Hello fellow MOBA players! Today I bring yet more news from Smite, but first give me a moment...
To kick Bobfish aside...
Okay, that's better, that should teach you for stealing my game news!
Now back to the story at hand. The new patch for Smite introduces a whole new look to the Conquest map. As the Smite developers stated when they remade Sun Wukong, the rest of the game will eventually all follow the same art style and direction of Hun Batz and now the new Conquest map overhaul. While the patch does not bring much else, this is no small change. The actual layout of the map still remains identical, it is just the entire visuals of every part of the map has been remade. Including the NPC characters, towers, landscape, ground, grass, bushes, really just everything!
Perhaps most interesting, as you will notice in the video above, is the awesome vistas the new map features. Beyond the map visual overhaul, both Ra and Anubis have now received a Golden and Ultimate Golden skin. While both Loki and Anubis have received voicepacks.
Another interesting change in the new update is the preventing of players buying items not meant for their class. This is (to my knowledge) the first time such a feature has been introduced to a MOBA and what this means is that if you are playing for example, Ra who is a magical user, you cannot buy items that provide physical damage. I will have to do some testing though to see how this change handles the hybrid characters who use both physical and magical. Hopefully there are no bugs now when playing a hybrid character that will prevent you to purchase items... that would really suck.
For the rest not much else in the patch itself however, Smite has recently announced an achievement in popularity on Twitch. Smite now average over 1 million weekly views. This occurred in the months of June, July, and August and is on path to continue increasing into the next months. This means a stunning 300 percent increase in Smite stream viewership on Twitch since December 2012! So yeah, quite the achievement and a good sign for the popularity and growth of Smite.
If you too want to join a slice of his Godly arena (quite literally) then simply click here to register for free and download the game entire free of cost, and play of course as well completely for free!
Posted 16-08-2013, 01:21
I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger... :P
On topic though, I don't know what it is about the direction that Smite is going but I just really hate it. When I first started Smite back in its Alpha it was so unique and fun, then they keep making changes, reversing them, making them again, and reversing those very same changes AGAIN! It makes no sense at all.
Now once again, you cannot play with 4 friends, either with 3 or 5... just wtf...
In addition, the game is slowly becoming more and more like LoL and DOTA 2 and this means it is also becoming less and less unique and with each patch it just keeps feeling more like LoL/DOTA 2 but played at ground level instead of the from the top-down perspective.
While this has always been so, it used to feature completely different strategies, meta games and even actually didn't have much of a meta as the game had very little structure and as a result you had a lot of freedom with how you played each God and many people as such, played the Gods very differently.
Now though the game is slowly getting more of a meta orientated strategy and gameplay and as a result I find that each battle is feeling less varied and I am also losing control over the win or loss of the game. As now no matter how good I play, my 4 allies, if they play bad or are downright stupid, can easily turn the game into a loss. While this didn't used to be the case.
It is also no coincidence that as the patches come out, my win-loss ratio has also taken a strong dive, especially when they broke the entire matchmaking system with the new God Mastery Level matchmaking design instead of the 1 to 30 + hidden elo matchmaking design.
All in all just very frustrating and I actually fully stopped playing the game now. I will still do news for it, but really, the developers ruined the game for me.
Posted 15-08-2013, 14:06
Hehe, I cannot be cast aside so easily