Smite 2 players can look forward to a complete redesign of the Conquest map and a heap of “fantastic upgrades.”
10 years after the original title, Smite 2 is built on Unreal Engine 5 and has been revamped from head-to-toe, with major changes coming to its biggest game mode, Conquest—which players can experience in the closed alpha.
The action-packed five-vs-five three-lane map serves as the center point for Smite 2’s biggest battles, including the esports scene, but it is far from a carbon copy of the map players will remember from the original game.
Instead, design director AJ Walker told Dot Esports that the map has seen a “complete redesign” and is full of “fantastic upgrades” that the developer is really excited about—including more detailed environments and improved visual effects that result in Smite 2 feeling “much more immersive.”
New and reworked objectives are in Smite 2 Conquest, with stealth zones and portals across the map to open up methods to transition in and out of content, and the “Infamy” system in the Jungle areas that “grants each team better rewards the more they slay their Jungle monsters.”
Major objectives in Conquest also have new features, with towers now providing gold at “various fractions of destruction” and a bigger boon awarded to the team that is the first to destroy the enemy tower in each lane.
Gold Fury now provides “unique bonuses when killed that escalate each time,” which culminates in the Ancient Fury spawn, with a similar escalating reward structure also added to the Fire Giant. All in all, these changes “allow for more creative team compositions.”
The major changes are possible due to Unreal Engine 5, which executive producer Alex Cantatore said resulted in the team feeling “so unbound and empowered” with the new engine, and the biggest challenge has been “finding our boundaries.”
While UE5 allows for cinematic-quality graphics, they come at a performance cost, so the development of Smite 2 has needed to find the right balance to ensure the game can run at a high framerate on a variety of platforms, even with 10 Gods fighting on-screen.
