Smite launches two lane Siege mode and map on May 6

MOBAs live and die by their three lane 5v5 maps. Dota 2's map has been passed down from generation to generation as a relic of the ancients. It shall always be as it always has been. League of Legends tried to introduce a new map and game mode with Dominion. It didn't work. Now Hi-Rez Studios' is taking a shot with Siege mode , a new two-lane map for Smite. Siege launches in beta with Tuesday's patch, along with the usual range of balance tweaks and a new god, Egypt's Osiris. Check out the one-minute tutorial video below for a peek at how Siege plays.

Siege seemingly combines gameplay features from a variety of MOBA modes, including Smite's own. It retains the basic minions and lanes structure of Conquest, Smite's 5v5 mode, but integrates an element of Smite's combat-focused Arena mode's scoring system. In Arena, killing enemy gods scores five points and killing enemy minions earns a single point. The first team to exhaust the enemy's 500 point pool loses.

In Siege, racking up 100 points spawns a powerful siege minion—think a super super minion—that deals extra damage against enemy objectives. Points are earned much like they are in arena, off god kills and minion kills. The jungle camps are worth a major nine points apiece, though, which is an interesting way to push players into jungling.

A centralized jungle camp, the Silver Fury, immediately spawns a siege minion when killed, which reminds me of the map gimmicks in Blizzard's Heroes of the Storm . Teleporters in each base will also funnel players straight to an active siege minion with no regard for the rules of spacetime. It's an interesting combination of ideas—by keeping the basic objective the same while pushing players to jungle more and push lanes more aggressively, Siege could prove popular enough to stick around.

Hi-Rez heavily tinkered with Smite's 5v5 Conquest map throughout its two-year beta, changing jungle camps, lane sizes, and fog of war before settling on the current design. Siege may not see the same lengthy evolution, but Hi-Rez does say Tuesday's launch is an early beta. We expect tweaks.

Want to read more on new god Osiris, balance nerfs to Zeus and Ullr, and changes to Smite's ranked league mode? Read the full patch notes here. Also, check out our review and coverage from Smite's launch tournament in Atlanta from March.

Wes has been covering games and hardware for more than 10 years, first at tech sites like The Wirecutter and Tested before joining the PC Gamer team in 2014. Wes plays a little bit of everything, but he'll always jump at the chance to cover emulation and Japanese games.

When he's not obsessively optimizing and re-optimizing a tangle of conveyor belts in Satisfactory (it's really becoming a problem), he's probably playing a 20-year-old Final Fantasy or some opaque ASCII roguelike. With a focus on writing and editing features, he seeks out personal stories and in-depth histories from the corners of PC gaming and its niche communities. 50% pizza by volume (deep dish, to be specific).