Let's talk about Magicka

[jakonovski]

It's coming out tomorrow on the 25th! That's what Steam says anyway.

For those who don't know, it's a diablo-esque co-op action rpg but instead of button mashing you have combo mashing. The catch is, it's very very dangerous and finicky and you'll end up killing your friends just as often as the mobs. RPS has a nice article up: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/01/24/spell-check-5-mistakes-to-avoid-in-magicka/

I'm totally going to buy it and force all my friends to buy it too.

[Ard]

This has totally not been on my radar, and it's out tomorrow, and it's reasonably priced.  This will not end well for me in what  I suspect will be a mixture of burns and electrocution.

[Yegolev]

I really wish I could play multiplayer games.

[ashrik]

I just played through the demo 3 times in order to see how far I could get. I can't wait to play online with some friends because it looks like a blast.

I was supposed to get a beta invite that never materialized, but I've been keeping track of this for a few months now. I recommend you grab the Steam demo and give it a shot

[Yoru]

This looks like it's going to be immense amounts of fun multiplayer. I had enough reward points on Gamersgate saved up, so I preordered this for "free".

Definitely something to play while drunk, I think.

[Kalle]

Multiplayer is buggy as hell. 

I'd wait for a patch if you havent bought it already.

[Ghambit]

Is there a lobby for MP play?  That's really what is stalling my purchase.
Dont have enough PC grognards in my life to find a nice group.

[kildorn]

I want to go to this game. <3

At least the basic idea seems hilariously fun.

How is the multiplayer buggy? Latency related, the usual NAT issues, or just something new and creative?

[jakonovski]

Steam download finished. Playing it now. I love Vlad who is not a vampire, and the pseudo-Swedish everyone is talking in.

[ashrik]

I've heard a lot about buggy multiplayer, but apparently some patch is being made, or is already out? I can't wait to get home from work!

[bhodi]

Once the bugs are ironed out of multiplayer, I look forward to "accidentally" killing you all.

[Typhon]

It's downloading!

[kildorn]

Steam News puts "release!" "RPS article!" "patch!"

So some things may have changed already today. Downloading now to try this out though.

[Kalle]

How is the multiplayer buggy you ask? I was trying to play with two friends and none of us were able to connect to a game or host a game. We did the usual router/firewall checks but to no avail. What's more, the server browser is plain broken. I can't scroll down the list of servers, the scroll bar disappears (!) so you only see the top ten listed. I couldn't find any games hosted by my friends even though that is one of the options in the browser. Pressing "quick play" to join a random lobby will return you to the same lobby if you try to exit the lobby. Backing out to the main menu I'd find myself back in the same lobby within seconds.

The people who have actually managed to connect to eachother have reported numerous glitches and loockups in play as well. So, yeah, it's a ton of bugs.

Singleplayer works fine as far as I can tell but I'd really like to play this game co-op and there's just no way to do that.

And yes, I've tried the most recent patch. It didn't help.

[Ghambit]

Thanks for the info.   I'll wait to buy.
Kinda of a shame really, these types of games only have the half-life of a single weekend.  If they release buggy they're essentially DOA.

[schild]

Hold mouse to move without click to move as an option is some backwards designed bullshit. Besides that, game seems stellar.

[K9]

I played the demo, it seems like tons of fun.

There's a few teething gripes (no autosave after you leave the tutorial, no explanation of how some elements combine). Will pick this up full later in the week.

How do you make wind by the way? I couldn't for the life of me seem to make the rain spell.

[bhodi]

I played the demo, it seems like tons of fun.

There's a few teething gripes (no autosave after you leave the tutorial, no explanation of how some elements combine). Will pick this up full later in the week.

How do you make wind by the way? I couldn't for the life of me seem to make the rain spell.

it's water water fire.

water+fire = steam, the spell is water+steam.

It's slow to cast for some reason, you can't just quickly mash the water button twice.

