Say what? I've never had a use for any of those spells, and IMO casting them on an opponent is simply dragging the encounter out needlessly. I really hope that magic combat is simplified, there were far too many pointless spells IMO.

There are the same number of magic skills in the game, except mysticism, that has been divided amonsgt other skills. How can you say that there won't be any commands, frenzy, drains, absorbs, fortifies, and weaknesses? Hell, I would bet anyone as in all those are included, excluding the ones that were related to fortify or decrease attibutes.



Weird, I haven't heard anything of "new and exciting ways to blow stuff up". I heard new and exciting ways to use magic, which is different. And button mashing? Really? I even heard in one preview how Todd was fighting against a bandit, both with shields up, looking for an opening! If this game turns out a button masher, I'll eat my iron helmet.



You can literally influence the surroundings with your spells, and even, EVEN if destruction was the only school available, which is not, all the different ways to use, say, fire spells, would make me more than possible to puppet my enemy how I wanted.

Seriously, what's with all the pessimism in this forum? I have my fears as well, but from that to make complete rants about mechanism we don't even know how will work?

We still have to see how "combining" spells will work but if we can really mix and match spell then the system will be much more complex than oblivion's

Spoken like someone who never took the joy in robbing the Morrowind Umbra of his ability to kill the average low-level character in less than three hits. Not very scary when he's reduced to the speed and strength of a mudcrab.

That has NOT been confirmed in the LEAST.

No, taking what information we DO have confirmed, Skyrim's magic system will be far more in depth than any of the previous games because you can cast the same spell in multiple different ways. Now, I do agree I would not like it if spell making was not in. I would be very, very disappointed. Lets hope that doesn't happen.

In the demo that he gave to in Utah, he used both the detect life and frenzy spell on the bandits at the entrance of the cave.

I think the reason that they are focusing on the fighting and destruction is that they are more interesting to the general populace. Todd's job is to get as many people as possible to be paying attention to Skyrim. The small details that interest those who love the entire series (myself included in that) aren't needed right now. Those who love the series already know about Skyrim. Right now it is about getting those who have not played TES for a while, or never played it. If you want to get things noticed; dragons, swords, and explosions are good at that.

Spell crafting was one of the things i was looking forward to the most and i hoped for more detail with it like fire would have temperature, flame coloure and shock wave/explosive damage.

If its has gone thene i really need a very large variaty of destructive tipes: Lightning, fire, ice, water, wind, earth, plasmid, spiritual, fysical, weather control and teleckinetics.

also i would like it if the spell evolves with your level (higher level more powerfull spells as long as you can controll the omount of damage you want from it), take lightning for eg. you start with a zap and a short range bolt at level 1 and whene you reach level 50 you can summon a 1terawatt megabolt that falls from the sky deatomising your enemy (outdoors only for that one).

I acknowledge that you disagree with my opinion, and I'm certain you're not alone in disagreeing.


This is exactly what I hope is indeed the case. I merely sought to communicate that, for the moment, I'm a bit disconcerted by the emphasis on the blowing stuff up part of it all, and hope that that emphasis is only a result of the way in which it's being presented, and not a result of the same emphasis existing in the game. I would hope it's the former, but I have at least some measure of fear that it's the latter. And only time will tell.

...Just give me spell creation.

if you look at the trailer there a shot where the hand have a big orange magic orb between theme (1:40), that could be haw spells will be combined, visually at least.

Whoa Whoa... I have read a lot about Skyrim...well, all of the Information thats out there and this is the first time I have seen anything about spell creation not featuring in the game...Now I'm pissed, although I do see how redundant it would now be, due to the fact of the visual effect of some of the destruction spells on the environment. :down:

oblivion had one of the worst magic systems of any game i have ever played. it would be pretty hard for them to make it even worse, so im thinking that skyrims will be significantly better. they already prevent you from spamming spells while using both a shield and a weapon which is a good start. dragon shouts are scaled so that the more powerful ones have longer cool down times etc. add to that the effects like shock and freezing enemies like dark messiah did and im sold.

as for spell creation im fine for removing that since it was super easy to abuse things like charm spells. now nonmodders wont be able to do that anymore.

How can it be more complex? My pure mage in Oblivion has lots of spells for different use,
even the basic elemental damage is complex beasts with weaknesses in area effect, the anti magic one also contains silence but does less damage.
How about weakness to magic+ weakness to poison + turn undead for poison attack on liches who have reflect magic, it is suposed to be followed by a poisioned dagger then they turn and run, and yes, it has a light effect who times out just before the other effects so I know then I have to recast. Add a group of mind control spell, it fun to cast command creature on a goblin warlord and watch him kill the other goblins. Casting it on the gnarls in the big battle against the order priests and watch them kill all of them was more fun

The magic trap effect is the one thing I find nice about the new system. All the others can be done better with spell crafting. Now add the screw ups we know will happen, things who sneaks past the play testing like oblivion levelling did Non of the buyable mind control spells work on enemies past level 18, imagine something like this and no spellmaking, no you will not notice until frenzy, command and turn spells stop affect enemies in the level 20 dungeon.
Now without spell making you are stuck with the inbuilt effects.
In short I does not expect pure mage to be playable the same way as warriors or archers in Skyrim without mods, I think it will be more like Morrowind, very frustrating. I could be wrong and hope so.

