Smite is better than LoL, let me count the ways
Posted: Tue May 13, 2014 6:48 am
I've mentioned this before in the LoL thread.
But back then it was largely an off hand mention of Smite being better, but without as much detail as largely at the time it was still in beta and while I was impressed by it I didn't play it much having experienced a fair degree of fatigue for the Genre from having played League Of Legends a lot (and indeed enough to become very sick of both LoL's and the genre's short comings at the time) just before I got hold of Smite.
However, I'm now less sick of the Genre, and Smite has officially left its semi-open Beta and is now open as free to play for all. And as a result I've been playing it a lot and really very much enjoying it, as well as enjoying it's range of fairly awesome features.
So I'm going to provide them with some free advertising and talk about the things I like about it here...
House Keeping About Comparisons
I think the LoL/Smite/DoTA2/500 billion others comparisons are appropriate here.
I've tried DoTA2 and found I dislike the pacing. But it had awesome features and user friendly interface and was generally far better quality of life experience than LoL ever was.
Playing Smite has been full of plenty of nice user friendly quality of life stuff and also also sorts of fun features that I have very much enjoyed and felt were pretty damn awesome things that the genre REALLY benefits from having and which LoL didn't have back in the day.
Now I know in the mean time LoL has been painfully slowly evolving like it always kept promising and yet barely ever delivering on. It eventually grew a second game mode, it has an extra map on which game play is totally broken that it completely fucking neglects and so on.
But Smite has all that only better and with more stuff already. And is already adding more stuff and a nice pace.
I don't feel I NEED to go back and point out how shitty LoLs second game mode was, how shitty it's three man map is, or how it's volvanoe map was cancelled or all it's other failings and delays on features. I don't feel I need to go check that it is STILL that bad, I have a great deal of faith nothing has changed as the whole culture of the developer was always one of total failure and incredible laxness in that respect.
MOST IMPORTANTLY, Smite is a 3rd Person MOBA... which makes it better than LoL
This is a huge big giant deal.
It's not top down like the traditional 2d RTS games at the genres roots. It is 3d (in appearance, game play is close enough to 2d) and you view it all from a 3rd person perspective.
It changeseEverything. Even though the basic underlying mechanics are pretty similar to a 2D game and there is pretty much no elevation baring a few special jump or fly character abilities, everything feels different and better.
So much better that 3rd Person by far feels like the genres natural and preferable perspective and 2nd person feels relatively clunky and inadequate.
It's particularly evident (and immersive and enjoyable) in chasing and pursuit, team fight positioning and map awareness, and in skill shots.
It is especially notable on skill shots as almost every ability in the game including basic attacks, are "skill shots". And the third person perspective only helps with and greatly enhances that excellent design choice.
Smite Is Free Play... better than LoL
And has a better model than LoL, probably second in fairness and generosity only to things like DoTA2.
The only stuff you HAVE to pay actual money for are some skins. All the characters and some of the skins are available for in game currency earned from playing and if you mainly just want to unlock gods you can earn that at a very comfortable pace and probably unlock a few characters a week with moderate effort/marginally realistic commitments of game time.
Some of the gods are for some reason super cheap, but most are a fixed standard price that matches that pacing and the only exception seems to be whatever god is "brand new" which is double price... until it isn't brand new then its standard.
Also if you want to pay you can pay for annoying funny money game currency... or you can just pay a flat fucking real money price (a modest one) for all the characters ever.
A significant improvement over LoLs eternally inflated character prices, but MORE of an improvement because LoL includes a sort of "Tax"/Money Sink for your free in game currency and Smite doesn't pull that sort of bullshit.
There is no "runes page" bullshit. There are not even bullshit "summoner powers" to unlock by persistent leveling up as a player.
Leveling up as a player pretty much exclusively grants you bullshit status icons, access to more skins and junk, and access to more organized and competitive game modes.
In the mean time there is no fucking "rune page" of compulsory currency sink that you need to throw away resources on instead of unlocking characters to be effective. And even the whole "fuck you no blink ability to level player blahblahblah" is replaced by two active ability items you can buy off a long list in the individual matches with not just in game but in match currency.
Oh and yeah, there is a weekly rotation of free to play characters. But it is ALSO supplemented by a daily rotation of a "special" match of the day that will further increase your access to characters you have not yet unlocked.
It is by far a more fair, a less exploitative, a less greedy and more comfortable model for both monetization and persistent "player experience points advancement" bullshit.
Smite has far better character/visual flavor/design
LoL is a visual and flavor fucking cluster fuck. Even DoTA2 is kinda... meh in flavor even if significantly more consistent and higher quality on art and technical assets.
Smite wins out on it's art style and quality (only just, but notably in that it has ANY consistent and pleasant style and ANY damned technical quality) which is definitely nicer and more uniform than LoL's while still not nearly being as nice as modern systems could easily manage.
But it seriously clearly wins out on choice of fluff/character flavor.
Smite just draws on real world mythologies for Gods and Deity like creatures for it's characters.
And that is brilliant. Characters are recognizable and interesting, fluff factions are the same and over all visual design is a great deal more uniform and compelling without LoLs laughable failures where they not only had stupidly variable character styles and art styles but couldn't even fucking stick to the same basic fucking scale for human sized totally fucking human total fucking humanoids.
