After deciding to make a MOBA, Quantic Dream also decides to release it at the same time as the Marathon server slam, the first Horizon Hunters Gather playtest, and the Steam Next Fest

There’s a lot going on in the world of videogames right now. The Marathon server slam is the big attention-getter of the moment, but Sony also got the first playtest for Horizon Hunters Gathering going on this weekend for some reason, and of course the Steam Next Fest is wrapping up over the next few days, and there’s a lot of very cool stuff coming out of that.

On top of all that, Spellcasters Chronicles is now in early access on Steam, a much lower-key affair but still interesting because it’s being developed by Quantic Dream, and is absolutely nothing like anything Quantic Dream has ever done before. The studio’s previous games, like Heavy Rain, Beyond: Two Souls, and Detroit: Become Human, are all adventure (or action-adventures, if you want to get fiddly about it), but for Spellcasters Chronicles the studio decided to give ‘er hell with a MOBA.

Our initial impressions were positive: PC Gamer’s Elie Gould spent some time with a Spellcasters Chronicles beta last year and declared it “exciting enough that I want to put extra time and energy into figuring out its details.” The reception of the early access release has been somewhat cooler, however: Significant performance and stability issues seem to be the most common problem, but there are also complaints about a perceived lack of development progress from the beta builds to the early access release.

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Well, that’s early access for you: It’s called “early” because you’re getting hands on it before it’s finished. (We used to call that a beta test, but now the beta test is early access and the alpha test is the beta test, I’m really not sure how the hierarchy works further down the line but you get the idea.) Performance, stability, and gameplay issues can all be tuned as development continues—as long as development actually continues. This could be a bigger problem for Spellcasters Chronicles: Its peak concurrent player count at this point is 888, and at this moment it’s sitting well below that.

This isn’t a catastrophic situation. This is a very crowded weekend, and on top of that the release of Spellcasters Chronicles was not widely publicized: Quantic Dream announced the date via its X account, but on the Steam store page, for instance, the updates go directly from the start of the second closed beta to the early access release. It’s a bit muddled, then, but I’m inclined to think that this is one instance where it doesn’t really matter because there are so many other things going on anyway.

And there is enthusiasm for it in other quarters: Posts in the Spellcasters Chronicles subreddit also call out performance problems but are notably more upbeat about its potential if and when those technical shortcomings are addressed.

Sadly, I can’t offer any personal comments on Spellcasters Chronicles because my aging CPU is not supported, but that’s probably okay too because the only thing I know about MOBAs is that Elie seems to like them. Now that Spellcasters Chronicles’ early access is live, I’ll see if I can talk them into jumping back in and giving us a more detailed look at what it’s all about—in the meantime, it’s free to play so you can try it for yourself on Steam or the Epic Games Store.

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