We were quite excited about Magicka, but were disheartened to learn that the game has launched with a myriad of problems. Thankfully the developers have been true to their words and have released patches for the game every 24 hours since release improving stability as well as tweaking the game based on user feedback.
All that promised support seems to have paid off as Paradox sent out a press release affirming the patch cycle and touting over 30k purchases on launch day. While boasting sales might not be a wise decision for a game that's currently frustrating lots of users with crashes and bugs, it's good to see the 4 player co-op title doing well.
To reward players that purchased the game early, Paradox is giving out the Wizard's Survival Kit DLC for free. This content offers an exclusive hat, robe and staff for your magic casting wizard. This content will be available for free until January 31st.
The latest patch for the game is live which allows servers to have passwords as well as various crash fixes again. According to a forum post, this will be the last patch until Monday (because Steam doesn't patch on weekends) - and Monday's patch will be a huge one promising to improve the game even further.
Here's the latest patch notes as well as the known issues.
Changelog for Patch #3 - January 27thFixed issues/bugs
- UPnP will no longer crash the game.
- Lack of playable avatar will no longer crash the game.
- Improved reports on disconnect and connection failed.
- Game crash on startup due to old gamer with long name fixed.
- Game terminates properly on crash.
- Save data wipe bug on multiplayer disconnect fixed.
- Boss crashes in Chapter 6 and 12 fixed.
- Servers limited to 4 simultaneous steam users.
- Players that have not selected a slot when the game starts is kicked.
- Server browser no longer displays games of a different version.
- Version miss match check.
- No longer possible to bounce between islands in Chapter 6
- Fixed interrupted dialog from Vlad in Chapter 6.
- Fixed trigger sequence in Chapter 9.
- Chapter 12 boss damage texture added.
- Fixed a bug where a client was locked in an animation.
- Delayed message from steam no longer forces player into game.
- Challenges are now playable using the French version
New features/balancing
- Added version number in menu.
- Added server password. (player requested feature)
- Default undie-time changed to 0.5s (Staff of the Dead)
Known Issues
- Beam spells merging sometimes crashes game with stack overflow (for real)
- Chat still awkwardly positioned.
- Self-shields sometimes get out of sync
- Players are still able to have multiple summons
- Server list sorting not implemented
- Network congestion on high ping (>400ms) connections still problematic.
- Game stutters slightly on some systems despite good performance (cause known, fix pending)
- Steam attempts to install XNA framework every time game is launched or rare occasion
- Game sometimes hogs uplink bandwidth - (Being researched)
Finally, check out these cheesy yet awesome infomercial for the game.