Hi-Rez Studios has started the open beta of the North-American and the European versions of its free-to-play MOBA SMITE. All the progress the players do during the Open Beta will be preserved when the game is officially released.

Hi-Rez has also announced that is going to be the sponsor of the next competitive season of SMITE, that will reward winners with prizes worth $100,000. In addition, all players who participate in the open beta and reach level 30 will be rewarded with a limited edition skin of the frost giant Ymir. That award will be granted upon SMITE’s official release.

The following new SMITE content and features are included in the Open Beta version:

- Graphical upgrade of Conquest Map
- Practice match against new AI opponent Ra
- In-game Team & Roster Management
- Ranked Team Conquest queue - Draft Picking for ranked and Challenge Conquest matches Improved Spectator Camera for Tournament Admins - including a 3-minute delay for spectators to prevent cheating and improved spectator controls (slow-motion, pause, rewind, fast-forward)
- Refer-A-Friend Program

"SMITE has been our fastest growing game to date, with over 900,000 players participating in Beta already”, says Todd Harris, Hi-Rez Studios Chief Operating Officer. “We’ve been giving out keys very liberally, but today we officially drop the key requirement in order to stress and stabilize our North American and European servers in preparation for release. We will continue to polish the game, release additional gods, and further refine the god and item balance over the coming weeks before a general release later this quarter."

Source of information: Hi-Rez Studios press release.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 25th, 2013 at 2:18 pm and is filed under MMO News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.