I'd say the worst outlier/offender for style in Smite is cupid, and frankly he (just barely) works well enough within the uniform style of the game and looks pretty convincingly like some sort of cherub as rendered in that style.
Smite Has Better Match Making than LoL
I'm not saying it's perfect. But I'm getting better more even matches more often, and stupider more obviously lopsided matches less often.
And that's at what must be a relatively low level of game history since I've only just started playing according to it (despite playing back in beta, that sorta doesn't count now).
Which is notable because low level match making in LoL was some of the worst of it.
But there is something ELSE significant about the match making in Smite that is totally fucking awesome.
There are multiple game modes. Each game mode has a match making que. And each match making que STARTS GAMES AT FIXED INTERVALS OF TIME ANNOUNCED IN ADVANCE.
You go to your play "Normal Game" menu, theres a bunch of queues by game mode, and each has a fucking counter, a bit over 2 minutes at most and many of them will be counting down under a minute.
If you join a queue for a game mode when that counter runs out then you almost inevitably WILL get placed in a game. As long as you don't join in the last 15 seconds you will generally successfully be placed, and just occasionally even if you select a game mode starting "NOW" you will be placed.
No fucking indefinite waiting in queue while the match maker keeps farting around. And with combined with a last minute penalty free "are you really there?" check to enter the pre match character selection there are almost no cases of AFK at character select, and with a penalty for leaving at character select (but no penalty for last minute drop outs right before it) there are ALSO almost no bullshit disconnects/leavers at character select.
You might think multiple game modes and the fixed intervals might hurt the match makers attempts to make appropriate match ups by dividing the available community of players too small... but after a couple of weeks of play I'd have to say I've hardly seen any evidence of that.
The first maybe half a day they ran their "beta" version of their latest game mode it seemed like that was happening... and after just one day it settled in and now seems fine.
Smite Has A Better Community Than LoL
I've ran into VERY few abusive players. Very few leavers. Even the most obvious "fuck you guys I'm AFK" that I've run into have been sneaky and tried to do it silently.
Because there are flat out direct rewards for being polite and productive, and clear and direct penalties for being reported.
I think LoL may have been finally starting to lean to SOME sort of model there. But this one has been there since the beginning and the community just seems better.
Sure I haven't got into the competitive league matches yet. I could see extra stress and acrimony happening there.
But I used to play LoL primarily outside of the competitive league mode too... and it was FULL of abusive incompetent assholes blaming everyone else for their own failures then AFKing, spamming chat with abuse and deliberately feeding just to ensure no chance of a win or even an enjoyable game experience.
Game Balance Seems Better Than LoL
OK fair enough I am yet to become AS familiar with Smite as I once was (but no longer am) with LoL.
And also fair enough it IS clear some characters ARE weaker than others, some passives and abilities are kinda relatively shitty compared to the sometimes rather obviously better ones.
But over all characters seem way better balanced. LoL's rejects were... wow-lol-fail-bad levels of crap. The not so great characters of Smite are just... not so great. Or often simply harder to play.
At least that seems to be the initial impression I've gotten after playing most of them and against most of them.
It didn't take long playing LoL to realise there were VERY clear character power imbalances.
Thought that may have been heightened by the fact that LoL was more likely to have (some) characters significantly more lacking in diverse toolkits of abilities while in Smite...
Smite Character Abilities Are Better Than LoL
Every Smite character I have so much as looked at is loaded with a diverse toolkit of abilities.
It's not that they have more of them. All of them get one passive, 3 actives, one active ultimate. Pretty standard fair.
But many if not most abilities have significant multiple utility. Dashes are rarely ever just dashes they always DO something else, AoEs almost always do something else, almost everything almost everyone does is useful in multiple situations and contexts.
Not only does almost every character have "something good" they generally almost always have something meaningful to contribute in almost any context.
And that just doesn't happen in LoL, in LoL some characters were "hahaha I have one ability on my character that does everything your character does with 3 abilities and an item!" and other characters were just sad and useless outside of narrow edge cases.
Items Seem Better
Again, I need to become a little more familiar.
And I think, as with most games in the Genre defensive items may just be a little too good value for money.
But WAY less so than was the case back when I was playing LoL. Tanks seem over all better balanced when selecting their defensive gear.
And bruisers are not automatically as unkillable as tanks can get, and making themselves a bit tanky seems to sufficiently lower their damage output in appropriate ways giving them an appropriate middle ground role. Unlike in LoL which was increasingly dominated by bullshit "Fuck you I do ALL THE ROLES!" tanky/dps bullshit characters.
It's also worth noting the games alternative to LoLs lame summoner skills are in match items you can purchase and upgrade to give you 2 active abilities. They are cheap yet appropriately costed, there are a large selection of base active items, and each one on it's third upgrade has two variants. It's by far a more enjoyable and adaptive experience, and allows players to take appropriate actives for the context and progress of the game AFTER it starts, which helps reduce situations where the game is lost before it begins because someone brought a character that needs some sort of active counter from at least one person on the team and no one fucking brought it.
Oh and there are just 4 "starter items" you can't upgrade. They are remarkably better balanced than the LoL ones (back in the day you usually just bought the defensive one or ignored them), and each has a sufficiently good unique ability that it can dramatically influence your early play and you might even buy one counter to your character's role depending on in game context of match ups in lanes. Find yourself dual laning with a partner who you want to feed or who just last hits way better than you? Buy the support starter item and share last hit benefits.
