by David Piner on Jan 09, 2016
Its day three of the Smite World Championship and the energy couldn’t be stronger. The crowd here is engaged and ready for the exciting second series of the semi-finals. All throughout the crowd you’ll find fans that aren’t only just local to Georgia but also throughout the world. The energy is through the roof at the Cobb Energy Center as Enemy just took out fan favorites Paradigm, moving on to the finals.
SWC is a little bit different this year. It’s four days long and the competition is way more fierce, as the SMITE eSports scene has grown up quite a bit from its early days. Enemy vs. Paradigm is a great example of some of the intense skill playing off now, as it was dragged to four games with Paradigm fighting tooth and nail to get it to that fifth. The center is packed and during the current intermission, fans are desperately trying to refuel before we move into the next series of excitement.
Considering I’m still watching the game, I can’t take too long to share the cool things happening here, but I can say that it’s interesting how big the SMITE community has grown, and how much interest everyone has for things like Paladins, which while it isn’t specifically SMITE, the demo booths have been full non-stop and players are loading up on swag, which again this year is taken care of by Hitpoint.
It’s entirely possible that next year we’ll see Paladins here as well, which almost makes me wonder if this event will evolve into semi-finals and finals only, with the large amount of eSport games that Hi-Rez is moving into. As is, fans are actually very interested into the XBOX One SMITE tournament, which will likely expand into the next year.
One of my more interesting observations of the event is Jetpack Fighter, which has launched already, is a rather neat mobile game and is showing Hi-Rez’s desire to be a multi-game studio and launch into new markets. While I won’t specifically go too far into it, it’s rather neat and interesting as a side note. There is a lot happening at Hi-Rez.
It seems that banning has started for Cloud9’s match so I’m going to jet. I’ll be back around on Monday with some exclusive interviews with the staff at Hi-Rez and some notes from the event itself.