Dev Insights - Ao Kuang, Dragon King of the Eastern Sea

Regal, powerful, the Dragon-God of the Eastern Sea commands storms and tides with the flick of a claw, yet he seethes with rage for past humiliations. As one of the four Dragon-Gods, Ao Kuang demands tribute from those along the Eastern shores. In SMITE Ao Kuang is a melee mage who excels at committing to one target and securing the kill with an explosive execution or fast slashes with his mighty sword.

See the Ao Kuang reveal and read the Q&A from the Design Team on his creation in Dev Insights.

This is clearly an imitation of League. Compare to this:

http://na.leagueoflegends.com/en/champion-reveal/kalista-spear-vengeance-revealed

Of course, League's goes more in-depth, focusing on gameplay and such, as well as other aspects of the champion's kit, champion synergies, weaknesses, and such.

The actual Kuang insights were also lacking. Instead of talking about gameplay, they choose to talk mostly about history and lore and the ultimate, which isn't even a major part of his kit.

In League, when they talk about champions, they talk about how they want to bring a concept to life. For example, with Azir, they wanted to show an emperor commanding his subjects and ordering them to attack and advance with him, as well as overcoming the previous shortcomings with other minion spawning champions such as Yorick or Heimerdinger, like clumsy AI or forced defensive play.

In this "insight," they talk about "What he brings to Smite" (also known as a list of abilities) and how much of a journey it was to make his ultimate look flashy and dangerous and important while keeping it restrained.

The best part of it was the points where he is compared to Freya and Loki, as well as his energy mechanic, but the latter is amazingly obvious and not at all insightful*, and the former is much the same. It merely tells how Loki and Freya are different and similar, and nothing here is particularly useful. We already know that Loki has stealth. We already know Freya is a sustained burst mage. We already know Ao is an assassin mage with burst, who happens to be melee, and happens to have a stealth.

I'd like an explanation for the RNG mechanic in his kit (or if they removed it), as well as why they deviated from the originally proposed Energy system. Most importantly, I'd like specific strengths and weaknesses, not a cookie-cutter list of obvious attributes.

I'd love to give some positive points, but I honestly can't find much. This "developer insight," from a gameplay perspective, is completely useless. It's nice, I suppose, to see how the developers approached making his kit from the lore first, but that's the only glint of information in the middle of so much...Styrofoam peanuts.

*After all, forcing gods to "go all-in" or "first strike," also known as playing like an assassin is a thing that has been repeated over and over again across many MOBAs, and a charge system has plenty of precedent.

Wow, they crammed so much stuff into his kit. It's not even funny.

My body's ready.

There's a difference between a god reveal and dev insight. Also, Hi-Rez has done this in the past :3

I like his kit.

Ao Kuang has a sword. Clearly, HiRez is copying League with that too. He also has hair too. Such a blatant rip off. Seriously, HiRez didn't think we'd see the connection? Shameful.

Other than that, still definitely looking forward to trying him out. He looks pretty interesting, despite some legitimate concerns about some aspects of his kit.

Ignoring your sarcasm, they clearly copied the visual layout and style of the god/champion reveal. The differences are the backdrop of the god/champion (which is a given) and the skills being videos versus still images (indicative of League's quality), and Kalista's being longer (indicative of a good understanding of the champion).

75% of the visual layout being identical is not a mere coincidence. Smite has copied League before. Don't deny it.

I know you enjoy Smite greatly, and are probably irritated by the wave of criticism in my post. But don't rush to look ignorant defending it. Admit that Smite was "inspired" by League's champion reveal layout and move on.

Color me surprised.

It would be nice if something labeled as an insight actually gave some insight. League doesn't need to label it - they already know.

And you must be referring to the Nox insight, which was so laughable I feel like using expletives to describe it. Aside from the completely awful god in release, it showed exactly how little HiRez understood their own game and MOBAs in general.

What I don't understand is why there's any real issue with copying other games. If they're copying, then that clearly means they wish to improve since they're getting ideas from things that are doing it right. I have zero issue with a world where everything is done right.

Granted, Hi-Rez aren't doing it well, but you can't blame a guy for trying.

@johnny boy. I personally only have a problem with it if you do a complete ripoff with no changes or changes for the worse.

In these god releases follow a very similar format compared to the champion releases but where the champion releases have more info on the character's skills, combo's, playstyles, positions, pros and cons and item suggestions for any play style smite fails by doing less of that and filling up a chunk of the video with the narrorator reading a wikipedia articel that is suposed to be the lore. Get the narrorator to give a quick run down instead and let her get more into the skills and other things i mentioned before and it would by copied in a perfectly fine way.