Gaming: After Deciding To Make A Moba, Quantic Dream Also Decides To...

You know how some studios delayed their games to avoid Cyberpunk 2077 and Grand Theft Auto 6? Quantic Dream is doing the completely opposite thing.

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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.

Our initial impressions were positive: PC Gamer's Elie Gould spent some time with a Spellcasters Chronicles beta last year and declared it "exciting enough that I want to put extra time and energy into figuring out its details." The reception of the early access release has been somewhat cooler, however: Significant performance and stability issues seem to be the most common problem, but there are also complaints about a perceived lack of development progress from the beta builds to the early access release.

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.

This isn't a catastrophic situation. This is a very crowded weekend, and on top of that the release of Spellcasters Chronicles was not widely publicized: Quantic Dream announced the date via its X account, but on the Steam store page, for instance, the updates go di

Source: PC Gamer