A Preview of Spellcasters Chronicles – A New Kind of MOBA

Spellcasters Chronicles is a new MOBA game from Quantic Dream, the minds behind the award-winning game Detroit: Become Human. While this may be their first foray into the world of MOBA games, it would seem they've brought their creativity along with them.

It's certainly a bit different from the usual MOBA we see in this day and age. There are a lot of differences between Spellcasters Chronicles and games like SMITE, but the overall idea remains the same. You're still attacking an enemy team's base and utilizing various kinds of upgrades to achieve your goal of coming out on top.

The differences go a lot deeper than that and make for some interesting gameplay mechanics and game flow, but does that make it more fun? In some ways, it does, while in others, it feels a bit more like a hindrance. I put some time into the Beta this past weekend and got to experience the chaos firsthand.

A Different Kind of MOBA in Many Ways

While Spellcasters Chronicles still follows many of the ideas that are staples in the genre itself, the game goes beyond these to create a new way to play. Not only do you control powerful characters with different kinds of passives and attacks, but you can also set up a deck to better suit whatever playstyle you want. Decks can consist of four cards from the various categories: buildings, minions, and spells.

This means you don't just have minions that spawn every so often, but rather you are the one spawning those minions yourself whenever you have the ability to. Everything you summon, buildings and minions, takes up an amount of population, and when that's full, you can't summon more of that rank. It adds another layer to your planning and gives you significantly more control over how you push down your lane.

The next biggest difference is probably the number of players. You don't have a big team; instead, it's a 3v3 battle. This makes everything a bit tighter and more controlled since you only have enough people to cover each lane. It also means dying can create a ton of problems since your lane can't be helped for the most part if you bite the dust.

The big coup de grâs of this game is the summons, known as Titans. These absolutely massive hulking monsters build up charge over the course of a round to become summonable. When they get summoned, they charge the enemy team's Life Stones and attempt to destroy them, while stepping on anything that gets in their way.

More Control and More Strategy in Your Hands

Being able to summon your own minions of various levels adds a real layer of strategy, not only to how you use them in battle but in how you set up your deck beforehand. With a limited number of slots and no way to change or alter them once you get into the game, it's paramount that you plan your strategy out ahead of time.

Of course, that doesn't always work, so you might need to be a little flexible with your playstyle by choosing what to upgrade when you level up. Unlike other MOBAs, you don't have a shop that you can buy and sell at to change your strategy. Instead, you're upgrading the various abilities you have at the start. You can unlock new, stronger spells or opt for personal bonuses in general. You can also increase the population of a specific rank of your minions if that's how you want to play it.

This is where most of the in-game strategy seems to originate. If you're constantly in a fight in your lane with another player, it might be a good idea to grab some damage or health bonuses to give you an edge over them. You could also opt to overrun their minions with extra population of your own minions.

It got pretty complex once I started to understand the ins and outs of the system itself. The biggest issue is that you really have no control over what upgrades you get during the game. It became a bit annoying since it meant you were sort of stuck with whatever the system gave you, rather than making that decision for yourself.

A Colorful Cast of Characters

The characters, or spellcasters rather, are chosen at the beginning of the round by both teams, followed by whichever deck you would like to use with that character. Each deck is linked to a spellcaster, so if you make one for the Stone Shaman, you can't use it on anyone else. You can, however, have duplicates of characters in a single game, which was interesting to see in a genre where this usually isn't allowed.

Each character seems to be linked to some kind of mythology, but for now, that seems to be played pretty fast and loose. There are only six total characters available to play, and they all fit into one of three categories: Duelist, Conqueror, and Enchanter. They slot into the usual categories you would imagine, so DPS, Tank, and Healer.

While they all have specific jobs, in a way, that doesn't seem to define them beyond giving you an idea of how they work. For instance, I played the Stone Shaman, who is primarily a healer, and I often had the most kills on my team from abusing my ability to heal around buildings, combined with putting levels into my damage. It made the game far more interesting to not be held to such a specific standard and given so much flexibility in how to play.

A Titanic Time with Colossal Monsters

I have to talk about the unbelievably huge summons in this game. Besides the humongous Titan, you can summon some other smaller ones to attempt to tackle enemy fortresses as they stomp towards the Life Stones. The Rank Four summons are a bit smaller than the Titans, but they are not by any means a pushover.

It takes time to unlock the more powerful ones during the game, as you won't get access to them until your character hits around Level 15, which felt pretty perfect given the 25-minute time frame you have to adhere to. The biggest bad boy available, the Titan, works basically like an ultimate in games like League of Legends. This takes a while to build up, but there are some ways around the map to help get that time down significantly.

This makes the fight much more interesting, as you aren't just fighting for control over neutral space, but you're also trying to deny the enemy team access to their most powerful tool. One thing that became a bit difficult to manage was the rapid eb and flow of combat. Games never seemed to be able to go for less than 20 minutes, even while one team was heavily in the lead. It made the games feel less hopeless overall, though it absolutely still felt like you were pushing a boulder up a hill.

In terms of fairness, I never really felt like I was ever in a position where I couldn't make a comeback with some strategy, but it was going to be a much harder task. In one game I played, I had someone leave at the beginning of the game, which made the game two-on-three. That felt almost impossible to overcome in the beginning, and although my team lost, we made it a nice fight and lasted all the way up until the last couple of minutes.

The Biggest and Baddest Problems So Far

Spellcasters Chronicles really managed to hook me with the significant changes it brings to the typical MOBA format, but with so many changes and adjustments, it means there's bound to be problems. One of the major glaring issues that seemed to plague everyone was performance. In some instances, these framedrops became so frequent that it was impossible to make heads or tails of where you actually were or what was even in front of you.

To the credit of the team, they seemed to deploy a fix quickly that made some adjustments and helped with framerate drops, but some people still experienced issues. I'm not entirely sure how this will run on lower-end hardware, given the game has so many moving parts, but at least the team seems to be good at making adjustments.

Beyond the technical issues, like bugs and glitches (which I won't cover since this was a beta), the game overall felt pretty good aside from some issues with pace and RNG. Since you choose a loadout beforehand with no way to alter it in-game, you can end up feeling a bit mismatched against the enemy team, especially if they're pretty coordinated. With random upgrades, you feel a bit at the mercy of the game to get what you might need to find success, but that doesn't mean you can't win even if you don't get the perfect upgrades.

Does It Have a Future Worth Following?

While the team over at Quantic Dream has a ways to go before this feels ready, what they do have now is something pretty spectacular. Each character feels unique and provides a different playstyle while still adhering to the general combat flow of the game as a whole. They've really shot for the moon here to make something very different from the norm, and in a lot of ways, I think it works super well.

I'll certainly be keeping an eye on Spellcasters Chronicles in the future. This new MOBA will really shake up the scene and give players something to think about one way or another. This game has some real potential, but the question moving forward will be whether the team can expand on what they have. If they can deliver a game like this with minimal issues and some more characters, I think it'll be a game well worth everyone's time.