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Todd Harris on Smite’s first year and the future
Hi-Rez Studios’ COO on season two, global expansion and an impending Xbox One release.
Written by Chris Higgins
8 min readPublished on
Todd Harris on Smite’s first year and the future
Todd Harris on Smite’s first year and the future© Hi-Rez Studios
Happy Birthday Smite! Though the Gods are essentially timeless and immortal, March 25 marks the one year anniversary of them leaving beta and everyone being allowed into their ongoing party, organised by Hi-Rez Studios.
With a year featuring a fully-fledged and drama-fuelled pro league, cluminating in a $3 million world championships, it may be hard to top going into the second season.
But that's exactly what Hi-Rez chief operating officer Todd Harris has planned for the third-person action MOBA. With the recent addition of Australia and New Zealand to the competitive roster, Todd talks Smite's global expansion, season two's reception and that ever-nearing Xbox One release.
Happy Birthday. One year older, one year wiser? How has Smite's debut year gone? It's been a good year, a big year for the game, seven million registered players and it keeps rising. I think the team added a God every month over the past year, so that's 12 new Gods, bringing us up to 63. And there's been all sorts of insane sales that the marketing team somehow got the OK to do, so yeah, real pleased with our first year!
And you’re well underway with Season 2 now, how has the initial reaction shifted since you revealed the new changes? It's gone really well, we've got a brand new map and a significant change to the three-lane conquest map – our main competitive mode. It's always a bit risky introducing such a big change but I think it's been really well received both from the general player base – because the art looks better – but also from the competitive standpoint, teams and players are adapting to it really well. It also makes for a really pleasant spectator experience. The art was optimised with that in mind and spectator mode itself has been improved too. So all around, the biggest change, the map, has been pretty well received. And from the pro league standpoint we've got a lot of familiar players and team names still there, but some big new teams coming in too.
How did Hi-Rez react to some of the feedback from Hunters in particular, who were seeing items introduced that really affected their role? We definitely looked at that feedback and considered it a lot, and some of the more aggressive changes for season two never made it out of Public Testing Servers (PTS). That's why we do PTS and why we encourage players of all skill levels to jump on there and give us feedback. Some of the more significant changes were rolled back, and I think we ended up in a good place thanks to the feedback from the competitive community.
Have you seen any bigger gaming organisations coming into Smite eSports now that the $3 million finals have put you up on the board? Fnatic would be a name that's a more recent addition. Cloud9 and TSM of course have been active in the Smite scene for a while, so already we've got some pretty significant multi-gaming organisations there. But Fnatic would be one recent addition that's actually doing quite well in EU.
A lot of the big organisations are full-team pickups that did well last year. Are there any new teams that you'd want to keep an eye on? From my standpoint, it's a lot of familiar players so far, but Smite's a new enough game, and there were enough changes in Season 2, that we can expect by the end of this season we can see some new faces that are in contention. We saw that in Season 1 in both regions, right? With Cognitive Red in NA, and out of Europe Titan coming up through the Challenger League. So, we've certainly set up the structure with the Challenger format to give teams the chance to do that again and have some awesome cinderella stories.
Do you have any further plans for regions outside of NA and EU? For Latin America and China we work with a publishing partner for game operations, and they handle the week-to-week league side of it, so it's up to them to qualify teams. So we're less involved in the specifics of the league format, we just give them some slots for the region and they qualify their teams. Definitely we expect them to be there again in the SWC, but perhaps the biggest addition that we're managing more directly is the Oceanic region, specifically in Season 2 Australia and New Zealand. They're playing ladders right now, versus a league, but we've told the region that they'll be able to qualify the best team, which will ultimately be decided at PAX Australia in 2015. And that team will earn an invitation to Atlanta for next year's World Championship.
What are the biggest moments on the horizon for Smite in its second year? The two biggest opportunities for us in the next year are additional regions and additional platforms. Region-wise, like we talked about, China had already competed in an eSports standpoint but there are still a small number of people playing in China. It's still in a fairly small Beta state. That's going to change in the course of the next year, it'll move into a more general release and that will mean a lot more players, competition and even a higher quality of teams at the season 2 world championships.
That's a very significant change, since there's a very healthy eSports and MOBA community in China certainly. And the second, new platforms, relates to Xbox One. We've been pretty clear that we see Xbox One as a separate community from a pub play standpoint and a competitive standpoint, so we won't have crossplay tournaments, but we are going to do some tournaments in this calendar year to see what the appetite is for Smite eSports on Xbox One. And we know you can't force an eSport but we expect that appetite will be there, so it will be interesting to see.
What feedback have you had so far for the Xbox One Alpha? I'd say the alpha feedback is better than we expected, honestly. It's a significant Alpha, it's tens of thousands of players who have experienced it to date. Just today, we sent out another 8,000 invites to people who signed up on our site, we actually sent each of them two keys, so they have one to pass to a friend. Probably the biggest surprise is that even in early Alpha, the playtime per day is higher than on the PC, and we don't even have conquest enabled in that build.
That's pretty significant, and again honestly a little surprising. When we took the game to PAX, we had hour-plus lines for people to experience the Xbox One version and just got really good subjective feedback on the comfort of the controls, which is the main concern when people hear MOBA on console, and haven't tried it. They worry that the controls won't be comfortable and will be awkward, but because Smite is really, at its core, a third-person action game with regards the combat, it translates quite well.
Are there any changes to the controls you'll be making before it finally arrives? We want to give players a few additional mapping choices. There are five defaults and pretty much all the alpha players find one that works well. But there have been further requests for more customisation so that will happen, certainly before general release. In the current build, players can't customise their own auto-purchase and spells or abilities and that feature, which is in the PC, will also be there for release. And the current build doesn't have our quick communication system, VGS, which the release version will. Those are kind of the primary things. But the core so far is working really well.
Have you seen any differences between what the most popular Gods are on Xbox from the PC? I haven't seen those reports yet, but many of the Alpha players are doing the free experience right now as we don't actually have a way for them to purchase things so far, so the free rotation gods are the most played gods. But that's going to be very interesting to see in open play, and also when we start tournaments to see what potentially different meta and tiering of gods emerges on Xbox One compared to PC.
So we can expect another dozen or so Gods this year, right? Any hints as to who we'll see or what Pantheon they’ll be from?We have told the community that their popular demand for Medusa will finally be satisfied, so Medusa's coming next. Pantheon, we are excited about a new pantheon but whether it happens this calendar year is still to be determined. Probably it will be more of a Season 3 thing than a Season 2 thing, so that's about all of the spoils I can give!
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