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.
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.
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.