And yet all the starters are just bad enough that while an early purchase of a second (different) one might just be acceptable it mostly isn't and you would totally sell them later in the game as their non-scaling main ability becomes appropriately obsolete. AND yet skipping starting items and going straight to the start of longer term investments is totally a viable fucking thing.
In fact did I mention? The basic item model/interface is pretty fucking awesome.
6 passive items. One of them will be your boots. Generally they only have "special" abilities on their final upgrade they ALL have three fucking upgrades and most branch at least once or twice. Almost all items are appropriately contextually viable. NONE of your 6 items are active and you do NOT clutter up character control with random fucking active items.
You can have different items in your six slots from the same item upgrade tree but you can never have the exact same item twice. It's not just that you don't fully benefit from stacking the same item multiple times. You just flat out cannot do that.
Instead you get 2 slots for active items ONLY. And generally EVERY character uses 1-2 active items and the same damnable key binds for them and the same damn complexity/difficulty commitment.
AND you get fucking potion slots I don't see entirely WHY you want them, potions mostly suck unless you get stuck in a late game even match maxing out your wealth and you buy the big game finisher ones. I suppose a few heals and maybe some manas are totally not an ENTIRE waste of any change you have from your starting item purchases.
But importantly buying potions DOES NOT clutter up your fucking standard item bar, your potions use the same two fucking slots and key binds, don't conflict with your active item slot and keybinds, and you can stack multiples of the same potion in the same fucking slot. This is something players in fucking LoL were asking for as basic quality of fucking life interface bullshit SINCE DAY ONE and I bet they still haven't fucking done it to this day.
Oh yeah. And you can set items (and character skills) to "autolevel" for you as they become available through experience or from visiting the shop while carrying cash. Oh yeah and you can fucking select the items and skill order in advance of games for those auto-buys if you want to AND you can then turn that off in the match if you need to vary it contextually.
But that's part of...
Smite's Interface is WAY better than LoLs
Smite is user friendly. Smite shares information with the player. It's all there. It's all there at all times. In game there is a short cut key to give you COMPLETE details on ALL your skills including actual current numbers of applicable bonuses.
You can select autoshop/autoskill selections in advance, you can stop using them in play, you can (I'm told) import them from fucking character guides on the internet IN the interface of the game itself. And I don't actually use that because the interface for shopping/skill select on the fly is pretty damned acceptable and custom item/skill purchase based on in game context is actually pretty admirably beneficial.
But it's more than that. Jungle camp monsters have visible timers on them (once killed by a team mate or sighted as dead) telling you when they respawn. Why? Because in games like LoL players were using "cheating" 3rd party software to do just that. Other games responded by banning such options from tournament play... and leaving them in the wild to make matches decidedly unfair for the entire rest of the player base. Smite responds by saying "Transparent clear game information for the players THATS A GOOD THING and just making it fairly and evenly available to EVERYONE.
Similarly there are tiny quality of life improvements. When an enemy is sighted by your team there is an automatic ping on the mini map. It's not as loud or as obvious as a manual ping of a location or enemy but it is an audible que that with minimal experience very nicely almost subconsciously prompts you to glance at it and improve map awareness.
It is all brilliant.
Smite's "Standard Mode" is better than LoL's
OK your standard map is a fairly standard three lane affair. But with notable improvements in that the final towers regenerate, and the last objective at the enemy base fights back (with strength based on the number of final towers still standing) which makes for some good potential for last minute come backs.
The Jungle on the 3 lane map is marginally less important and it seems like while "need jungler" meta is stubbornly persistent it isn't actually absolutely necessary the jungle is better designed to encourage almost anyone and everyone to dip it instead, and Junglers are pretty heavily compelled to COME THE FUCK OUT OF THE JUNGLE and engage in the actual game significantly more at all phases.
The biggest jungle failures I've seen are ones who try and play it like LoL used to and go in and stay in for most of the initial laning period only emerging as either power houses or total fucking failures shortly before mid game with MAYBE the most competent of them attempting a gank or two in between.
Smite Junglers who seem to succeed basically just regularly dip the jungle and roam lanes as appropriate far more than LoL ones were compelled to.
All in all fuck the jungling meta and Smite rather nicely undermines it in all the best ways.
Smite has better alternate game modes compared to LoL
LoL has a three player map the developer officially openly abandoned and mocked as unballanced crap they didn't give a shit about. Smite apparently "doesn't balance" around their three player map. But I'll be fucked if it's half as obvious as it is for LoL. Characters play differently on the three player map... but I've yet to see any not be viable on it, indeed I've yet to see any change from viable to not viable depending on if you are on the three or five player maps.
I think a lot of it is also because while LoL's three player map was a sprawling complex cluster fuck of excessive jungle... Smites is a fucking single lane with only 2 minimal very limited jungle paths. It's basically three player single lane from go to finish and it works brilliantly and balances much like the early to mid game of the "standard" five player conquest mode.
LoL has a crappy domination game mode. Finally. It was crap. It had alternative item bullshit too. Which was crap. Smite DID have a crappy domination mode. I've played it. It's crappy. It's also been retired. It comes back sometimes for the special match of the day. Which makes nice variety. But seriously. The right decision there dropping that one. The mode might have worked but the map was total ass.
