Magicka Sequel Planned, Console Version a Possibility 62
Indie action-adventure game Magicka has been an unqualified success since its launch in January. While work is still underway on the original game, the CEO of publisher Paradox told Joystiq that a sequel is not in doubt: "When we — and I'm not saying 'if' — but 'when' we are doing a sequel to this game, it's going to be done on a totally different technology. It was super buggy at release. We addressed most of them in the first week, but there are still issues with laptops and a few other things. It's due to the engine that we produced the game on." He also indicated that console ports of Magicka are a strong possibility.
Magicka (Score:4, Informative)
1) Slashvertisement.
2) I played the demo - seemed okay, seemed to make good progress, interesting ideas, had to restart from a checkpoint a couple of times but nothing too taxing etc. Bought it on that basis.
Had to re-do everything I'd done in the demo (in fact, in a worse way because there were some vital elements that weren't highlighted in the full game that had been in the demo until they patched them). Then realised that save-"checkpoints" only worked if you didn't quit the game in between.
So you struggle through a level - get right to the end, die. You restart and restart from just before you died but then if you choose to close the game and try again later - bam - right back to the very start of the level. I didn't get past more than about 30 minutes of actual gameplay (after many hours of trying) and the developers have zero interest in changing it because dozens of complaints on the forums.
Yes, if you sit down and wish to play it through in one session after reading up on every spell combination and memorising them all and then just spamming the most powerful ones, you can complete the game in one sitting and never hit the issue. But if you want to PLAY the game and experiment (which is kinda the selling point of the game), then you're stuffed and find yourself re-treading old ground constantly (with extended cutscenes etc. each time) over and over and any progress you make better be a LOT of progress or it won't save between sessions even if you've touched a "save" checkpoint.
And then they sold out and just produce a bucket of odd DLC for it without bothering to fix many of the issues. And that's from someone who had a relatively smooth ride bug-wise because I tried the demo and read the specs beforehand, but it still crashed out on me a couple of times (it doesn't matter "how often", games should not crash out). After the first two days of trying, I literally just left it to linger on my Steam account and haven't tried since.
I never even tried to play it multiplayer because all of my friends steered clear of it but the single-player is all but impossible if you can't dedicate a whole day or two to completing it. Even then, the multiplayer had ridiculous network traffic sizes that made it mostly impossible for four-people on ordinary broadband connections to play together (and there were all sorts of sync issues).
Basically, it was a really, really, cool idea that they buggered up by being too focused on selling instead of fixing. And you should look at the Steam forums and the number of complaints about "my super-duper graphics card can't run this at all".
Will the fix the first one first? (Score:4, Informative)
I bought Magicka and while it's incredibly fun, it's also completely broken. Singleplayer is buggy as hell and multiplayer straight up doesn't work. I tried playing online with a few friends and it was an absolute blast but after a while, events stopped triggering, we'd get stuck in cutscenes, if anyone had network connectivity issues we'd have to start the level over again entirely... you can't rejoin a game in progress. After 4 hours of the first two levels over and over, we gave up. We got to a point where we'd finish a certain battle and then nothing would let us continue. We tried ten times or so restarting the server, restarting the game, reinstalling the game, nothing.
It's so painful because underneath it's one of the coolest games I've played in a really long time. But as much goodwill as that gets from me, it's not enough to overcome the fact that I purchased a game that essentially doesn't work. And not in a hardware, oh my PC setup is weird, thing. It runs beautifully. Graphics are glitch-free, frame rate is high, everything is great on that side of things. This is the sort of problem where actual game logic is broken and there's no way for me to troubleshoot my way around it.
If the developer is going to start planning a sequel before fixing this game, than consider me a customer lost. I very strongly suggest all of you avoid their products as well.
Re:Why Magicka was so great and why it sucks... (Score:4, Informative)
Sorry - I don't see the developer support that you do - there are dozens of people basically saying "I've bought it, I meet the specs, it just doesn't work" and there's nothing but the promise of possibly a future patch once they "lock down the issues". (I have no technical problems in terms of performance, but I've seen the odd crash - just not enough to disturb me yet).
Lots of people cried out for savepoints, which is literally half-a-dozen lines of extra code. "We'll look into it", from the very first day of release - nothing, and no decision, 4 months later. Network multiplayer was borked for most of that time and is STILL the heaviest bandwidth I've ever seen on a game (and still on the "To Do" list that the developers post on Steam forums every now and then).
Yet in that time, there's been 2 entire DLC's. It's called chasing the easy money. That's fine. But *my* money isn't easy, so they won't be getting any more of it.
They might be there on the support forums but they are basically there for reassurance - actually getting anything done is rare. When was the last patch that actually *changed* something? A month ago. What did it change? Mostly crashes. What did the previous SIXTEEN updates fix? Mostly crashes.
Good things to fix, but 17 updates to get rid of some huge, major, quite obvious crashes and yet they focus mainly on two DLC's (three if you count releasing a tiny little weapon to start you off as a DLC - offered for free with early purchases).
And there's no way I'm subjecting three of my friends to the issues that just I've experienced with it (and ignoring the huge numbers of people still reporting "game doesn't even start" or "game crashes" on the forums) and certainly not by giving them another three lots of money.