And Dark Messiah, perhaps? I've heard that Bethesda had acquired some of the folks (or is it the production company?) from that game under their wing some time ago...

I understand your concern, and I have similar concerns as well. I really, really hope that we keep at least half of what Morrowind (or hell, even Oblivion's) spell making system could accomplish. I want to customize every facet of my spells, not use pre-constructed crap. The novelty of "OH WOW I CAN CAST THE SAME SPELL DIFFERENT WAYS DURP DURP" wears off quickly when you realize you're still being shoehorned.

But that's how it was with the old spell making system. Same spell, just different radius/duration and all that jazz. We have already did the math and there is more combination with the new magic system then with the spellmaking system in the past. We get more diverse spells than ever before, which imo, I could care less if an older system is gone if the new system does everything the old one did but better.

Its still the same, Fable 3 just doesnt have hotkeys or proper menus . It was sort of a joke.

I personally hated the TES magic systems. Of course the combat in TES games have always been extremely bland, more bland than mmos like WoW. Timed blocking in Oblivion helped and Skyrim looks to be doing a lot of amazing things and Im looking forward to it.

Oh please, you're entitled to your opinions but just stop using that "DURPITY DURP" stuff already.

I keep hearing you say this "same spell", sure it was, yet what's the difference between that and the new system? The new system has the same spell, just cast a different way. At least with spell making I can make spell combos (fun stuff like putting multiple damage attribute spells into a single, terrible hex, sort of like Bonewalkers did) and not be limited by just what the developers could imagine. Other fun stuff also existed like Levitate for 1 point on Target, which made an opponent move very slowly. If you aren't allowed to change things like that, especially on "buff" spells (spells that one would normally imagine exist solely for the purpose of making the caster stronger, but a wise magic user can instead screw their opponents over with it), then you are thus limited by the system. Even worse is that if spell making IS gone, and the max we can use at once is just two different spells, that definitely limits us, as Morrowind could allow some 8 or more spell effects on a single spell at once. It was very fun, and interesting to create spell combinations that took advantage of different gameplay aspects.

It seems to me that many are simply seeing "OH WOW DIFFERENT WAYS TO CAST" and not thinking that its JUST THAT; a different variation on the same spell. A fire spell will still do the same thing, despite how you cast it. That's fun and all, but it can't possibly replace all the customization that a full spell making system allows. I don't see why they have to be mutually exclusive, either. Why can't we have a spell making system AND the dual wielding, multi-cast system? I would love to cast all my zany spells in different ways.

Edit: Oh, and "Did the math"? What are you on about? If they don't have spell making, the best you can get at one time is 2 times 86 = 172, at least without switching spells. In Morrowind, there were several thousand spell combos, as you can have, as I said, many many spell effects on a single spell at once.

1 thing that wasn't in Fable, Dragonshouts

I understand this, I've spent ages in game handcrafting perfect spells, unique ones, coming up with names for them.
It still amounted to little more than hog tying a generic set of effects into a custom role on the most part.
Or fiddling with a magic system that was underpowered with with bad leveling, to the point that I just over nerfed spells to compensate.
In Oblivion you really only needed one spell Command X, at level 25 for 1 - 6 seconds AoE 15 - 25.
Or any touch, ranged, single or AoE version of this.

The whole system was both open to and needed exploiting and only took off when heavily modded and other spell effects added.

I'm not saying Skyrims going to be great, but I'd rather see more unique spells than the same bunch of effects repeated.
That's just me though.

I have only two questions
Script effect still present in game?
Can we edit and create spells in CS?

General irritating tones on your post aside (which I think is too much and won't do any good to the discussion), I have to admit that you raised some interesting points here.

edit:But what Madocmayhem has said was quite spot on, though.

Try Morrowind's spell making system. It isn't as limited by leveling, nor does it have the caps on its effects like Oblivion's does.

In addition, you say "hog tying generic effects together". And Skyrim's will be different how? Unless they practically removed half of the spells and introduced more unique spells (God help me if they did. Shoe meet horn), then it will just be the same thing, just without nearly as many combinations as we could make in Morrowind or Oblivion. Like I mentioned in my previous post, a fire spell is a fire spell is a fire spell. The only difference is that it looks a different way, but the effect is still the same. You burn stuff. At least with a spell making system I could burn, burden, and drain them at the same time.