Instead Smite created a nifty Arena mode with a very strong emphasis on direct sprawling 5 on 5 team fights from start to finish. It still (sort of) has laning in that it has creep waves. But has no towers, points are lost for character, creep kills, and live creeps that make it to the enemy side, but there are NO TOWERS or similar building based objectives and the whole thing plays out a lot like one really broad lane with a few obstacles to dance around and a couple of jungle camps mostly in the open.
Arena is very dynamic and enjoyable and rather compelling in it's differences to the main "standard" mode, but with a focus on 5 on 5 team fights doesn't require or create altogether too great a divergence in character/item balance requirements.
But Smite has more fucking modes.
Smite has a version of the standard mode (for normal non-competitive queues) with a more advanced draft/character selection mechanic than standard. I don't know the details. I need to "own" a few more characters to try it. I THINK LoL was JUST finally starting to implement basically that exact feature back when I left. But they'd taken their time about it considering it was a basic community demand from day one. Smite has launched with it.
It also has an "Assault" mode. 5 vs 5, Everyone gets a random god pick. There is no returning to base to shop/heal unless you DIE, its all in a single lane (with towers etc... on this one) and there flat out is no jungle. I'm not too keen on it, but it plays well and it is basically THE description of a "game mode" players in LoL were forced to use lame "custom games" they got NO in game points/currency from back when I was still playing even though, yet again it was a basic demand from the community from day 1, and again Smite launched with this.
Not content to stop there they are testing a new map/mode. Two lanes, bunch of jungle, towers, 5 vs 5... and every now and then you get enough kills or kill a special jungle camp and basically get a mobile tower running up your lane that everyone can teleport directly too from a door near your base/spawn point/shop. It's still officially "Beta" but seems to play pretty fucking well, and yet again manage to do so without major upsets or required changes to the games basic character/item balance. I'm pretty impressed and play it as much as most of the modes.
And all these modes have a relatively standard (though I think, cumulatively pretty nicely generous) "first win of day" bonus you can earn for more free currency to unlock more characters (and SOME cosmetic items). Combined with the fact that all of them are on fixed reliable, but variable, count downs for the match maker it nicely compels people to play diverse games and even out the queue populations. No queue seems to be the ghost town that it could be.
Aside from that there are also two competitive ranked "league" queues (standard conquest mode and the 3 man mode) but I still need about a million more player experience for that. That is basically the ONLY thing you need player experience for, but you need to be level 30. You ALSO need to have "mastery" with 16 different characters, which means you'll have to play something like maybe 5-15 games with each of them depending on game type, length and whether you win. Do that and you'll fairly safely have the experience and a lot of unlocked gods. Might take a month or two though.
So there are some pretty hefty (but also appropriately diverse) hurdles to even enter the competitive modes. Normal queue however is pretty enjoyable as is and rewarding on points/god unlocks.
BUT also...
Smite has the very best game mode of them all
Smite also has a Match Of The Day game mode. And it changes every day.
The map/mode is different all the time ranging from the abandoned domination to Arena or Assault or whatever.
However match of the day also has non-standard limitations on which characters you can pick to play.
It usually removes the limit on the number of the same character you can have on a team. Indeed one common match type limits EVERYONE to the same character, one arbitrarily selected by the mode. And it's honestly ridiculously hilarious.
Other times character selection is limited to themes like "All High Damage Tagged Characters" or "All Egyptian Gods" or "All Randomly Selected Egyptian Gods". I played a game which randomly resulted in 4 Ras running around. It was somehow marginally MORE hilarious than the standard "everyone just has the same thing" match of the day format.
And importantly you are not limited to your unlocked characters in this mode. You don't "own" Hercules, he isn't on the random rotation but match of the day is all Hercules vs all Hercules, or has Hercules in its random or selectable themed category. No problem, you can just fucking play Hercules.
It's a lot of fun, and it is very often worth playing the match of the day for sheer novelty, bonus experience with specific gods, and the win of the day bonus.
So why would any one play fucking LoL
It's your old WoW dilemma. Sheer momentum making up for whatever. But in the mean time, there are a LOT of MOBA games around at the moment.
And a few of them have prospects to be fairly big, or already are. Smite and DoTA2 have large communities. Smite and DoTA2 I have directly experience with and can see some rather clear reasons why people would play either (and personally significantly prefer Smite). I've seen a few reviews suggesting Blizzard's and EA's contributions to the genre look like they have some fairly notable quirks/variations/advancements that may make them attractive, and they shouldn't have problems getting large enough communities to be playable.
But LoL... LoL has a big community. A shitty one. It has bad items, bad maps, bad modes, bad characters, bad art, and a really shitty bunch of developers who never get anything done and have a terrible attitude towards their own (shitty) player base.
If you are playing LoL you are playing the wrong game. Smite is probably the right game, I'd accept DoTA2 or one of the other major newcomers who offer something different. But seriously. There are currently right now on the market games like Smite that are in all ways significantly superior.
I know people will largely see this as an attack on LoL. And in many ways it is. But basically this is advice. I was a LoL player. There were many aspects of that which I enjoyed. But there was a lot of shit too. There are now options out there which are similar but significantly better on the good aspects and sufficiently less shitty on the shitty aspects. As someone who enjoys the genre it has moved on to better things and I advise you to thoroughly check out what it's moved onto because it is seemingly way more fun.
