Last month I had a chance to sit down and talk to John Hargelid, Studio Manager for Paradox North. John was showing off one of Paradox’s latest projects, a follow-up game to the fan-favorite Magicka.
Magicka: Wizard Wars is a fast-paced, innovative game featuring a unique combat system that was not in the original. I got a chance to play a round of the spell-binding multiplayer madness, and then talked to John about the experience and what Paradox expects from the Magicka: Wizard Wars project.
Gameskinny [GS]: So I’ve been told not to call Magicka a MOBA. What do you prefer to call it?
John Hargelid [JH]: We like to call it an action PVP simply because MOBA is so closely tied to a specific game mode usually and obviously we don’t have that game mode.
GS: So you don’t view it as having the same game type as a MOBA?
JH: No, not really. MOBA’s tend to be a lot more champion focused, they tend to be obviously lane type gameplay. Yeah. We see that we give the player a lot more freedom. Obviously when you have somewhere between 150 to 300 things you can do at any point in time…
GS: With all the combinations?
JH: Yeah. The different kind of gameplay that brings.
GS: So why change the formula of Magicka into this action PVP?
If you had to think about doing five, that actually takes like 2/10’s of a second longer and it affects gameplay.
JH: Well if you take a look at the original game, obviously a lot of the charm a lot of the concept comes from the story and the lore and the humor. But we also noticed, because we released PVP as a standalone game mode later on, we noticed that it was very popular. Unfortunately it wasn’t really designed to be a PVP game, because once you learned the 3 ultimate combinations, that was it. The game became quickly boring, everyone was standing in their corner hoping to hit the other players. So we wanted to do a dedicated PVP experience that had a balanced design. That’s why you see things like you can combine three elements rather than five. That caters to a much quicker gameplay. If you had to think about doing five, that actually takes like 2/10’s of a second longer and it affects the gameplay.
GS: Yeah it’s a big deal in PVP. It still has friendly fire. Why keep it?
JH: We feel it’s at the heart of Magicka. Basically that’s the fun, but to be honest it also adds the hardcore gameplay that we’re having, so you basically need to make a tactical decision sometimes that “I might kill my friend but I might also kill two enemies”, and you have to make that split second decision.
GS: It’s less painful when you don’t have the minute long respawn.
JH: Exactly. And what we also liked is the fact that if we take the more softer approach, if you look at the lore, the wizards are completely irresponsible beings. They’re over powered, and they just throw magic around them like it’s, “I want cheese, I’m going to grill some cheese and then set a forest on fire just to have a snack”. And you want to really have that feeling in the game.
I want cheese, I’m going to grill some cheese and then set a forest on fire just to have a snack.
GS: There’s a sort of tongue and cheek element to Magicka. How does that persist, or can it persist, in a game without a story?
JH: It’s definitely a challenge, but I think that the main thing that we’re doing is if you look at every single item and robe or character in the game there is still a short description that is funny to keep that humor in the game, and the items you have…Look at that. Sorry, you can’t record this but you see the imp? [on the player select screen there is a little imp that appears next to the character.] Details like that we try to put into the game that makes it more fun. So with every major patch that we release about every other week the imp also tends to be upgraded. Or updated. Featuring what’s been going on for the past two weeks. We like to think we’re still keeping the fun aspect in all of the details still in there.
GS: What sort of aspects does Magicka have that make it different than similar games, or the MOBA genre in specific?
JH: I would say that it’s the twitch based gameplay. So basically you have all these combinations at any point in time, so every player starts off balanced. I would say that other games that have this sort of in round progression, so that if you suck in the beginning of the round, you’ll be playing the whole round trying to catch up. But here it’s actually your skill and your use of combinations at any given time so that your team can still make a comeback at the end of the game and win the round because you held it together and even if you had a bad first ten minutes, you came back your second half.
GS: I read online that you have a persistent character, how does that remain balanced? How do you stop higher ranking characters from destroying others?
JH: We just added a kind of ELO matchmaking system, so that’s going to really help. And most importantly the characters are only persistent in the sense that you gain experience and you gain in game currency to buy cooler things in game, but each item also always have a con. A disadvantage. And that’s how we would like to see the game being played. Balance in the sense that you might become better at choosing, more adept at water, doing more damage from different elements. It’s like a complicated rock, paper, scissors.
GS: What are the expectations for continuing the Magicka franchise? Or are you just focused on this right now?
JH: That’s an interesting question. Obviously we’ve already released a tablet game, which is also now available on Steam. So we’re not afraid to try out new things. Magicka is just as much a weird combination experiment for us as developers as it is for the players playing it. Obviously we would all love to see a sequel as well but I don’t have any news for that.
It’s like a complicated rock-paper-scissors.
GS: Do you have a release date for Magicka Wizard Wars? You’re in Alpha, right?
JH: Early Alpha, Early Access on Steam so it’s Alpha in that sense. We’ve said that we want to open the game in early Summer, so we’re fairly close to hitting that milestone and that’s why we’re getting all the matchmaking stuff in place, a lot of the boring technical stuff to fall into place. But we have a couple of really great networking programmers that joined recently that are helping us out, so what is it you say? “Coming Soon.”
GS: Are you looking at doing this competitively? Is there a future for this game competitively? Or is this more like a game that I’d play with my friends?
JH: I think we’ll see tournaments being hosted for this game. We might not always be driving them from Paradox’s end, but we’re building kind of tournament support into the game eventually that will help the community do what they want to do. We see this very much as the community’s game, so we’re going to try and give them the tools and the support they need, we also have this fairly new gameplay called duel game mode.
GS: Like 1 on 1?
JH: Yeah, so one on one. So it’s a lot more decisive, you can show off your skills. There are less, there aren’t really any random elements in the game, but you can get the impression that it becomes more and more random the more players involved. Therefore we wanted to create this really one on one experience, and I see that as a potential tournament game mode. We like to compare it to a fighting game where you basically show off “this is my skill, and I’m going to counter every attack that you do.”
GS: So I played the sort of Capture the Point game mode, do you have any others?
So we have the whole Capture the Point game mode, and the Duel Mode.We’re always open to experiment with new game modes, and we keep any eye at the forums, we actually had up until last week a feedback forum in the game. But it’s all about looking at what does the community want right now, and I think the two game modes are enough for now, and we’ll see what the third will be.
You can find out more about Magicka: Wizard Wars on the Paradox North site (including information on joining the Steam Early Access for multiplayer madness.)
