It’s all hands on deck for Spellcasters Chronicles‘ second closed beta test, which will be taking place next weekend, starting on Thursday, January 29. The devs have not only optimised performance, but have also added a ton of new content like a beta ranked system, new spells, creatures, and buildings.
“I am very happy and excited to tell you that [on] January 29, we will release closed beta two of Spellcasters Chronicles,” Gregorie Diaconu, game director, says in a dev update. “First of all, we wanted to thank all of you for joining our last closed beta in December. We were very happy and excited to see you all enjoy it, give us all your feedback, share your passion about what you loved about this concept, this game, this universe. And also give feedback about what you want in the game.”
But the second closed beta won’t just be more of the same. This time, players will be able to play in a new arena, the Nordic Shore, a location covered in the remnants of ancient battles and has a huge sea monster skeleton running across it. And to fill this new space, there’ll be new toys to mess around with.
“As you know, the spellcasters can infuse the creatures, and for the first time, the frost infusion is coming into the game,” Fabien Arnaudo, the senior game designer, explains. “And with the new resurrection and sacrifice spells, death of your creatures won’t always be a bad thing.”
Players will also now have access to defensive buildings like a Wall and Ballista, as well as a Harpy’s Nest that can, well, summon harpies to attack enemies. There’s also the Stone Behemoth creature, which can destroy buildings from a long distance, a Steam Tank that does immense single-hit damage, Faeries, which “brings invisibility”, and a Lich: “I will let the player discover what the Lich does.” Ok, not suspicious at all.
The second closed beta will also give players access to a new ranked mode, which is still in beta. There are eight ranks: Novice, Initiate, Adept, Mage, Archmage, Master, Grand Master, and Fate Weaver. It may not be good for my mental, but I will be checking this ranked mode out, because why not add higher stakes and stress to my matches?
But arguably the best change coming to the second closed beta is some much-needed optimisation. “The 3D engine team mostly worked on improving our specifications and improving performance between the closed beta one and the closed beta two,” Marine Lopes, producer R&D, says. “With a lot of feedback during the closed beta one about performance and we wanted to improve that for the second experience.
“It was very important for us to provide a more fluent experience for players and to reach more players for closed beta two. We mostly worked on the CPU performance and RAM optimisation. And we’re now happy to say that you’ll be able to play Spellcasters Chronicles on 16GB RAM (down from 32GB). We want every player to be able to play our game, so we will keep improving even beyond the closed beta.”