Or to put it simply. Smite is awesome. You should play Smite.
But back then it was largely an off hand mention of Smite being better, but without as much detail as largely at the time it was still in beta and while I was impressed by it I didn't play it much having experienced a fair degree of fatigue for the Genre from having played League Of Legends a lot (and indeed enough to become very sick of both LoL's and the genre's short comings at the time) just before I got hold of Smite.
However, I'm now less sick of the Genre, and Smite has officially left its semi-open Beta and is now open as free to play for all. And as a result I've been playing it a lot and really very much enjoying it, as well as enjoying it's range of fairly awesome features.
So I'm going to provide them with some free advertising and talk about the things I like about it here...
House Keeping About Comparisons
I think the LoL/Smite/DoTA2/500 billion others comparisons are appropriate here.
I've tried DoTA2 and found I dislike the pacing. But it had awesome features and user friendly interface and was generally far better quality of life experience than LoL ever was.
Playing Smite has been full of plenty of nice user friendly quality of life stuff and also also sorts of fun features that I have very much enjoyed and felt were pretty damn awesome things that the genre REALLY benefits from having and which LoL didn't have back in the day.
Now I know in the mean time LoL has been painfully slowly evolving like it always kept promising and yet barely ever delivering on. It eventually grew a second game mode, it has an extra map on which game play is totally broken that it completely fucking neglects and so on.
But Smite has all that only better and with more stuff already. And is already adding more stuff and a nice pace.
I don't feel I NEED to go back and point out how shitty LoLs second game mode was, how shitty it's three man map is, or how it's volvanoe map was cancelled or all it's other failings and delays on features. I don't feel I need to go check that it is STILL that bad, I have a great deal of faith nothing has changed as the whole culture of the developer was always one of total failure and incredible laxness in that respect.
MOST IMPORTANTLY, Smite is a 3rd Person MOBA... which makes it better than LoL
This is a huge big giant deal.
It's not top down like the traditional 2d RTS games at the genres roots. It is 3d (in appearance, game play is close enough to 2d) and you view it all from a 3rd person perspective.
It changeseEverything. Even though the basic underlying mechanics are pretty similar to a 2D game and there is pretty much no elevation baring a few special jump or fly character abilities, everything feels different and better.
So much better that 3rd Person by far feels like the genres natural and preferable perspective and 2nd person feels relatively clunky and inadequate.
It's particularly evident (and immersive and enjoyable) in chasing and pursuit, team fight positioning and map awareness, and in skill shots.
It is especially notable on skill shots as almost every ability in the game including basic attacks, are "skill shots". And the third person perspective only helps with and greatly enhances that excellent design choice.
Smite Is Free Play... better than LoL
And has a better model than LoL, probably second in fairness and generosity only to things like DoTA2.
The only stuff you HAVE to pay actual money for are some skins. All the characters and some of the skins are available for in game currency earned from playing and if you mainly just want to unlock gods you can earn that at a very comfortable pace and probably unlock a few characters a week with moderate effort/marginally realistic commitments of game time.
Some of the gods are for some reason super cheap, but most are a fixed standard price that matches that pacing and the only exception seems to be whatever god is "brand new" which is double price... until it isn't brand new then its standard.
Also if you want to pay you can pay for annoying funny money game currency... or you can just pay a flat fucking real money price (a modest one) for all the characters ever.
A significant improvement over LoLs eternally inflated character prices, but MORE of an improvement because LoL includes a sort of "Tax"/Money Sink for your free in game currency and Smite doesn't pull that sort of bullshit.
There is no "runes page" bullshit. There are not even bullshit "summoner powers" to unlock by persistent leveling up as a player.
Leveling up as a player pretty much exclusively grants you bullshit status icons, access to more skins and junk, and access to more organized and competitive game modes.
In the mean time there is no fucking "rune page" of compulsory currency sink that you need to throw away resources on instead of unlocking characters to be effective. And even the whole "fuck you no blink ability to level player blahblahblah" is replaced by two active ability items you can buy off a long list in the individual matches with not just in game but in match currency.
Oh and yeah, there is a weekly rotation of free to play characters. But it is ALSO supplemented by a daily rotation of a "special" match of the day that will further increase your access to characters you have not yet unlocked.
It is by far a more fair, a less exploitative, a less greedy and more comfortable model for both monetization and persistent "player experience points advancement" bullshit.
Smite has far better character/visual flavor/design
LoL is a visual and flavor fucking cluster fuck. Even DoTA2 is kinda... meh in flavor even if significantly more consistent and higher quality on art and technical assets.
Smite wins out on it's art style and quality (only just, but notably in that it has ANY consistent and pleasant style and ANY damned technical quality) which is definitely nicer and more uniform than LoL's while still not nearly being as nice as modern systems could easily manage.
But it seriously clearly wins out on choice of fluff/character flavor.
Smite just draws on real world mythologies for Gods and Deity like creatures for it's characters.
And that is brilliant. Characters are recognizable and interesting, fluff factions are the same and over all visual design is a great deal more uniform and compelling without LoLs laughable failures where they not only had stupidly variable character styles and art styles but couldn't even fucking stick to the same basic fucking scale for human sized totally fucking human total fucking humanoids.
I'd say the worst outlier/offender for style in Smite is cupid, and frankly he (just barely) works well enough within the uniform style of the game and looks pretty convincingly like some sort of cherub as rendered in that style.
