A Few Thoughts On: Magicka

When I heard of Magicka my first thought was one of dismissal, I didn’t really need another Diablo clone so close to the actual Diablo III release date, especially when I have a barely touched Torchlight sitting in my Steam account. My second thought was to maybe read up a little about it before I passed judgement, and thankfully I did. Magicka is a top down “Magic ‘em Up” developed by Arrowhead Studios, a small time Swedish company. In Magicka you’re given eight spells from eight different elements, and with these spells you have five slots in which to combine them. So for instance, while channelling fire five times nets me a relatively weak fire spray, substituting two of those slots for say earth gives me a nice powerful fireball. This is just the tip of the iceberg and the amount of combinations you have at your disposal are mouth-watering. 

 

The first thing that struck me about the game was its humour. Comedy and love are two elements that I’ve always felt games have struggled with. But when a game can successfully deliver comedy, it, as a whole will flourish from it. Portal while technically excellent wouldn’t have been half the game if GLaDOS was simply “The Bad Guy.” From cult references to the excellent “Vlad” (not a vampire), Magicka has humour in abundance and while you may curse quite a lot, you’ll also laugh.

It’s quite a long game too for the price of ten Euros. It took me about ten and a half hours to complete the single-player and there is also the multi-player and various challenges to try. You’re given the eight spells right at the start of the game and without changing anything but your staff and sword those spells are to last you eleven hours and beyond. You do find spell books along the way, unlocking new combinations for special spells such as Thunderstorm and Teleport, but since all of your spells are unlocked at the beginning there is the worry of boredom setting in as you fall into a routine. To be quite honest I did sort of settle into a routine, I had one combination which saw me through most of my killing but not all of it. Arrow-head studios were clearly aware of this problem and threw teleporting dwarves, Ogres with hand-held mortars and other sorts of mythical beasts at me to rock me out of my routine, and it worked! There is no one spell that will see you through every fight and learning what works well in what situation is one of the fundamental joys of Magicka.  I’m struggling to remember the last game where I could visibly see myself getting better that didn’t use a levelling system.

But for all its ‘sploady fun Magicka does have its downsides. I still have to get a multiplayer game working properly, which is a shame because from what I’ve seen the game looks like it’ll become even better playing with friends. The single-player has its issues also, the inability to save in between levels and the widely spread checkpoints are the source of much frustration. While I criticised Bioshock for having its respawning system I think Magicka has gone past hard and into frustrating at times. I’m a firm believer that while a game like this shouldn’t be easy, it also shouldn’t have you cursing in frustration as a boulder randomly blasts you into lava setting you back another 10 minutes of progress.

That said, Magicka is a breath of fresh air. As I mentioned before, when I looked at Magicka I immediately thought “Diablo clone” which just shows what sort of mind-frame all these rehashes have put me in. But no, Magicka is genuinely innovative and above all just a lot of fun. Arrowhead studios looked at what Diablo had done and instead of copying it like everyone else, they created their own take on it and subsequently gave us a fantastic combat system we’ve never seen before and I’m genuinely delighted they’re getting success with this title.

MMOs and the WoW model.

When someone mentions the Massive Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game (MMO) genre, grinding quests and enemies to level up, gaining new items through killing bosses in dungeons and repeatedly killing eachother in PvP will usually spring to mind. MMOs now have defined gameplay mechanics. But, back when the first MMOs were released these mechanics we all take for granted now weren’t there. Since there was no mould, MMOs at that time took all shapes and sizes. Games like Ultima online, The Legend of Mir and Lineage all had mechanics that we don’t see today. The Legend of Mir had guild run territories, Lineage had player driven politics and Ultima online famously had its non-combatant classes. All three games were also brutally hard on the newer player with open world PvP and free for all looting. These are all aspects that are looked back on with fond nostalgia for many gamers who regard the modern MMO as a disappointment. However it’s important to note that these games weren’t perfect, they were hugely complex, extremely rough around the edges and most importantly focused on grinding experience.

In 1999 a game called EverQuest was released and its mechanics would shape the future of MMOs. Bringing in a 3D world and focusing on group centric experience gaining, it was a massive hit. EverQuest had begun the mould which would lead on to define MMOs as we now know them. The trend in MMOs to accept a dominant mould and follow in it began here, games like Dark Age of Camelot, Asherons Call, Anarchy Online, Ragnarok Online and Star Wars Galaxies all based their mechanics off EverQuest. However this mould wasn’t perfect, it still hadn’t tackled the problem of the boring grind for experience, and there was little to no endgame. 

In 2003 Eve Online was released, and was a revelation to the MMO genre. Completely disregarding the conventional mechanics set up by EverQuest, it did away with the traditional levelling system and instead let people pursue different areas of the game. To this day it stands apart from the traditional MMOs and flourishes because of it. A year later another MMO was released that went back to the EverQuest model, but instead of tweaking it slightly to create its own niche, World of Warcraft (WoW) decided to take on the model and improve it. The launch of WoW was as unstable as every other MMO (something many of us have forgotten), however its launch was a success thanks to the low specs it required, the fact that it had a fan base off the back of the strategy games, and also the relative failure of EverQuest 2. Due to all these reasons WoW survived the trickiest part of creating an MMO, retaining a player base after the launch. It now went about its ultimate goal of improving on the EverQuest model. 

The main change was focusing on the end game, rather than the levelling that preceded it. Now when you had reached the level cap you had a multitude of bosses with all sorts of different combat mechanics that required group cohesion to defeat them. In essence it took the focus on the group that made EverQuest so popular, but instead of using that group to level, it took it to the endgame. This proved to be a massive success and introduced the idea of competitive PvE’ing where guilds would race eachother to boss kills. Another massive success was lessening the harshness of levelling. Now because the focus was at the level cap, the process of levelling was made easier, with less experience grinding, a wide spread quest based system and a focus on solo levelling. Mechanics such as losing experience points on death, or massively long corpse runs were also cut in favour of a more casual experience. All this made for a much friendlier approach to levelling and it was a roaring success, breaking all sorts of records for subscribers.

All of these changes effectively meant WoW had improved on EverQuests model enough to consider it their own. Over the years WoW has polished this model to a mirror shine, and it now is pretty much a perfect model for MMO games. Unlike EverQuest it is so polished and perfect that now when other companies try and make their own games off the model by tweaking it slightly to create a niche, they usually fail because these small changes aren’t enough to drag players away from WoW. What does this mean then? Blizzards titan has gone as far as this model can go and any attempt to follow it will at best only result in a player base just able to turn a profit. It’s time developers changed their thinking on MMOs, the EverQuest/WoW model cannot be improved any more. WoW now has five years of development time added onto it and it’s just not possible for a new MMO to challenge that amount of polish. 

If a company wants to create something to best WoW it has to do it by creating something different. The heavy focus on PvP that Warhammer Online had, or the way Bioware will try and use story to enhance The Old Republic are not big enough changes. Developers need to change the core of this model, changes like ripping out the levelling system, or creating a player driven world will attract a player base it just needs to be done well. Some people claim that WoW has taken the MMO as far as it can go, but that’s a narrow way of looking at it, they have taken a model that the MMO has subscribed to for a long time as far as it can go, but the genre itself has many possibilities.