When Spellcasters Chronicles was announced, it felt like a whirlwind of an announcement. Early morning of Thursday, October 16, 2025, you could see rumors online about Quantic Dream making a multiplayer game. Shortly after, those rumors proved to be true as Quantic Dream co-founder David Cage confirmed the studio was entering a new chapter with a multiplayer game in development, while work on Star Wars Eclipse continued.
Fast-forward one hour from Cage's post, and Quantic Dream had announced its multiplayer title as Spellcasters Chronicles, a new PvPvE, 3v3, F2P, third-person multiplayer action game that's also a hero-shooter and a deck builder. The game's first closed beta would arrive before the end of the year, and the next day, on October 17, attendees at TwitchCon would be able to play it and check it out for themselves. It was a lot, to say the least, for the announcement and reveal of the studio's debut multiplayer game.
Though, while it's arguably a tad overwhelming with its mix of genres, it also makes a lot of sense to me. As a studio known only for its single-player games, Quantic Dream might as well go big or go home with its foray into multiplayer. So that means we get a game that's trying to mash a few different things together: a bit of Overwatch here, with a bit of deck building there, and a splash of Destiny, but your characters can actually fly in the air constantly instead of having to come back down to the ground.
It also means a short eyes-to-hands time span, which is my term for the time between when we see a first trailer and when it's first publicly available to players to try. A shorter eyes-to-hands time span means less time for players to wonder how development on it is going, and less time for negative speculation.
There's some emphasis on narrative, though at this stage in the game, it's far less clear how that will play out. I've found that a lot of developers will try to claim there's some kind of meaningful narrative to be found in their multiplayer game, and very few, if any, will actually make good on that claim. We'll see where Spellcasters Chronicles ends up.
In the meantime, ahead of the game's first closed beta, I got the chance to play an hour of Spellcasters Chronicles with other members of the press and a few of the game's developers. Well, it wasn't necessarily an hour, because the first 15 minutes were spent solving a couple of technical issues, one of which was that the game ran like an absolute slideshow on my laptop.
My laptop is not the highest-end gaming laptop out there; I have a 3070Ti laptop GPU paired with a Ryzen 9 6900HS CPU and 32GB of RAM. It's not the best, but it's not the worst either, and while I get that it's a pre-release build, I was still surprised by how poorly it was running when I first loaded the game and got into a match. I was able to have a smooth experience for about 45 minutes once I connected to Quantic Dream's internal streaming setup, so my impressions are mostly based on that short window.
That short time frame could very well be why, coming away from that time with the game, to answer the question I asked in the title of this preview: No, it probably can't cast a spell on players.
Now, there are a lot of caveats here; I didn't spend a lot of time with the game, only getting through about one and a half matches. I also wasn't playing with a bunch of experienced Spellcasting Chroniclers (or whatever its community of players will call themselves). Each side had one Quantic Dream developer on their team, so the sides were evenly matched with one experienced player, but the rest of us were new to it, and anyone who plays multiplayer games knows that as your game knowledge increases, so does, generally speaking, how much fun you have.
I also didn't get the full Spellcasters Chronicles experience - not just because of the short time I had with it - but because the abilities my character had were pre-set for this demo. I have to imagine that if we were able to actually build the characters we played and spend some time choosing and learning the pros and cons of each card, which would be the case in the final game, I'd feel more engaged with the match.
All that to say, I could be wrong, and this could become the next big multiplayer game in the industry for all I know. But what I do know is that, whether I'm wrong or not, I probably won't be playing very much of it, and that has little to do with the limitations of the time I spent with the game; I only mention them because they do, of course, colour my experience with it.
Let me start with the good. It feels good to play, and by that I mean it felt good to fly around, to use the different abilities of my hero, to summon creatures and move forward on your enemies' Lifestones. While I did have issues with the pacing in the one-and-a-half matches I played, I appreciate the layer of strategy involved in its gameplay and the back-and-forth that can occur.
It's also not a boring game to look at. There's a great spectacle to the gameplay, with the spells you use as your main attacks, summoning creatures to march towards your enemies' Lifestones, and especially summoning Titans to march your line forward. A spectacle that was only matched by an experience I had, where I summoned a Titan-sized stone wall to defend our team's Lifestone long enough to destroy theirs, and win the match.
There's a lot to like about Spellcasters Chronicles, for sure, I'm just not sure it's all engaging enough to really make a dent in the communities of already established multiplayer games, particularly established MOBAs. Much of what I don't like about playing the game can be attributed to things I just don't like about MOBAs, but even when considering that my personal issues with MOBAs clearly aren't problems for the millions of people that play them, it's difficult to see Spellcasters Chronicles breaking through the ceiling.
Most of the moment-to-moment gameplay in Spellcasters Chronicles felt good, and very little of it felt great. Casting spells felt good because they looked cool, but they never felt great to cast, as the visuals, audio, and animations didn't align to make it a deeper sensory experience.
The character designs seemed fine? The more I study them in action while watching back gameplay footage from my play session (which isn't my actual gameplay but a developer playing due to technical issues with the capture of my footage), the less intrigued I am to know anything about them, but I don't think I would say they look bad. The environmental design of the map was lacking anything really eye-catching, and I'm not entirely sold on its mix of genres. It's not a 'bad game,' which means it must be a 'good game,' at least in some ways, but it's by no means a great game.
'Good but not great' is not a good place for a multiplayer game to land in 2025.
Launching a new original single-player game, and by that I mean a game that's not based on a previously established series, is one thing. Launching a new original free-to-play multiplayer game? You're not just trying to get players in the door, you're trying to get them to move into a mostly empty space when they're already living in five other world-class apartments (games).
Yes, this is just a preview. Yes, once again, I only had a short time with the game in limited, pre-release conditions that the general public won't deal with. Yes, it will be tweaked and altered over time, and yes, considering how many multiplayer games we've seen come and go (announced and unannounced) even within just the last five years, across all genres, it's not exactly prophetic to say the latest game to try won't make it.
But I'll still say it, because I don't think Quantic Dream has something here that's ready to smash onto the MOBA scene and the free-to-play multiplayer scene and catch everybody's attention with the kind of intensity that it needs to survive.
Ultimately, hey, what do I know? I know that I didn't love what I played, but I liked it enough to give it another shot under regular conditions to win me over. I know that it's not generally my kind of multiplayer game, and that's where I hit a wall with it. I also know that in the history of single-player game studios branching out to multiplayer, it doesn't always go so well.
If you want to play what honestly feels like it'll be the FBC: Firebreak of MOBAs, then you should check out the closed beta for Spellcasters Chronicles from December 4-7 on Steam.
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