Smite Has Better Match Making than LoL
I'm not saying it's perfect. But I'm getting better more even matches more often, and stupider more obviously lopsided matches less often.
And that's at what must be a relatively low level of game history since I've only just started playing according to it (despite playing back in beta, that sorta doesn't count now).
Which is notable because low level match making in LoL was some of the worst of it.
But there is something ELSE significant about the match making in Smite that is totally fucking awesome.
There are multiple game modes. Each game mode has a match making que. And each match making que STARTS GAMES AT FIXED INTERVALS OF TIME ANNOUNCED IN ADVANCE.
You go to your play "Normal Game" menu, theres a bunch of queues by game mode, and each has a fucking counter, a bit over 2 minutes at most and many of them will be counting down under a minute.
If you join a queue for a game mode when that counter runs out then you almost inevitably WILL get placed in a game. As long as you don't join in the last 15 seconds you will generally successfully be placed, and just occasionally even if you select a game mode starting "NOW" you will be placed.
No fucking indefinite waiting in queue while the match maker keeps farting around. And with combined with a last minute penalty free "are you really there?" check to enter the pre match character selection there are almost no cases of AFK at character select, and with a penalty for leaving at character select (but no penalty for last minute drop outs right before it) there are ALSO almost no bullshit disconnects/leavers at character select.
You might think multiple game modes and the fixed intervals might hurt the match makers attempts to make appropriate match ups by dividing the available community of players too small... but after a couple of weeks of play I'd have to say I've hardly seen any evidence of that.
The first maybe half a day they ran their "beta" version of their latest game mode it seemed like that was happening... and after just one day it settled in and now seems fine.
Smite Has A Better Community Than LoL
I've ran into VERY few abusive players. Very few leavers. Even the most obvious "fuck you guys I'm AFK" that I've run into have been sneaky and tried to do it silently.
Because there are flat out direct rewards for being polite and productive, and clear and direct penalties for being reported.
I think LoL may have been finally starting to lean to SOME sort of model there. But this one has been there since the beginning and the community just seems better.
Sure I haven't got into the competitive league matches yet. I could see extra stress and acrimony happening there.
But I used to play LoL primarily outside of the competitive league mode too... and it was FULL of abusive incompetent assholes blaming everyone else for their own failures then AFKing, spamming chat with abuse and deliberately feeding just to ensure no chance of a win or even an enjoyable game experience.
Game Balance Seems Better Than LoL
OK fair enough I am yet to become AS familiar with Smite as I once was (but no longer am) with LoL.
And also fair enough it IS clear some characters ARE weaker than others, some passives and abilities are kinda relatively shitty compared to the sometimes rather obviously better ones.
But over all characters seem way better balanced. LoL's rejects were... wow-lol-fail-bad levels of crap. The not so great characters of Smite are just... not so great. Or often simply harder to play.
At least that seems to be the initial impression I've gotten after playing most of them and against most of them.
It didn't take long playing LoL to realise there were VERY clear character power imbalances.
Thought that may have been heightened by the fact that LoL was more likely to have (some) characters significantly more lacking in diverse toolkits of abilities while in Smite...
Smite Character Abilities Are Better Than LoL
Every Smite character I have so much as looked at is loaded with a diverse toolkit of abilities.
It's not that they have more of them. All of them get one passive, 3 actives, one active ultimate. Pretty standard fair.
But many if not most abilities have significant multiple utility. Dashes are rarely ever just dashes they always DO something else, AoEs almost always do something else, almost everything almost everyone does is useful in multiple situations and contexts.
Not only does almost every character have "something good" they generally almost always have something meaningful to contribute in almost any context.
And that just doesn't happen in LoL, in LoL some characters were "hahaha I have one ability on my character that does everything your character does with 3 abilities and an item!" and other characters were just sad and useless outside of narrow edge cases.
Items Seem Better
Again, I need to become a little more familiar.
And I think, as with most games in the Genre defensive items may just be a little too good value for money.
But WAY less so than was the case back when I was playing LoL. Tanks seem over all better balanced when selecting their defensive gear.
And bruisers are not automatically as unkillable as tanks can get, and making themselves a bit tanky seems to sufficiently lower their damage output in appropriate ways giving them an appropriate middle ground role. Unlike in LoL which was increasingly dominated by bullshit "Fuck you I do ALL THE ROLES!" tanky/dps bullshit characters.
It's also worth noting the games alternative to LoLs lame summoner skills are in match items you can purchase and upgrade to give you 2 active abilities. They are cheap yet appropriately costed, there are a large selection of base active items, and each one on it's third upgrade has two variants. It's by far a more enjoyable and adaptive experience, and allows players to take appropriate actives for the context and progress of the game AFTER it starts, which helps reduce situations where the game is lost before it begins because someone brought a character that needs some sort of active counter from at least one person on the team and no one fucking brought it.
Oh and there are just 4 "starter items" you can't upgrade. They are remarkably better balanced than the LoL ones (back in the day you usually just bought the defensive one or ignored them), and each has a sufficiently good unique ability that it can dramatically influence your early play and you might even buy one counter to your character's role depending on in game context of match ups in lanes. Find yourself dual laning with a partner who you want to feed or who just last hits way better than you? Buy the support starter item and share last hit benefits.
