Hi-Rez studios are changing the way they introduce new gods to Smite in the coming year. The changes will mean that Gods are more able to make their way to the game, regardless of the depth or popularity of the pantheon they stem from.
Cerberus is the next God making his way to Smite; here’s what we know.
In a round-table discussion at this year’s Hi-Rez Expo, the game’s executive producer Chris Larson said the team were “hesitant to release another major pantheon this year, because it really restricts the way that we have to produce.” Releasing major pantheons, as the studio has done recently with the Japanese and Celtic gods means “we have to fill a whole roster; we have to have a warrior, a guardian, a mage.” That’s meant that in the past, development has avoided certain gods, because the rest of their pantheons are “not deep enough to have enough interesting characters that we wanted to bring to Smite,” but that strategy is set to change in 2018.
Lead designer Ajax says that those kinds of constraint “aren’t going to be the case anymore. If we only want to do one, or two [gods from a specific pantheon], that’s fine, and we’ll do that and we won’t feel pressured to create a whole huge team of gods in the same pantheon.” The aim is to “open it up to give us the ability to make the single coolest characters we can, regardless of where they’ve come from.”
That philosophy is what drove the adoption of the Slavic and Voodoo pantheons, that will be making their way to the game in 2018. Larson says “the way we chose Slavic and Voodoo is that, well, Voodoo’s just going to be cool, right?” You can just imagine all the awesome characters that we’re going to be able to create in that pantheon. And Slavic is probably less the dev team and more the community that has been requesting us to really dive into that pantheon.”