SMITE: My Current Obsession

For the last few months I’ve been delving in and out of the MOBA genre looking for something that can scratch the particular itch for online competition and recurring fun.

I’ve tried League of Legends, Infinite Crises, a shocking number of free to play MMO titles, but nothing quite came close, nothing stood out as being truly geeky enough to satisfy my peculiar brand of geekiness. Whether because of gameplay issues, a distaste for the “play every day but not more than once” incentive systems, or just confusion over the underlying lore, nothing quite fit.

I think I may have found it.

I’m here to tell you about SMITE.

One Thing Well: Why Does This Game Exist?

I have a philosophy when it comes to evaluating games. Any game must answer one question: why was this game made? Or, phrased differently, “what is the thing that will make this game different from the most popular games in its category?” In short, why play this instead of DOTA or LoL?

SMITE, unlike some titles I could mention but won’t bother to in case some of our readers are enamored of them already, has two answers to that question: “you play a god,” and “you fight from the third person.”

Yes, shockingly, one of the two reasons I just gave you is a camera angle. Don’t run away. Let me elaborate.

Despite having many of the gameplay conventions familiar to players of the MOBA genre – towers, minions, jungles, an enemy base to destroy, ‘last hitting,’ etc, SMITE feels fundamentally different from other games in its class. Moving the camera to the third person perspective changes more about the game than you might expect!

For starters, it’s possible to sneak up on someone. Battles feel faster and more immediate, because you’re down in the action, as it were. Powers place more emphasis on player skill than on ‘clicking faster.’ And as a bonus, skills useful in other action video games do somewhat carry over. In some ways SMITE feels more like a 3rd person action-shooter with superpowers, which … honestly might have a lot to do with what I like about it.

Wait, wait, back up, did you say that you play a god in this game?

Yeah, I did. Gods, actually. All the ‘champions’/playable characters in the game are literal gods lifted straight out of real world mythologies. Zeus. Aphrodite. Ra. Kali. Nemesis. Thor. Odin. And many, many more. In game abilities and lore are, by and large, incredibly faithful to the source material, and there’s a shocking amount of potential for learning about the old pantheons by osmosis. You compete with other players to win worshipers, proving your mastery of a particular deity’s power.

I mean seriously how badass is that.

Okay but this is another free to play nightmare, right?

Well, not if you don’t want it to be.

Wut

You do have the option of playing the game much like most people play LoL, constantly feeling the tension between grinding vs. microtransactions, yes. The two currency options are Gems (purchased for real money), or Favor (won via in game matches). Unlike most other games I’ve looked at, though, most of the in game content can actually be bought with Favor, even many of the skins. And unlike most titles in the genre, SMITE gives you the choice to essentially buy the game outright, with the “Ultimate God Pack.”

$30, and you unlock all current and future gods, plus they refund any Favor you already spent on them so you can use it to buy skins. As near as I can tell, that kind of offer is unprecedented in the F2P market.

Heck, I’m impressed that they’d even make the offer. LoL is still over there trying to nickel and dime everyone to death.

So hey, give it a shot – the first hit is free.