PAX East: Smite Expands to the Xbox One .

If you attended PAX East or at least tuned in to watch on Twitch you noticed this was the year of the MOBA and the online shooter. While many of those games are a work-in-progress or are currently in beta, Smite has been available for about a year. The game has established itself as something unique and Hi-Rez Studios has big plans for the game as they continue to look towards expanding their audience while continuing to polish and improve the game.

For those of you who don’t know, Smite is a MOBA with a twist on the camera controls. In most games of this genre you’d find a more isometric camera view with the ability to pan off character all over the map. Smite features a third-person over-the-shoulder camera style which allows the game to have a more immediate feel to the action with the addition of a more limited view that requires players to communicate a lot more with each other.

I was able to speak to Todd Harris, Co-Founder and COO of Hi-Rez Studios about the success they had over the year and what exactly are the next steps they plan to take with Smite. I mentioned before that the game has been out for a year and Todd tells me it has been a bountiful one for them. “After a long beta process, we launched Smite in March of last year. Since launch our studio has doubled in size and we continue to see our playerbase expand month over month.” He continues, “Not too long ago in January we completed Season 1 and held a tournament in January with a prize pool of 2.6 million dollars, the third largest prize pool in history.”

So after a successful year, what exactly is the next step for Smite? Quite simply the answer is to take it to other platforms. Since Smite utilizes third-person over-the-shoulder camera as opposed to the tradition isometric view found in other MOBAs it allows the game to easily translate over to a controller. Focusing on the Xbox One first, Hi-Rez looks to expand their player base by offering their title to potential players who don’t play or own a PC. The title will continue to be free-to-play with their in-game store but Microsoft requires that players have an Xbox Gold account for multiplayer access. For those of you who already have an account on the PC, you will be able to make a one time copy over to the Xbox One and from then on they will act as two separate accounts. Meaning that after the transfer anything you have earned or unlocked on any account does not transfer over to the other account. There also will not be any cross-platform play between the platforms for balance and technical reasons according to Todd.

Although the game is already an established product it isn’t a simple matter of tossing everything over to the console version. There are still technical challenges that need to be overcome. One of the biggest challenge they have is creating a workable UI with the controller in mind. This means all the menus in game needed to be redesigned and control schemes for actual play needed to be tested and iterated on. I had the opportunity to play the game in its pre-alpha state. The UI in particular works very well for a controller but it is still a work in progress but changes are rapidly being deployed to get it to a finished state. Most of the menus can be navigated using the thumbsticks or D-pad while the bumper and trigger buttons are used to navigate between tabs. One example of an upcoming tweak is that the god selection screen currently has three rows portraits but after feedback and testing they are going to change it to two rows for a more visual impact and more clarity on screen.

The controls were pretty intuitive. The left thumbstick controlled your god while the right thumbstick was dedicated to controlling the camera and aiming your special abilities. In its default state, the abilities are mapped to the face buttons, A, B, X, and Y. The auto-attack was mapped to the right trigger button while other auxiliary commands and abilities were bound to the D-pad such as the recall ability that teleports you back to your home base. As I played a Co-Op arena match, nothing struck me as rough around the edges. The A.I. played well; I didn’t run into any problems controlling my god and the game ran very smoothly with graphics that were described as the high setting you’d find on the PC version of the game.

It was brought to my attention that they will offer alternative button layouts in case the default isn’t to your liking. For instance, there is a layout that maps abilities to the bumper buttons and triggers that will allow you to keep both thumbs on the the thumbsticks to retain full control of the god while you perform abilities and other actions. Currently at this time there isn’t a way to configure the button layout, but through feedback during alpha and beta they may implement a way to configure the buttons manually.

The alpha for Smite on the Xbox One began this week. You can still go to their website to sign up. If all goes according to plan, beta will start sometime in April and a full release during the summer. No definitive dates were given. The hands-on time I had with Smite showed me they have done a good job bringing the game over to the Xbox One and making the necessary adjustments, but even with account transfers I’m not sure if PC players who own the system will want to manage two accounts as they flip back and forth and I’m not sure how much of demand the game has with Xbox One owners. I just wonder if they will be able to gain a decent player base to establish a good competitive community.