And yet all the starters are just bad enough that while an early purchase of a second (different) one might just be acceptable it mostly isn't and you would totally sell them later in the game as their non-scaling main ability becomes appropriately obsolete. AND yet skipping starting items and going straight to the start of longer term investments is totally a viable fucking thing.
In fact did I mention? The basic item model/interface is pretty fucking awesome.
6 passive items. One of them will be your boots. Generally they only have "special" abilities on their final upgrade they ALL have three fucking upgrades and most branch at least once or twice. Almost all items are appropriately contextually viable. NONE of your 6 items are active and you do NOT clutter up character control with random fucking active items.
You can have different items in your six slots from the same item upgrade tree but you can never have the exact same item twice. It's not just that you don't fully benefit from stacking the same item multiple times. You just flat out cannot do that.
Instead you get 2 slots for active items ONLY. And generally EVERY character uses 1-2 active items and the same damnable key binds for them and the same damn complexity/difficulty commitment.
AND you get fucking potion slots I don't see entirely WHY you want them, potions mostly suck unless you get stuck in a late game even match maxing out your wealth and you buy the big game finisher ones. I suppose a few heals and maybe some manas are totally not an ENTIRE waste of any change you have from your starting item purchases.
But importantly buying potions DOES NOT clutter up your fucking standard item bar, your potions use the same two fucking slots and key binds, don't conflict with your active item slot and keybinds, and you can stack multiples of the same potion in the same fucking slot. This is something players in fucking LoL were asking for as basic quality of fucking life interface bullshit SINCE DAY ONE and I bet they still haven't fucking done it to this day.
Oh yeah. And you can set items (and character skills) to "autolevel" for you as they become available through experience or from visiting the shop while carrying cash. Oh yeah and you can fucking select the items and skill order in advance of games for those auto-buys if you want to AND you can then turn that off in the match if you need to vary it contextually.
But that's part of...
Smite's Interface is WAY better than LoLs
Smite is user friendly. Smite shares information with the player. It's all there. It's all there at all times. In game there is a short cut key to give you COMPLETE details on ALL your skills including actual current numbers of applicable bonuses.
You can select autoshop/autoskill selections in advance, you can stop using them in play, you can (I'm told) import them from fucking character guides on the internet IN the interface of the game itself. And I don't actually use that because the interface for shopping/skill select on the fly is pretty damned acceptable and custom item/skill purchase based on in game context is actually pretty admirably beneficial.
But it's more than that. Jungle camp monsters have visible timers on them (once killed by a team mate or sighted as dead) telling you when they respawn. Why? Because in games like LoL players were using "cheating" 3rd party software to do just that. Other games responded by banning such options from tournament play... and leaving them in the wild to make matches decidedly unfair for the entire rest of the player base. Smite responds by saying "Transparent clear game information for the players THATS A GOOD THING and just making it fairly and evenly available to EVERYONE.
Similarly there are tiny quality of life improvements. When an enemy is sighted by your team there is an automatic ping on the mini map. It's not as loud or as obvious as a manual ping of a location or enemy but it is an audible que that with minimal experience very nicely almost subconsciously prompts you to glance at it and improve map awareness.
It is all brilliant.
Smite's "Standard Mode" is better than LoL's
OK your standard map is a fairly standard three lane affair. But with notable improvements in that the final towers regenerate, and the last objective at the enemy base fights back (with strength based on the number of final towers still standing) which makes for some good potential for last minute come backs.
The Jungle on the 3 lane map is marginally less important and it seems like while "need jungler" meta is stubbornly persistent it isn't actually absolutely necessary the jungle is better designed to encourage almost anyone and everyone to dip it instead, and Junglers are pretty heavily compelled to COME THE FUCK OUT OF THE JUNGLE and engage in the actual game significantly more at all phases.
The biggest jungle failures I've seen are ones who try and play it like LoL used to and go in and stay in for most of the initial laning period only emerging as either power houses or total fucking failures shortly before mid game with MAYBE the most competent of them attempting a gank or two in between.
Smite Junglers who seem to succeed basically just regularly dip the jungle and roam lanes as appropriate far more than LoL ones were compelled to.
All in all fuck the jungling meta and Smite rather nicely undermines it in all the best ways.
Smite has better alternate game modes compared to LoL
LoL has a three player map the developer officially openly abandoned and mocked as unballanced crap they didn't give a shit about. Smite apparently "doesn't balance" around their three player map. But I'll be fucked if it's half as obvious as it is for LoL. Characters play differently on the three player map... but I've yet to see any not be viable on it, indeed I've yet to see any change from viable to not viable depending on if you are on the three or five player maps.
I think a lot of it is also because while LoL's three player map was a sprawling complex cluster fuck of excessive jungle... Smites is a fucking single lane with only 2 minimal very limited jungle paths. It's basically three player single lane from go to finish and it works brilliantly and balances much like the early to mid game of the "standard" five player conquest mode.
LoL has a crappy domination game mode. Finally. It was crap. It had alternative item bullshit too. Which was crap. Smite DID have a crappy domination mode. I've played it. It's crappy. It's also been retired. It comes back sometimes for the special match of the day. Which makes nice variety. But seriously. The right decision there dropping that one. The mode might have worked but the map was total ass.
