Which had the best magic graphics
Oblivion: short and sweet more like throwing a fire ball.
Morrowind: lots of sparkles longer spells.
( DF and AR included for fairness )

I like the magic effects from morroind. Theyre a bit more flashy. Rather than just the flying sprite used in Oblivion. Hell not even Quake 3 uses sprites for the bullets.

Depends on the spells. The shield spells were a bit distracting in Morrowind, with that purple bubble around you. But I really like Morrowind's area effect shock spell. Still, many were a bit underwhelming, or did not clearly show what kind of spell it was. On the plus side, all of those issues can be fixed with mods.

I definitely thought that obviously Oblivions spells had more polygons, but Morrowinds spells looked better. More flashy, more interesting looking, I loved the AoE poison effect in Morrowind. Just cool.

I think they need to overhaul the entire magic effects system. Smaller spells obviously should have smaller effects and the larger AoE Spells should be massive exploisions and it shouldnt take more then one to kill anything.

I much prefer Morrowind's magic effects. I also liked having to ready my hands for casting.

I would like to see spell effects like the abilitys used in Mass Effect. E.G. swirling balls of fire that track enemys and fly over obsticles.

Seriously? Morrowind's magic graphics were over the top, and the animations were slow. Oblivion did magic just right.

Morrowind

I guess Morrowind's were a little better than Daggerfall's, and Oblivion's were a little better than Morrowind's. Not a lot of improvement overall through.

I liked Oblivion's more. Especially the enchantment shader (that subtle glow around enchanted items, rather than the saran-wrap look of Morrowind).

I chose Oblivion, because I like the graphics better, as in how they look. The subtleness was nice.

But, a spell should take some time to cast. I didn't like the insta-fireballs of Oblivion. If a gun takes a while to load and an arrow takes a while to notch, then a spell should take a while to cast. It's only fair.

When you couple insta-cast with regenerating magicka, you get spells that are wayyy to easy to master.

I think, ideally, it should be Oblivion's graphics, Morrowind's casting time, and Daggerfalls magicka pool.

I voted Morrowind.

In MW the spells can fail, and they may take a little longer to cast. That's why I liked it, it was a bit more realistic than oblivion's "cast a spell, never fail" stuff.

They all svcked.

The effects really need a revamp. The majority of effects in Oblivion were clouds of dense smoke/light with different colors, such as healing spells being a cloud of bluish white light, and illusion spells being a cloud of greenish white light. A lot of the effect sounds were also that damn annoying sparkle noise.

As for Morrowing, the majority of effects were that weird double sided line of light that first flew out from your body, then back into it, and the effects just changed the color of that (purple for alteration, green for illusion, etc), and a lot of them had either that really loud swirling "sssweeesssww" noise (like for restoration) or that wobbling low "wbbblllll" noise (for alteration or illusion).

I'd definitely appreciate better effects if we could get them, but I'd rather we get better SPELLS.

Morrowind's effects were more varied and spectacular to me, whereas most of Oblivion's were just simple glowing auras and smoke puffs. I didn't care much for the stock sounds used in Morrowind's spellcasting, though - especially that sssweeesw that Orzorn mentioned.

Arena had some pretty spectacular spell effects for its time, such as jets of fire arcing towards the center of the screen and lashing out at your enemies. Of course, there's a major difference between sprite and particle-based effects, so I wouldn't necessarily expect them to be as cool on modern tech.

I prefer the destruction effect from the Redguard comic. Every other spell should cast a similar light or be totally transparent, just bending light a bit, so you can follow the spell on screen.

I also believe elemental magic needs to locate a short pier and take a long walk.

Yep. The visuals svcked.

Magic graphics, dude. Graphics.

That's gonna be kind of hard, Oblivion obviously had the most pretty, but Morrowind had that fireball spell with a second ball spinning around the center ball. So I guess Morrowinds was a little more varied.

Are you talking about the green energy beam the Dunmer cast in the slave camp? While we're on that topic, I wish you could do http://www.imperial-library.info/content/page-17-0 to spellcasters ingame!

Hell yes.

Well, In TES2 you could see all sorts of stuff going on when you walked into a Mages Guild. Dude reading a levitating book, wizard with a pointy hat having some magic projectiles whirl around his head, gleaming-eyed daedra summoner, magic smiths hammering something and sparkles flying around.

The graphics for your own spells pretty much svcked in each of the game though, so I'd vote for TES2 just for the great atmosphere those animated NPC sprites give.

Cyrus is such a badass.

I liked the magic graphics and sound better in Oblivion, but as others have said, everything except for damage spells was just a cloud that hung over the target. The lightning spells are pretty much what tipped the scale, I think they look pretty cool.

I have to agree completely on this. The spell graphics from the Elder Scrolls series have always been rather underwhelming, it's one of the reasons why I really don't think the games do magic justice. I'd like to see something a little more impressive, more importantly though, I want actual VARIETY in spell effects. As of now, while we get differences between on touch, on target, and on self spells, there's little variety beyond that, sure, different spell effects might look slightly different, but they really feel like they just took the same effect and slightly changed the overall look of the particles involved, well I suppose that at least in Oblivion, destruction magic had you shooting a ball of fire, a bolt of lightning, or a big cloud of frozen air, but beyond that, the effects all felt far too generic. If you play some other fantasy RPGs, you'll notice that there can be a fair variety both in how spells look and how they behave, we get none of that in the Elder Scrolls. In part, I think the culprit may be custom spells, in order to make it easy to create new spells, Bethesda made the spells themselves fairly simple, resulting in better spells really feeling like pretty much the same spell, just with different stats, this also makes creating your own spells not very satisfying as you can't create a spell that will actually feel unique. Honestly, if it would give Bethesda more freedom to get creative with spell effects, I'd be pleased if custom spells dissappeared from the series forever.