Titan Forge aims to make Smite 2 more accessible to new players

3rd-person MOBA Smite has been running for more than 10 years now, which means there is a large pool of experienced players that can make it difficult for new players to start playing. During our interview at the Smite 2 announcement event in Arlington, general manager and creative director Travis Brown admitted that the current system is not working very well to get new players on board. With Smite 2, developer Titan Forge Games aims to change that.

“When you start playing Smite, it assumes you’re an average player. And if you are an average player, you will be paired with people who are average and have been playing for a while, and you will lose a lot of your first few games.” Brown tells me during our interview. “Our new matchmaking system, it’s going to look at things more, starting with the fact that you’re a new player, you’re at zero, how do you grow?”

This includes helping new players choose a role that suits them. The new matchmaking system will look at different skills in different roles to ensure better matchmaking. “It will take into account if I’m a very good support player, or if I’m a very good solo player. However, if you put me in the middle of the court, I’m going to suck.”

The developers are also introducing more automatic options for upgrading gods in Smite 2. “We’re making sure the auto-builds are available, but also allowing you to customize the auto-builds. This means you can both go with a predetermined plan, but if you want to opt out of that plan because the game has changed like MOBAs, the character you thought would be strong isn’t really strong, you can opt out of that and then start with a more custom build.” Brown and executive producer Alex Cantatore explained that they aim to make “All the systems are more accessible so that when you’re ready to get started with it, you’ve learned enough from the game and the way we’ve presented things to you, you’ve learned enough things to make those choices as you’re ready to make them.”

To make it easier for new players, they are also upgrading automatic leveling in Smite 2. Cantatore explained that “nine times out of 10 you’re going to level up your skills in the same order as a particular god. I always want to improve my second skill on Ymir first, and then I want to improve my third skill. So for 90% of the players, 90% of the time, we could just set that up so it worked automatically.” This way, new players can ” see which skills need to be leveled in which order and learn that, and need to feel not have to worry about pushing the button.” Cantatore continued: “You don’t have to worry about this part of the depth if you’re new, but you can start worrying about it if it’s important to you.”

Although automatic leveling is already available in Smite, the developers noted that the new Unreal Engine 5 allows them to upgrade it significantly. The current automatic leveling system will almost always provide more points for upgrading unlocked skills. “If you reach level 3 now, you always get a second point in the same skill. But many characters actually want one in every skill at level 3 and that’s something the old automatic leveling couldn’t really do.” Brown and Cantatore explained. “That’s just because of all the legacy of the game out there. So we’re building a new system from the ground up.” This way, depending on a predetermined style of play that new players can choose at the beginning of each game, the system will “determine exactly which cars are for you, and we can do that all the way up to level 20, so now we can really refine that so it’s not shaky or weird for any character.”

The choice to put more emphasis on onboarding new players is often at odds with serving experienced or esports players in Smite. “We discuss that every day. If we only listen to our professional player Discord, we’ll make a game that they love to play, but no one else will even want to engage with it because it’s just way too hard.” explains Brown. “I’m still having discussions at this point about the autobuild system: do I want to do full hits or do I want to be a tanky guy? [Voor nieuwe spelers] those might be all the decisions you want to make. For other players, they might want to be guided to do more damage or not die as much.”

According to Brown, they are trying to “to find the best solution that makes as many people happy as possible while keeping the core of the game intact.” It is also one of the challenges in development that the developers are very passionate about getting right. “From day one, I’ve been really passionate about making sure we really get players on board effectively.” Brown said. “Over 10 years, we’ve developed a lot of things and methodologies to make sure we keep skills fast and poppy enough that they feel good to use in action and in quick succession. But we don’t want a lack of counterplay if you’re a little slower or if you don’t have that fast reaction time.”

Improved onboarding for new players is something the developers will be working on in the coming months. “What we have today doesn’t have any of that functionality in the game yet, but that’s our goal for the next six months. To add all the features needed to help new players onboard Smite.”