Instead Smite created a nifty Arena mode with a very strong emphasis on direct sprawling 5 on 5 team fights from start to finish. It still (sort of) has laning in that it has creep waves. But has no towers, points are lost for character, creep kills, and live creeps that make it to the enemy side, but there are NO TOWERS or similar building based objectives and the whole thing plays out a lot like one really broad lane with a few obstacles to dance around and a couple of jungle camps mostly in the open.
Arena is very dynamic and enjoyable and rather compelling in it's differences to the main "standard" mode, but with a focus on 5 on 5 team fights doesn't require or create altogether too great a divergence in character/item balance requirements.
But Smite has more fucking modes.
Smite has a version of the standard mode (for normal non-competitive queues) with a more advanced draft/character selection mechanic than standard. I don't know the details. I need to "own" a few more characters to try it. I THINK LoL was JUST finally starting to implement basically that exact feature back when I left. But they'd taken their time about it considering it was a basic community demand from day one. Smite has launched with it.
It also has an "Assault" mode. 5 vs 5, Everyone gets a random god pick. There is no returning to base to shop/heal unless you DIE, its all in a single lane (with towers etc... on this one) and there flat out is no jungle. I'm not too keen on it, but it plays well and it is basically THE description of a "game mode" players in LoL were forced to use lame "custom games" they got NO in game points/currency from back when I was still playing even though, yet again it was a basic demand from the community from day 1, and again Smite launched with this.
Not content to stop there they are testing a new map/mode. Two lanes, bunch of jungle, towers, 5 vs 5... and every now and then you get enough kills or kill a special jungle camp and basically get a mobile tower running up your lane that everyone can teleport directly too from a door near your base/spawn point/shop. It's still officially "Beta" but seems to play pretty fucking well, and yet again manage to do so without major upsets or required changes to the games basic character/item balance. I'm pretty impressed and play it as much as most of the modes.
And all these modes have a relatively standard (though I think, cumulatively pretty nicely generous) "first win of day" bonus you can earn for more free currency to unlock more characters (and SOME cosmetic items). Combined with the fact that all of them are on fixed reliable, but variable, count downs for the match maker it nicely compels people to play diverse games and even out the queue populations. No queue seems to be the ghost town that it could be.
Aside from that there are also two competitive ranked "league" queues (standard conquest mode and the 3 man mode) but I still need about a million more player experience for that. That is basically the ONLY thing you need player experience for, but you need to be level 30. You ALSO need to have "mastery" with 16 different characters, which means you'll have to play something like maybe 5-15 games with each of them depending on game type, length and whether you win. Do that and you'll fairly safely have the experience and a lot of unlocked gods. Might take a month or two though.
So there are some pretty hefty (but also appropriately diverse) hurdles to even enter the competitive modes. Normal queue however is pretty enjoyable as is and rewarding on points/god unlocks.
BUT also...
Smite has the very best game mode of them all
Smite also has a Match Of The Day game mode. And it changes every day.
The map/mode is different all the time ranging from the abandoned domination to Arena or Assault or whatever.
However match of the day also has non-standard limitations on which characters you can pick to play.
It usually removes the limit on the number of the same character you can have on a team. Indeed one common match type limits EVERYONE to the same character, one arbitrarily selected by the mode. And it's honestly ridiculously hilarious.
Other times character selection is limited to themes like "All High Damage Tagged Characters" or "All Egyptian Gods" or "All Randomly Selected Egyptian Gods". I played a game which randomly resulted in 4 Ras running around. It was somehow marginally MORE hilarious than the standard "everyone just has the same thing" match of the day format.
And importantly you are not limited to your unlocked characters in this mode. You don't "own" Hercules, he isn't on the random rotation but match of the day is all Hercules vs all Hercules, or has Hercules in its random or selectable themed category. No problem, you can just fucking play Hercules.
It's a lot of fun, and it is very often worth playing the match of the day for sheer novelty, bonus experience with specific gods, and the win of the day bonus.
So why would any one play fucking LoL
It's your old WoW dilemma. Sheer momentum making up for whatever. But in the mean time, there are a LOT of MOBA games around at the moment.
And a few of them have prospects to be fairly big, or already are. Smite and DoTA2 have large communities. Smite and DoTA2 I have directly experience with and can see some rather clear reasons why people would play either (and personally significantly prefer Smite). I've seen a few reviews suggesting Blizzard's and EA's contributions to the genre look like they have some fairly notable quirks/variations/advancements that may make them attractive, and they shouldn't have problems getting large enough communities to be playable.
But LoL... LoL has a big community. A shitty one. It has bad items, bad maps, bad modes, bad characters, bad art, and a really shitty bunch of developers who never get anything done and have a terrible attitude towards their own (shitty) player base.
If you are playing LoL you are playing the wrong game. Smite is probably the right game, I'd accept DoTA2 or one of the other major newcomers who offer something different. But seriously. There are currently right now on the market games like Smite that are in all ways significantly superior.
I know people will largely see this as an attack on LoL. And in many ways it is. But basically this is advice. I was a LoL player. There were many aspects of that which I enjoyed. But there was a lot of shit too. There are now options out there which are similar but significantly better on the good aspects and sufficiently less shitty on the shitty aspects. As someone who enjoys the genre it has moved on to better things and I advise you to thoroughly check out what it's moved onto because it is seemingly way more fun.
Or to put it simply. Smite is awesome. You should play Smite.