The complexity that you speak of only existed while standing in front of the spellmaking altar. The actual combat you explain is still equip awesome spell for this situation and left click. You will still be able to do all of those things, but now it will take a few spells. Now you will be able to hit them with ice first (to slow them down), prepare a fire rune on the ground, hit them with a fire weakness spell, have them walk onto the rune, and watch them burn. To me, that is a lot more fun than equipping one spell that lowers their speed, makes them weak to fire, and burns them.

Something interesting you may not have known. You can cast those level 25 Illusion spells on creatures above said "magnitude level." You just have to be at 100% spell effectiveness. Although I agree that we need spell creation just to add depth, varaity, RP purposes and customization.

Most of the ideas presented about how the oblivion system is "complex" also make magic boring in that game. Drain speed, str, burden all at once so that NO melee enemy can ever touch you... boring. Drain and damage magicka + intelligence so magic users can NEVER cast spells at you (or just cast a long duration silence)... boring. I would actually use magic in combat if there was some actual strategy involved other than "completely neutering the enemy so I can just stand there and spam 2 buttons". Oblivion's system lead to button mashing... Do not forget the ever favorite 100% chameleon or combine 3 second invisibility with every spell. Ya... I know I find godmode type games boring, but that is why I never got far with magic characters. If magic = godmode in the game then mages should have turned everyone else into slaves by the time Skyrim takes place in the game world. Perhaps I just have a different view on such matters.

Can't wait to paralyze bandits with one hand and absorb their health with the other hand.

With great power comes great responsibility. Dont want to be "OPed", dont make OPed spells. I never did.

I know about the level 25 limit and the need for 100% efficiency, I also have a mod who set it to 100%. I'm talking about the level of the pre made spells you can buy in shops, none of them affect creature past level 18, has not checked turn undead as it's conjugation.

I guess Skyrim will not have exactly this issue, however I will promise you that Skyrim will have other flaws in the magic system. Note none of this is usually patched, now it's not a big issue for me as I play on PC I'm more concerned about the overall combat system.

Spell creation is a make or break feature for me. Ill probably only rent Skyrim if its not in.

Mmmm... see.... this is the "button-mashing" part of it I mentioned (and granted, that's probably not the most accurate phrase to communicate it, and I apologize to those who were misled by my poorly-chosen words).

I've never been a big fan of fighting games, for instance, because I just have a hard time remembering the button combinations and repeating them correctly in the heat of the moment. I really don't want to see that sort of mechanism as a part of spellcasting in Skyrim.

To use your example - this is how it's likely that it will play out for me -

Hit them with the ice first (to slow them down)
Intend to prepare a fire rune on the ground, and accidentally push the wrong key, and instead equip a healing spell.
Panic as the opponent moves closer and the slowing effect of the ice spell is already wearing off.
Jump to the fire weakness spell and get it off just in the nick of time.
Realize that I skipped right over creating the rune on the ground, so now the slowing effect is gone and the fire weakness is running, but there's no fire damage to take advantage of it.
Die.

For myself, I'd much rather prepare a spell that does all of those things (more or less), aim, click once, then just watch it unfold on its own.

In part, it goes back to the way I look at RPGs - I'm not in the game. I'm the guy who's pushing keys to move around the person who's in the game. The things that person does depend on his/her skills - not mine. If s/he's a tremendously powerful mage, that's reflected by the way that s/he handles magic in the game - not by my facility with pressing keys in the correct order at the correct times.

And in part, honestly, it's just that I sort of svck at the pressing keys in the correct order at the correct time part of it. In an RPG though, in my opinion, that shouldn't matter. That's part of the point, at least to me.

Even with their list-based complexity, I never thought the magic of Morrowind or Oblivion was very good. Looking at it from a design perspective, it just never played well, but Skyrim seems to be fixing that issue, and making spellcasters a bit more interesting to play. What it may have lost in statistical complexity, it gained in depth of feel. Instead of "What" spell you cast, it's "How" you cast it, and I'm really looking forward to that. In a perfect world, we would have both the statistical depth of Morrowind, and the nuanced depth that Skyrim is going for, but really, what good is depth if an overwhelmingly vast majority of players (And developers included) didn't actually find it fun or interesting to exploit that depth?

I'm fairly indifferent on the matter of spell creation. If it's in the game, and implemented well, then I'll use it. However, if there is already a good range of spells pre-built I suspect I'll do fine without it. Skyrim's magic system seems to be coming along just nicely to me and I'm sure it will be a massive improvement over Oblivions's, with or without spell making.

True and you have a point, I'm interesting in how the dual spell effect system works out. However it will still be two discrete spells and don't expect any fancy interaction, but you would have the possibility to cast often, paralyze and damage sounds promising, however it's also something you could easy make in Oblivion paralyze one second and fire damage for three seconds but it might be easier to come up with in a hard fight than in front of a spell altar.


Or adjust with the difficulty slider that was that I did, enemies hit harder so they have a decent chance of killing me, I needed silence as I had 100% weakness to magic and pretty high difficulty. Mages was a serious danger even at high level. High difficulty gave the enemies lots of health so I needed weakness effect to do more damage.

True. Ive also bound "cursed" items on my self to help balance. Like a 'Weakness to Magic' ring on a Breton for example. This required duping and enchanting though and was obviously easier to do with a more magic oriented character.