Monday, 19 October 2015

LO3 - Magazine Article - Smite


SMITE is a game that has rapidly grown and made a name for itself, two years ago it had a playerbase 50,000 people…Now it has over a million players and hosts worldwide tournaments with the second highest prize-pool in the history of E-sports. In this article we will speak with the Owner of the company and the tournaments that they host.

SMITE is a MOBA (Multiplayer Online Battle Arena) and has the typical elements of this genre of game, however as well as appealing to this audience the game has two other key factors that owes its massive success to. As a spin on the classic MOBA game, the camera is brought down behind the head of the character played much like an FPS game, this small change actually changes the game and how it is played greatly, it makes the action and style of gameplay a lot more fast paced and require a lot more focus to be aware of the environment. The characters that the player uses and the maps that are played on are all based off of Ancient mythology’s and pantheons, the characters are designed as lore-friendly as possible and it works greatly in HiRez Studios favour as they wont run out of source material for their character designs anytime soon!

The competitive scene of this game has been non-stop growth since the introduction of a ranking system for their most popular game modes. In 2014 they had their first live tournament that took place in Atlanta, they had teams from both North America and Europe brought to the stadium to play after a series of qualification matches online, this on top of the massive turnout of fans to the actual event and the people that watched online showed this to be a massive success and milestone for HiRez.

So what do they owe their rapid growth and success to? The answer is actually really simple, Twitch. Twitch is a livestreaming service that allows people to stream their gameplay to anybody else watching around the world

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