I apologize, but when I get talking about the magic system, I get pretty into it. I've played mages in every TES game to date, and play a mage in pretty much every RPG. I really enjoy the aspect of magic that TES gives to it and would hate to see it leave just so we can cast the same spell 5 different ways that still all do the same thing effectively. I want to control every facet. I like playing a mage almost like a scientist, and that was a lot of the fun of a mage in Daggerfall, Morrowind, and Oblivion. It was the experimenting and discovery. One day, while making cheap levitation potions, I realize just how slow I moved while using them because they were so low. I figured I could use that same slowness on an enemy for much cheaper than any other spell. I was thrilled when it worked. It really got me into the gameplay and mindset of a mage.

Just for fun, another cool spell to make is Water Walking on Target. Not only can it help in annoying escort quests, but it also can be used defensively. If you're fighting something near a body of water and start losing, you can cast water walking on the enemy, then run beneath the water to hide from it as it is stuck on the surface. You can even make it AOE if you need to run from multiple enemies.

This is sure, mysticism spells has been moved to other classes probably most to alteration who needed a boost, I agree it was the weakest school and it changes nothing.
Staves changed to one hand no feelings about it, it makes them more useful as you can combine with a spell or a melee weapon. You can not use it as a melee weapon in one hand but you could not in Oblivion either.

Spells and spell effects, some confusion here, 80 spells would not do if you factor in the different strengths and properties, heal self and heal other is two spells, heal on target probably one more.
now we can imagine your spell strength is set automatic, however this would be dumbed down^3, sometimes you need a strong healing spell, other times a long term effect. Area effect spells are nice against critters but you don't want to use the inferno spell who empty your magic. And the facing a pack of zombies you want to empty your magic pool and run.
Against a moving strong enemy you want a small area effect.

The spellmaker is the main issue, removing it would devastate magic, remember playing a demo of Daggerfall, the one thing who put the game in the run and buy NOW category was the enchanting and spellmaking. Dropping it would be a sin who makes mythic dawn look good.

However love the idea that you can use a spell many ways, on floor in front of you as a trap, hold button for flame thrower, but again if the fireball is weaker then the flamethrower why use it? area effect? if it's stronger the flamethrower is redundant.
Also same effect could be gotten from a custom fire based spell, if other effects is added us fire if it's strongest, here you would be able to decide area effect size yourself.

However in worst case scenario, pure mages was useless in Morrowind without exploits or mods, and not many on this forum says Morrowind was a bad game
If pure mages need mods to make sense I can live with it. (Zaria summons dragon with daeric armor loads a stack of soulgems into it's gatling laser, mount it and fly away) :sorcerer:

Wait, I used "same spell" as you said it. You said "same spell" and I was just repeating that phrase. It's different because all the old spellcrafting system did was basically increase the damage of your spell. It still only showed one spell effect. With the new system, you have more combinations than the old spellcrafting system and it has a myriad of different ways to cast them, like placing runes on the ground to make a trap out of the spell, making a flamethrower out of a fire spell or a constant stream of lightning from a shock spell and so on. Also, for all we know they will give us a lesser form of spell making system to tweak damage or something. It's not limiting in any way, the new magic system has more combinations than the previous spellcrafting system actually, we have already done the math on this.


Except that is just what the old system did except not as much. It didn't give you different ways to cast like the new system, all it did was use the same spell but had more damage than before or a bigger radius, that's it. There wasn't anything awe inspiring about it. The new system doesn't limit your decisions in magic, it only increases it. If you made a spell with the old system, you could make it have shock and fire damage. So you launched it and it would either look like a fire spell or shock spell and just do more damage. With the new system, if you are fighting multiple enemies, you can have shock and fire damage but now you can hold both spell buttons and you can launch a flamethrower and stream of lightning on the target and hold them down as long as your magicka holds. How is that more limiting than the old system? You get the same effect as the old system but better looking.



That's not how it is at all. you have 2 spells at one time, each spell has a channeled effect, a trap effect, a normal use effect and a combine effect. That's 4 and that's all we know, there could be more. Then you have to realize that you have them for over 85 spell effects, then you have to realize the combinations between the spells. Then each hand can use a different use effect for the spell on top of the two different spell effects at once. These combinations go into the billions, not 172.

Hmm... There doesn′t seem to be a unity in this particular question. I′m not sure how the system is going to be, and it could be great, it could be horrible. A single step towards a Fable 3 system would be horrible, I think everyone agrees on that one. But I guess we′ll just have to wait and see.

