When Smite 2 was announced at the end of last week, one area that seemed to draw a little bit of frustration from fans revolved around how the skins and cosmetic items that players have earned throughout the past 10 years of Smite won't be seamlessly transitioned to the new game. Instead, developer Titan Forge Games has come up with a solution to essentially give players credit based on the amount of money they spent on skins in the first game to be able to put towards skins and other cosmetic items in the sequel.
As for why this is the case, influencer Jake Lucky sat down with some of the Smite 2 development team, where he asked executive producer Alex Cantatore for a detailed explanation behind this situation.
"Smite has been around for 10 years, we spent 10 years making about 1,600 skins, I think there are in Smite, which is a lot of skins. Unreal Engine 3 and Unreal Engine 5 are fundamentally different engines, and it's not just 'oh, it's a better version', people think 3, 4, 5, they must be connected. The way that they approach things technically are completely different, so the way that you create a material, the texture on a model, the way that the effects system works, everything is completely different. We can't just copy-paste a skin from Smite 1 to Smite 2. For a normal skin... it takes about eight weeks to get a skin from Smite 1 to Smite 2, of actual, like a person working for eight weeks. With 1,600 skins, we did the math, and it was like 240 person years or something, if we're trying to get all the skins over from Smite 1 onto Smite 2."
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Hi-Rez Studios and Titan Forge has announced that Smite will remain in operation and online, meaning you can continue to play with your current skins and items, even if many will not be transitioned to the sequel when it eventually does make its debut.