14 DAY TRIAL // One of the big surprises of the Sony E3 2014 press conference was the announcement that Magicka 2 was being developed for the PlayStation 4 home console and the team working on the title at Paradox Interactive says that the move represents a risk that can deliver huge payoffs.
Fred Wester, the chief executive officer at the company, tells The Escapist that his team was careful to see whether the next-gen console would make it easy to deliver updates and patches in the long term before it agreed to port the game.
He states that, “We have to make sure that we capture the audience and that we support the game. We're in for the ride, long term, like we continue to patch the game. I remember when we released Europa Universalis 4, four weeks before, we released a patch for EU3 and that was six years after the original release.”
Magicka 2 will also be launched on the PC and Paradox says that it will create a more streamlined experience that captures the complex nature of spell casting and the hilarious effects that mistakes can have on the player and the world around him.
Wester believes that the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360 were too guarded by Sony and by Microsoft and that the two companies have learned a lot of valuable lessons that they are currently putting into practice.
The executive also says that the first Magicka has managed to sell 2.8 million units on Steam and that it can also deliver solid numbers on the PlayStation 4.
He adds, “Sony's been really helpful and it's a really good cooperation. The idea for us now is that we sign a handful of games to be out for the PS4 and the first one that we're announcing is Magicka 2, then we'll have a few other ones as well. I hope down the road we're going to release a grand strategy on PlayStation as well.”
The fact that Magicka 2 is coming to a home console does not mean that Paradox is also thinking about porting over its core grand strategy titles.
When asked about Europa Universalis IV, he joked that finding a way to make the fonts look better was the main obstacle for such a move.
The grand strategy experience has already been adapted to work on the new Steam controller, which features haptic feedback elements.