Huh. It turns out Quantic Dream, makers of such decision-heavy dramas as Heavy Rain and Detroit: Become Human, haven’t just been tinkering with their long-teased Star Wars: Eclipse. They’re also taking a sharp turn into competitive multiplayer, announcing Spellcasters Chronicles: a 3v3, third-person, free-to-play MOBA full of aerial magefights and big stompy demon lads. Huh.
It’s hard to imagine a starker departure from the studio’s previous work, or a riskier one. The modern Multiplayer Online Battle Arena isn’t so much a genre as a graveyard, with League of Legends and Dota 2 ambling around and occasionally sharing a knowing look between the headstones. Still, Spellcasters Chronicles seems determined to try, offering shorter, punchier matches and bigger maelstroms of hero-shooter spectacle.
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To wit, everyone can fly. Everyone, from the gothy shamans to the vaguely Druidic witches that make up the game’s roster of multicultural magic-spewers. While the map looks like a fairly conventional three-lane affair, Spellcasters Chronicles encourages zip-zooping through the air above, three-dimensionally duelling other players, and raining down an assortment of (often screen-filling) arcane attacks on creeps.
Summoning your own minions is a focus as well. Capturing territories affords you more opportunities to call forth a powerful familiar, like the Astral Monk’s battle elephant, and eventually, players can spawn even bigger beasts called Titans: magic kaiju that will rampage down a lane unless stopped by either massive combined firepower or, more likely, an opposing Titan. At which point the objective effectively shifts from lane dominance to a noisy game of wizard conkers, buffing your own big guy to punch harder while chipping away at the other big guy’s health.
Another novelty is the deckbuilding element to spell loadouts. Characters fit into archetypes – tank, support, or damage dealer – but you can customise their skills (and summons) before each match, choosing from abilities and monsters that you’ve unlocked in previous battles. This is also where Spellcasters Chronicles draws its tactical flexibility, as although there’s no shopping system to gain strength through items, min-maxing spell upgrades can still create distinct builds to press a character’s natural advantages or counter those of an enemy.
It’s still all very strange to be witnessing this stuff in a Quantic Dream game, though the studio claim that Spellcasters Chronicles will still have some kind of meaningful narrative across its season. And that, in places, it may even branch out in response to player decisions. How, exactly, remains vague: game director Gregorie Diaconu says that “Spellcasters Chronicles began as a creative experiment, an opportunity to channel our passion for storytelling into a shared, living world. While very different from our previous titles, it builds on what has always driven us: giving players the power to shape stories – this time in a collective manner.” Which doesn’t explain much.
A blurb I found elsewhere in the announcement paperwork is slightly clearer, stating that “Each season, you will face a choice that impacts the gameplay and lore of the game.” I still don’t know how that’d be executed as a series of “collective” choices – voting, maybe? Storytelling by democracy? Not sure about that, no sir. I’ve spent thousands of hours around Dota players and am convinced most of us shouldn’t even be allowed to choose when we leave the house.
I’m also not sure what Spellcasters Chronicles’ chances are in a corner of online play that’s hard enough to break into, let alone survive in. Deadlock is already doing the highly mobile, third-person MOBA thing, and besides Valve pedigree, that offers a generally more interesting and distinctive world than what so far seems like just another broadly-defined fantasy setting. And while the sense of scale looks impressive, especially with two Titans slapping each other about, I worry that summons might be a little too important: a good MOBA satisfies when you gain mastery of your hero, not when you run backup for an AI entity so it can win the game for you.
Still, I haven’t played the thing. Frankly I haven’t played Deadlock in months either, so maybe deep down I’m just a puritan codger who thinks MOBAs should stay top-down like God intended. No release date for Spellcasters Chronicles yet but a closed beta is planned for sometime later this year.
Both this and Star Wars: Eclipse come as Quantic Dream try to patch together some goodwill, following French media reports in 2018 of abusive workplace behaviour and financial irregularities at the Paris-headquartered studio. As our sister site GI.biz reported in 2021, co-founders Guillaume de Fondaumière and David Cage successfully sued newspaper Le Monde for libel, but lost a similar case against Mediapart after the court ruled that the journalists involved “had, for each of the accusations, enough factual evidence.”
