The MOBA Smite shines in the latest patch with unusually creative hero skins. For instance, the god Hercules gets a paint job as a Mexican luchador, and for Scylla, they take strong inspiration from Tim Burton.
Skins have been the royal road for free-to-play games that truly want to be free-to-play to make money without significantly affecting game balance. The beauty of the system is that designers really have to put in the effort to get to the players’ money. Players are only willing to pay for a skin if it convinces them. After all, gamers don’t gain any advantage from it, other than the feeling of owning something beautiful or cool.
And you can tell from the additional “For a good skin, there’s good money” motivation for designers. Even if some look “08/15,” this particular cash motivation often ignites the creativity of the designers, and evidently, the gentlemen and ladies in suits are also willing to approve things they might otherwise reject. They give the creatives a lot of leeway.
A bonus star is, in our opinion, deserved this week by the MOBA Smite from Hi-Rez Studios. There, the new goddess Bellona is being introduced, but the highlights of the patch are two skins.
In the god-MOBA, they turned the good old Hercules into a “Mexican wrestler,” a masked luchador, complete with new animations and the obligatory wrestling chair as a weapon:
The absolute creativity bird (meaning an owl) has, however, been achieved by Hi-Rez with the new skin of the already creepy Scylla. “Daisy Despair” looks as if she just stepped out of a seemingly child-friendly nightmare by Tim Burton:
We’ll see if we can get some giveaways for these skins.
