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SMITE Combines MOBA and Action Gaming, But I’m No Competitive Player

Added: 10.01.2015 1:00 | 2 views | 0 comments

On Wednesday, I flew to Atlanta, GA for a video game event. This is an activity I love doing, given I get to leave the house, meet new people, and potentially invade the personal work space of an incredibly cool company. Development studios have an air about them that immediately speaks to both the intellectual and inherently (almost to a fault) nerdy nature of video gaming. There’s toys on every desk. There’s a poster of an exceedingly geek chic movie. There’s the relatively diverse dress, personality, and overall style of nearly every employee. Walk into any game development studio and try to say that it doesn’t speak to the minutia of geek culture. This subject came up last year when I visited Vicarious Visions and had the opportunity (nee, the gall) to speak to one of that studio’s co-founders about something as grand and unwieldy as religion. Nevertheless, they were extremely gracious inviting a group numbering in the dozens, though some of the employees had been given the go-ahead to take a day at home while people were wandering through. Obviously, I’d love to see a studio at full operating capacity but I have to accept that not everyone gets as much done when curious faces meander by as a superiors offers details about how the sausage gets made. Regardless, I was happy to be met once again by friendly people with an open attitude about their work here in Georgia. In the immediate, we learned about SMITE while other parts of the day walked us through the business, eSports, and animation or even the tournament’s organization this weekend. It was a lot of talk about a game I hadn’t played before a brief demonstration period, but it’s all valuable nonetheless. In fact, these days it feels like more and more video games need to go to such a great length in explaining, but little do consumers get the kind of treatment I get. Some games don’t even come with instruction booklets and I wonder if those who make video game purchases, aren’t a little shorted by the fact that some of the most entertaining pieces of content are also the least intelligible. That hurdle, the one between understanding and the adventurous leap that gets a new player to push a button and discover the reaction for themselves actually stands in opposition to what a lot of the best games can accomplish these days. The highest quality interactive experiences don’t need a tutorial sequence. The best games don’t need to tell you which button to press. Further, the best games avoid using all of the buttons until you’ve managed to grasp an essential activity. Jumping, for example, should always be the A or X button or the space bar. How can software accomplish this more readily? SMITE doesn’t lend itself to this discussion, given it’s a highly competitive game, but what about something like Bioshock’s crashing, didactic opening where the very means by which you move throughout the world (the left stick or WASD keys) is only displayed on the screen if you’re not already jumping to action? Rarely do we mistake that side of the controller for anything other than moving the character. Even after a brief hands-on, it’s not hard to identify exactly what SMITE can do to become more accessible in conjunction with its eSports community and the possibility that a player may get more from watching high level play than joining in themselves. It needs to further differentiate from isometric-perspective MOBAS and utilize its third-person perspective for greater penetration into the action genre. It needs an option to play that involves no set up whatsoever where the player gets a character and into combat without investing in match set-up. It needs gamers willing to pick up a controller for either PC or the upcoming console version, particularly as a lot of the action will feel better suited for buttons and analog sticks. It could stand to decrease the intense graphics used to animate bouncing Egyptian-Mayan goddess breasts at character select screens. I’ll have a full weekend to play more SMITE and get a better feel for its third-person action and the developer has an emphasis on the Xbox One version here at the tournament, but I’m looking for eSports at large to entertain. It truly hasn’t thus far and I’d say that the field needs to grip me for at least a full day of action before it could ever leap to something like ESPN. Someone mentioned at a post-studio tour dinner last night that they remembered seeing Magic: The Gathering played on ESPN and while I may not be old enough to look back fondly, I doubt it stuck around the way highly organized video gaming may. eSports will remain competitive on two fronts, both in development and in gaming communities. Will SMITE work for business or for fans?

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Tags: Evil, Wake, With, Xbox, Sports, MORE, Soul, Xbox One



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