of a full, released game.”

Alex: Our data shows that players are moving over to the current-gen consoles at a very fast pace, and the work to support last-gen consoles was not warranted. Supporting that low spec would have also held back SMITE 2’s design and visuals. Over 75% of SMITE 1 console players are already playing on the latest generation of consoles, and that share keeps growing.

Players on last-gen consoles will still be able to keep playing SMITE 1, as SMITE 1 will not be taken down when SMITE 2 is released.

It is incredibly important to us to support a wide range of hardware at a playable framerate, including handheld devices like SteamDeck. SMITE 2 can be a very demanding game, with 10 players and a bunch of NPCs all casting a lot of abilities on-screen at the same time. Most multiplayer-focused games (SMITE 2 included) intentionally reign in certain aspects of the visuals so that combat is readable and the game will run well on many PCs. So I think we are using UE5 to its maximum potential to create the best version of our kind of game.

Alex: Players will receive currency in SMITE 2 equal to the amount of currency that they spent in SMITE 1. That currency (Legacy Gems) can be used to unlock Classic Skins as they are ported over, and we are committed to porting Classic Skins at a reasonable pace. Legacy Gems can also be used to pay for 50% of the purchase price of new-to-SMITE-2 content, effectively giving some SMITE 1 players half-off everything they’ll ever buy in SMITE 2.

Though we understand some players may prefer to just have all their SMITE 1 skins in SMITE 2 on day 1, we are a small studio making a game that’s jumping from UE3 to UE5. Very little is reusable between the two engines, and almost everything has to be recreated from scratch. There are currently over 1,600 skins in SMITE 1. To just port every skin to SMITE 2 would take about 250 person-years of work, using some rough math.

Alex: I think there are two key reasons why players will move to SMITE 2:

Number 1: The game is just better. It’s a better foundation with better, more interesting systems, more depth, and more opportunities for the future. If you don’t play SMITE 2 and immediately notice the 100 ways it’s better than SMITE 1, then you’re never going to move – so that’s our priority. It has to be hard to go back to SMITE 1 after playing SMITE 2, and we feel it is.

Number 2: You don’t lose any of your money. All of your currency moves over to SMITE 2. So though it’s an all-new game, you’re still getting the benefit of all of your previous spending – something that is incredibly rare in the industry, as a lot of true sequels (i.e., not just a small upgrade to the existing engine and some design tweaks with a version number increase) will give players no carryover content whatsoever.

Alex: In 2023, we were over a year into a project to get SMITE to run natively on the Xbox Series and PlayStation 5. We had made no discernible progress due to restrictions with UE3.

At the same time, we shipped a UI overhaul intended to modernize the game. We spent over a year on this with a large team of UI programmers and artists. The end product was.. passable at best because, like most UE3 games, SMITE’s UI runs in Adobe Flash through a middleware known as Scaleform.

These efforts to bring SMITE into a more modern state were really showing the game’s age. It felt like we were nearing the end of what was possible for SMITE.

At the same time, a small prototype team was whipping up new UE5 game ideas from scratch in a matter of weeks. We asked the prototype team to see if they could make SMITE in UE5. Two weeks later, a very rough version of SMITE in UE5 was playable.

We knew then that the tech was there to allow us to bring SMITE into UE5 at a pace that made it feasible. We’d had talks about UE4 in the past, but we always felt like it would take another decade to recreate what we had done in UE3. UE5 seemed like an answer to secure the future of SMITE, to build a new foundation, and to build the “SMITE but better” we had always wanted to build.

Alex: We’ve spent a decade building SMITE, and we get to take all of those learnings and make SMITE 2 better.

If you just step in and play after not having played SMITE in a few years, you’ll probably say, “It feels like SMITE.” And that’s what we want you to say – we want to be faithful to the core second-to-second gameplay that players love about SMITE.

But we’ve revised all of the systems built on top of those bones. Item building is completely different, and Gods now scale off of multiple stats, allowing Gods to be played in more roles across the map. There are Active Items, allowing more interesting counterbuilding mid-match. Just tons of little minute differences that add up to make the experience feel familiar, but at the same time completely different – much more creative, flexible, and interesting than SMITE 1’s rigid roles, builds, and game flow.

There are also just a ton of fun little “plus-ones” for all the Gods we’ve brought over from SMITE 1. We’ve critically reexamined every kit and added something else fun to play around with. Ymir’s wall can now knock back enemies – or knock himself forward as a mini rocket jump. And every god has something like this.

We also have some bigger features planned for our Open Beta release that we can’t quite talk about yet, but do even more to enable more creative, flexible, interesting gameplay.

Alex: We haven’t had any major issues with the Series S, as we targeted it as our minspec from Day 1. The graphical fidelity is lower on Series S than the other platforms, as should be expected, but overall it’s been fine with the proper planning.

Alex: I hope that we have. I think that through this Alpha process, we’ve learned a ton about what players want from SMITE 2 – more than we did from a decade of making the game the first time.

But we’ve built a game that’s truly SMITE but so much better. Better looking, more flexibility, more creativity, more fun. There is no other game that nails the blend of true MOBA strategy with third-person action gameplay as SMITE does. There’s a reason that 40 million players enjoyed SMITE for a decade. And this is that, but better.

We know we’re not done yet; there’s so much more we want to accomplish – core features, more gods, more modes, just a ton, really. The feedback from our Alpha in recent weeks has been, “Wow, it’s suddenly really hard to go back to SMITE 1 after playing this,” and to us, that’s the sign that we’re on the right track.

Alex: I’ll just say quickly that a big part of SMITE’s core identity is that it’s not just great on PC Keyboard and Mouse – SMITE 2 is the MOBA for controller and console players. A huge percentage of our player base for SMITE 1 is on console, and we would expect that to continue in SMITE 2.

We support full crossplay and cross-progression across PC, Xbox Series S|X, and PlayStation 5. And the game just feels great on the controller because we put a ton of effort into making a third-person MOBA feel great on the controller.

If you’ve always wanted to experience the deep strategy of a MOBA, but you want to actually get into the action with your axe or bow in third-person, then SMITE is the game for you – whether you play on keyboard and mouse or controller. We hope to see you on the Battleground of the Gods.