Hmmm I've tried Morrowinds one, I wish people would stop talking down to other users as much about which games they have or have not played.
It is serverly limited by magicka though, and spell chances, it requires serious fudging of the spell system to maximise.
Some fiddling with touch spells, alot of fortify work arounds, potion glitching and tunning spells into something that actually gives you something to work with.

A fire spell is a fire spell, however in skyrim it's already stated that a fire spell is the most damaging of the elenental spells.
It can be used as a flame thrower, a large powered AoE fireball or a small direct to target one.
It's use is against fighters and large hitters.

Electricity is to drain magicka, so will have a bonus as standard, and is aimed at mages and magicka users.
We may ( speculation ) see chained effects, bolts or touch effects, ( again speculation. )

Frost drains fatigue and slows down foes, use this against anyone that's fast or relies on damage, against an archer or two hander it'll limit the damage taken.
If following past TeS games were the lower the fatigue the less likely to hit, or deal full damage.

85 spells, I don't know how many are unique.
25 may just be different summons, 60 could be a mix of the same effects changed only in a small way ( if so I'll agree 100% with your opinion. )
Or we could have 50+ spells each completely original, with various ways to power them up.
Combine this with the perk system, I see it as vastly giving more options than the previous games.
I don't know if I'll like it, but I currently like that effort is going into how the magic system could be improved.

LOL yeah, I used to make that same spell for my Argonian in Morrowind. It was very cool, to say the very least.

They are 85 unique spell effects, not only 85 spells in the game. It was confirmed along time ago that they are spell effects and not spells.

Funniest spell in Morrowind levitate 1 on target, area effect in 30 second. Now this spell had two uses, 1 it was a very chap drain speed spell as levitate strength decided speed and 1 was around as fast as walking, bonus was that it was a non hostile spell so you could cast it on the guards who was chasing you and ignore innocent npc.
Now the fun factor was if you cast it on a group of hostiles, then levitate on yourself and run off a cliff, very effective against the boar riders in Bloodmoon. they had 50% reflect magic if I'm not mistaken, simply cast it multiple times, reflect is just nice.
Best of all you get flying pigs :intergalactic: . only thing who can beat it is then their levitate rimes out.

spell making may be unlimited but are you going to make unlimited spell combination no. no one is going to make 1000, I doubt anyone would break 100.
I like the system in Skyrim much more because it will unclutter the spells and it will allow you to make combinations on the spot and not have to go to a spellmaking alter to get a better one, so every time you get better at destruction you dont have to find an alter

And yet each way to cast them still achieves the same effect.

Same spells.




Besides the trap spells, which have a more unique use in their place as the only spells in the TES series so far that truly take effect AFTER they are cast (as opposed to immediately), its like I said above. The same spells. To count them as different you would also have to factor in on touch, on target, and on self from Morrowind. And hell, all of those AND Aura from Daggerfall if comparing to Daggerfall. In addition, your math completely discounted what I also pointed out earlier; You can have some 8+ spell effects on a SINGLE SPELL! Compare that to Skyrim where a spell only has 5 or so variations on itself and can't be combined with anything else (Besides what you cast with the other hand at the same time). In Skyrim, I might cast Fire and Weakness to Fire, but in Morrowind I could cast a single spell that had Fire, Lightning, Ice, Poison, Weakness to Fire, Weakness to Lightning, Weakness to Ice, and Weakness to Poison. Perhaps MORE. I could do that on touch, on target...or on self (haha), but like I already said, counting different casting types is pretty moot except for more interesting effects like the Trap effect, and for Daggerfall's Aura effect.


Yeah, haha. You could always make the levitate spell stronger (so it doesn't take as much time to do this), fly high into the air, and wait for the spell to end (just put it on an 8 second timer or something) and watch the enemies fall to their deaths.

Who cares if it reminds you of another game, if Skyrim is fun to play then I honestly couldn't give less of a [censored].

<-Disagrees.

Thanks I misread it to mean spells not spell effects.
If so then it shows the system is larger and more comprehensive than even Morrowinds 54 effects.

If they are the same spells, then so are those made by the spellmaking system, not seeing your point.



Wait? Changing touch, on target or on self was in Oblivion also, just so you know and how does that make the spell different but making your spell an aoe cone in front of you that can constantly channel causing constant damage from two sources is just the same spell? I don't see how you can get that from that, you get the same damage (or more possible) and the spells are actually different. All you get with the old system is a spell that looks the same and does the same damage as the new system would (or less) I'm not seeing the superiority of the old spellmaking system.



Indeed :celebration: