March of Giants Closed Alpha: Access, Dates & What to Expect

The March of Giants closed alpha is officially happening, and for a genre that has spent a decade polishing the same arena formula, that’s genuinely big news. Ubisoft’s Montreal studio has confirmed that its World War I-inspired MOBA will open its doors to outside players, giving a limited group of testers the first real chance to shape a game that is still being written. If you want to see how trench warfare, fairytale giants, and 4v4 team fights fit together, the March of Giants closed alpha is your earliest possible entry point.

What Is March of Giants?

March of Giants is an in-development multiplayer online battle arena game from the March of Giants Team, a studio founded specifically to build competitive MOBAs. In the official March of Giants: Closed Alpha Announcement, the studio’s creative lead explains the team spent roughly five years on the project before its public reveal, drawn in by the creative latitude the studio offered.

That origin story matters. This isn’t a licensed spin-off or a trend-chase bolted onto an existing franchise — it’s a studio assembled from scratch with the stated goal of pushing the MOBA genre beyond its arena-shaped comfort zone.

The core design pitch: rather than dropping heroes into a symmetrical arena, March of Giants drops them onto a battlefield. Units are described as soldiers with something like a predestined agenda — constrained, chargeable capabilities — but enough freedom left over to maneuver. The ground itself can be physically reshaped, echoing how real artillery turned World War I battlefields into cratered trench networks.

The setting is a deliberate mashup. Swords, shields, and high-fantasy magic are out; gunpowder, cannons, and a form of “magic” that reads closer to science are in. Then there’s the giant — the fairytale creature the game is named for, and the element that ties a historical war story to something mythic.

The world in a nutshell:

• Genre: Competitive multiplayer MOBA with RTS-scale battles
• Studio: the March of Giants Team
• Setting: World War I fused with fairytale
• Signature twist: A battlefield you can physically reshape
• Signature unit: Giants
• Current phase: Closed alpha (Pioneer Playtest)

March of Giants Closed Alpha: What the Announcement Confirmed

The announcement video spends little time on dates and a lot on intent. The message is essentially that alpha means the game is finally real. Until that point, it existed as an internal idea; the March of Giants closed alpha is the moment it becomes something outside players can touch, argue about, and break.

Here’s what the team has actually confirmed so far:

The most striking part of the announcement isn’t any single feature — it’s the stated reason for testing at all. The developers argue that no internal team can define how a game is truly played, because players will bring far more minds and infinitely more hours than the studio ever could. Strategy, vocabulary, and meta will be shaped by testers. If you’ve ever wanted your feedback to matter in a genre this competitive, that’s the pitch.

It also tells you what the alpha is not. This isn’t a marketing demo or a stress-test gimmick. The team is openly saying they expect to be surprised, and they want the community to expose things they never anticipated.

How to Sign Up for the March of Giants Closed Alpha

Access is invite-based, and there is no paid route in. The practical approach is to get your name into every official channel the team actually watches — the playtest sign-up page, the Discord server, and the subreddit where devs say they post daily.

Tips to improve your odds:

• Use the same email address on the sign-up form, Discord, and your eventual game account so invites don’t bounce.
• Describe your real MOBA history in the survey. Studios tune cohorts for a mix of veterans and newcomers, not just for the highest rank.
• Enable Discord notifications for the announcement channel — waves roll out fast and often with little warning.
• Keep your hardware details current. If your region opens a new wave, you want to be reachable immediately.
• Never buy an invite from a third party. Access is tied to your account and cannot legitimately be resold.

Gameplay Deep Dive: Trench Warfare Meets the MOBA Formula

The comparison below is the clearest way to see what the studio is chasing. Read the right column as design intent, not final balance.

Because abilities are described as limited and chargeable, expect fights that reward pre-planning over button-mashing. The ability to reshape the battlefield raises the stakes further: a fight you win at minute five may be physically impossible to repeat at minute fifteen because the ground beneath it no longer exists in the same shape.

Here’s an informed look at how a roster might shake out, based purely on the design language in the announcement:

Treat that table as informed speculation rather than a published roster — no full hero list has been revealed yet. It does, however, show where the design freedom lives: when the map is mutable and abilities are gated by charge time, the traditional tank-assassin-marksman triangle gets a lot more interesting.

Alpha Timeline, Invite Waves, and What Testers Should Expect

No launch date, beta window, or rollout schedule has been announced. What exists is a sign-up pipeline and a stated intention to build the game alongside its players.

What to brace for inside the test:

• Expect a possible NDA. Many closed alphas restrict streaming and screenshots, so read your invite email before hitting “Go Live.”
• Expect instability. Placeholder art, abrupt tuning passes, and server hiccups are normal at this stage.
• Expect your feedback to be read. The announcement frames player input as the entire point of the phase.
• Expect no fixed calendar. Invites can appear days or weeks after you register.

Community reports from the official Discord and the subreddit are currently the fastest way to catch wave announcements, and the devs’ daily presence there is confirmed by the playtest hub itself. If you’re serious about getting in, that’s where to park yourself — player experience in past genre betas consistently shows that active community members hear about invites first.

For a wider view, our Pioneer Playtest guide, beta impressions, beginner guide round out the picture from different angles.