[trias_e]

I bought this as it simply looks to fun to pass up, although I know of no IRL friends who have grabbed it as of now.  So feel free to invite me to play if I'm around.

[bhodi]

Sadly, non-lan multiplayer is still unplayable until a patch comes out. And the game is pretty much made for multiplayer.

Tips:
Hit left ctrl to block.
Middle mouse without a spell queued activates the active ability on staves.
Always keep haste up
Always go into battle with a powerful spell on your sword
If shielded, when hit by arrows, it causes you to fall down. Only shield for melee guys.
Beastmen shamans all run around with lightning immunity (purple) aura so don't even bother with lightning combinations.
Things that are wet (hit with water or steam) will take double damage from lighting. You can't combine lightning directly with water, but you can combine it with steam.
Things that are wet that are hit with cold will freeze. This wears off really quickly but they'll take triple damage while frozen, and can't move or attack. Smack them with melee!

You should figure the fun spells out for yourself, though rock shield variations, cold AoEs, and heal mines are handy. If you're really stuck, feel free to use the murderbeam:

[Trouble]

Ice + Ice + Ice + Ice + Rock is the highest single target I've seen. This game is button mashey as fuck, that's a 9 key combo.

[Typhon]

How is the multiplayer buggy you ask? I was trying to play with two friends and none of us were able to connect to a game or host a game. We did the usual router/firewall checks but to no avail. What's more, the server browser is plain broken. I can't scroll down the list of servers, the scroll bar disappears (!) so you only see the top ten listed. I couldn't find any games hosted by my friends even though that is one of the options in the browser. Pressing "quick play" to join a random lobby will return you to the same lobby if you try to exit the lobby. Backing out to the main menu I'd find myself back in the same lobby within seconds.

The people who have actually managed to connect to eachother have reported numerous glitches and loockups in play as well. So, yeah, it's a ton of bugs.

Singleplayer works fine as far as I can tell but I'd really like to play this game co-op and there's just no way to do that.

And yes, I've tried the most recent patch. It didn't help.

We were having trouble connecting as well until a read a post on their forums that said, "have you tried inviting from Steam?".  Tried that, and it worked like a charm.  Didn't have to open any ports, give IPs, nothing.  So, if you bought this via Steam (I think maybe even if you didn't), you shouldn't have any trouble inviting your Steam friends.  After we were able to connect we had zero issues.

Game is hilariously fun with other folks.  Friendly fire is unavoidable, especially in challenger mode (didn't actually get a chance to play adventure mode yet). 

More Tips:

[kildorn]

Hokay, this game is hilariously fun and random, but screw the warlock boss when playing solo.

Seriously, healing is Strong in this game, and I can't find some way to stop three mages with a few tens of thousand hp each who like to spam AE heals. ><

[K9]

nerf locks? 

[kildorn]

It's more "1 v 3 mage battles are a TAD CRAZY" :D

The prior 1v2 mage battle seemed a lot easier, they had low enough HP that I could just fire huge fucking rocks at them. My go-to method of dealing with anything is really "shoot a giant rock at it", with a side of "shoot a giant arcane infused exploding rock at it"

Is the ice meta-element decent to make? Because infusing things with frost seems like it causes no damage, but slows.

[K9]

Fully charged combinations of ice and arcane seem quite powerful, but I haven't really played enough to fully test everything.

I'm still a bit lost as to the benefit of adding more copies of the same element into a spell. Sometimes it seems to make the area of effect stronger, or do more damage, other times nada.

[kildorn]

rock rock rock rock rock rock makes a BIG rock that hits a lot harder. Charging any rock combo seems to be more about velocity than size.

spamming water just seems to be a longer "wet" effect, I guess? Not sure, water seems useless beyond setting up lightning bolts.

[ashrik]

The devs are talking about releasing a patch every 24 hours until the game is running stable. Looks like a big one is coming out tonight

[kildorn]

New patch up tonight:


Thanks for playing the game!

Here's the official status of Magicka as of now (26th of Jan).

Short story:
Singleplayer and Multiplayer: Tonights (it's 18:00 in Sweden) patch is going to be fairly big and hopefully it'll adress the majority of the issues you've been experiencing. Right now we've got so many players posting on the steam forums we're having a hard time keeping up answering posts. But we're reading all of them and are adding stuff to our "to-do"-list. This includes fixes and improvements

Here's the changelog

Patch will be delivered to Steam very soon and it's up as soon as Steam pushes the button). We'll monitor your response closely and keep patching the game as often as possible.

Please let us know if the patch helped!

Changelog Patch #26 Jan


Bugs Fixed

* Added keyboard binding for cast self (default middle mouse button)
* Steam usernames longer than 15 characters will now be shortened instead of crashing.
* Fixed a bug when displaying an already disposed server in server listing which caused a crash.
* Multiple move orders with delays will now properly stop during the delay.
* The errorReport in the application directory now also contains a version numbers.
* Server lists can now be properly scrolled.
* Path names are now region safe.
* Chapter 6 Scene 4 (Grimnir mind duel) now spawns the correct amount of spawns.
* Removed VAC option, all online games now use VAC.
* Improved cutscene-skip in Chapter 2 Scene 2.
* Improved cutscene-skip in Chapter 3 Scene 3.
* Checkpoint added in Chapter 6 Scene 5 (Grimnir boss fight).
* Statuseffect desync crash fixed.
* Animation time desync crash fixed.
* Additional small fixes.

Features added

* Cancel button added to gamepad configuration popup.
* Icon added for break free action.
* Icon added for boost action.
* Icon added for magic action.

Known issues:

* No private game/password game option (coming soon)
* Game stutters slightly on some systems despite good performance
* Steam attempts to install XNA framework every time game is launched
* Inexplicable poor performance on some high end machines
* Sometimes campaign progress is wiped due to network disconnect (yeah this one is annoying)

[Ghambit]

Okay, purchasing.
On Steam as "Ghambit"

[kubodhi]

Purchased as well, but it'll be a few hours before I'm home and playing it.

Steam user: kubodhi

[Nightblade]

I happen to have a 10 dollar amazon gift card lying around, so I could get this on amazon for free, are the steam items really useful or should I just not pay anything for it and go amazon?

[kildorn]

Is it on amazon? I thought they were doing a steam release only now, with a non steam version to come in the future?

But the pre-orderish items are pretty useless.

[K9]

I'm having fun playing through this, the spell combos do vary wildly in usefulness and power, but there is definitely a button-mashing, running around spammy fun to be had.

Observations so far:

 - Cold+Arcane beam is nice on big slow guys since you can snare them and damage them at the same time.
 - You can actually CC mobs fairly well. 5xRock -> AoE will knock everything down on about 2/3 of your screen, 5xcold -> AoE has the the same effect snaring.
 - An easy way to set up dampness for lightning combos is to enchant your sword with 5xwater and then hit something. As far as I can tell, the more charges you enchant your sword with, the bigger the splash effect of the attack. Water does knockbacks and dampness. Gather mobs, splash them with your watery sword, then charge up 5xlightning and AoE.
 - Sword enchants (spell+sword attack) are fun and can help in clutch situations. Being able to throw down heal mines on the move is cool.
 - Don't underestimate melee, it's not going to get you through everything, but it's not bad
 - Randomly mashing stuff and accidentally making a spell which heals half the enemies you are fighting is a lot less frustrating and a lot more amusing than you think.
 - The game is amusing, and has a running thread of subtle (and not so subtle) jokes
 - There is a staff you can get on the first level, just after you exit the castle which has fear as an on-use. This seems so powerful it's almost broken, as it will get you out of pretty much tight situation, allowing you to heal yourself
 - Screw druids

I haven't figured out auras yet

[kildorn]

The auras are immunities. So anyone in the radius is immune to *color* spell type.

The only "crap, not what I meant" is when I try and heal then shield myself. Life + Shield = Healing Immunity D: