Quantic Dream’s Spellcasters Chronicles plays better than I thought, but is still an oddly passive MOBA

One of 2025’s unlikeliest game announcements was Spellcasters Chronicles, a 3v3 MOBA in development at erstwhile singleplayer specialists Quantic Dream. It’s a three-lane magic-slinger starring a selection of flying mages, with an emphasis on summoning creatures to do your structure demolition work for you, and I’ve now played a couple of games ahead of its closed beta on December 4th-8th.

I wasn’t overly enthusiastic about Spellcasters based on the original reveal. And after two games of mostly bodyguarding other, bigger, cooler magical beings, I’m still not convinced. That said, it wasn’t as bad as I’d feared: it makes bold, maybe even brave departures from wizard fight genre conventions, some of which pay off rather nicely.

The shorter-form match structure, for one, is appealing. While each team has three big pillars (“Lifestones”) to knock over, there’s a hard 25-minute time limit om each round, with the victors decided by whoever did the most damage before the clock runs down. I enjoy the max-level drama of a late-running Dota 2 match as much as anyone, but there’s more urgency to Spellcasters Chronicles; more impetus to make things happen and get your summoned lads down lane ASAP.

Despite looking quite daunting in straight menu form, the deck-based spell equip system helps with the age-old MOBA problem of learnability. Each mage has some unique skills, but most offensive talents and summoned minions come from a big, shared pool. Thus, if you become enamoured with a particular flavour of fireball, you can take it with you when trying a new character and avoid having to go into their skillset completely blind. It does make individual mages less distinct, but it’s far more approachable than the usual MOBA onboarding process of having to absorb potentially hundreds of abilities at once.

Combat is also visually spectacular in a way most MOBAs rarely are – even the ones that similarly blend in third-person action, like Smite 2 and Deadlock. Ultimates are screen-filling explosions of shocking colours and particle effects. Levelled-up summon squads fill out lanes like RTS armies. And the Titans – team-allied giants you can only spawn after filling up a lengthy damage gauge – are properly gigantic, monstrously strong kaiju whose lumbering threat quickly makes them a focal point for yet more raging spellstorms.

Making all AI-controlled allies entirely player-summoned, a break from the MOBA orthodoxy that decrees creep waves must spawn at regular intervals, is also an interesting twist in itself. You can’t just swan off on a one-mage offensive: ignoring the need to occasionally retreat to friendly territory and respawn a few units will mean losing ground to players who take care in keeping their forces topped up. And as tempting as it is to hit the big red button as soon as it’s ready, even Titans have an element of timing. In one match, an enemy Titan was bearing down on our central pillar, and while I had mine ready to go in an adjacent lane, it would have taken too long for my guy to stomp his way over there. Instead I flew over myself, dropped a summoning circle in the last remaining square foot between our Lifestone and their behemoth, and watched my towering defender materialise between them like a big fleshy door slamming shut in the attacker’s face.

I do wish, though, that the most impactful plays in Spellcasters Chronicles weren’t so regularly centred around helping AI-controlled units win the game for you. I was struck by how inherently supportive Spellcasters Chronicles feels: most of the time you’re either creating summons, buffing summons, or killing enemy summons so your summons can advance faster. Player-to-player interactions barely factor in, as everyone is strong and fast enough at the start of each match to survive in a lane by themselves, and even killing another mage in a midair duel (a rare occurrence, given the ease of simply flying away) only feels impactful in the sense that it helps your summons live longer. Which, actually, is always, always the goal, as player damage against structures is heavily blunted, making your gaggle of imps and trolls the only feasible means of victory.

To stress the point, a lot of them are much, much tougher than you. Especially when you’re on defence, this doesn’t produce elegant displays of battlesorcery so much as it does extended periods of mashing left click in the hopes of whittling down one of the other team’s four-bajillion-HP war elephants before another one shows up. Which does feel like trying to knock down St. Paul’s Cathedral by flicking Pringles at it. Good thing you can whip up another batch of underlings to deal that damage on your behalf, eh?

This also has a knock-on effect on your spells, namely that they don’t have anything like the kinetic impact to match their extravagant visuals. XP-earned upgrades allow them to remain viable as simple hitpoint reduction measures, but when I launch a salvo of magic missiles into the back of a rival player’s head, there’s little tactile sense that I’ve done anything besides make a little red bar get smaller. And if I launch them into a Titan, or any of the chunkier summons, sometimes I don’t even get that.

The free, three-dimensional movement has its drawbacks too. Again, it’s maybe a little too straightforward for ambushed players to zip back to the protection of a tower – escape tools are some of the most satisfying to use in MOBAs, but when everyone can so easily engage and disengage from the off, there’s little value left for good positioning or situational awareness. The floatiness doesn’t help with lack of heft to magic attacks, either. Would it be too cruel to blast someone clean out of the sky with a well-placed lightning bolt?

I appreciate that these complaints might make it sound like I was expecting to play some form of ego-ballooning, wish-fulfilling singleplayer action fantasy, not a team-based strategy game. But the MOBAs that go the distance, and many do not, are the ones that afford even its lowliest support mains the opportunities to make a big impact. Usually by way of outplaying or outsmarting other players: a fight-winning ult from the laneside trees, or saving a heavier-hitting teammate’s life 0.002 seconds before an enemy shuriken would have lodged itself in their spine. The closest I got to something like this during my time with Spellcasters Chronicles was that clutch Titan deployment, and that was still ultimately just creating yet another summon.

This babysitting passivity worries me, as does Quantic Dream’s continued reluctance to share details of another unusual MOBA feature: its player-determined story and seasonal updates. Spellcasters Chronicles was announced with the promise of bringing the choice-and-consequence of their previous solo adventures to an ongoing multiplayer game, but none of the developers I asked during this preview would describe the actual mechanics of how thousands of players could simultaneously pick out plot developments, map changes, and balance updates. I’m not a marketer but from the outside, this is a strange tactic, given that branching melodrama is what the studio is best known for. Besides suing French newspapers, obviously.

I don’t think it’s fair to fixate on previous output to the point of holding Quantic Dream’s lack of multiplayer experience against them – fresh perspectives can bring fresh ideas, and some of the ways in which Spellcasters Chronicles breaks from MOBA tradition show some promise. It has a big job, however, in balancing that iconoclasm with actually being exciting to play.