(Aesthetic spell effects, spell aesthetic animations, or what have you.)

This'll be the second time I've referenced Dark Messiah in a topic, but that game did a lot of things right.

So, I'm hoping Bethesda gave mages nice animations for preparing and casting spells. For an example from Dark Messiah, take the lightning bolt spell from the multiplayer. When you're passive with it selected, there's distortion around your hands, like from a gas stove, and you can see sparks. When you begin to cast it, you're hands spread apart as the bolt forms...just watch this video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_sx4UIGfZuk

It goes a long way in making you feel like a master of the elements.

I would love this to be implemented! :thumbsup:

Hand animations :turned:

Spell aesttetic effects on the hands seems better...

Not when it's spelled wrong.

But you're right, I'm not good at describing things.

Different casting animations are cool; In Oblivion there were different animations for cast on self, cast on touch, cast on target. But effects like that really wow you, it's great attention to detail.

Bethesda said that they had a lot of inspiration from Bioshock when making the spell system. I think it'd be fair to expect something along the lines of plasmids from that series.

Keep in mind that effects must be kept to one hand per effect to uphold the dual wield equipping system. If you have the same spell equipped to both hands, which they've said is possible, then it's anybody's guess how that would look. I'm assuming not much different.

I hadn't heard that, but that just made my night. I loved the plasmid system in both Bioshock games.

sounds good to me

This might make you happy
Arcane studios, developers of Dark messiah are now apart of BGS and are rumored to be working on skyrim as well

Source: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arkane_Studios

I think it would be good to have a variety of hand animations for the same spell, it does not have to be 100, but even just 5 animations per type of spell would could be used at random when the spell is cast. This would make spell casting less monotonous.

Definitely. I remember years ago I used to read the Marvel Doc Strange stories, and his hands were always twisted into some weird shape to manipulate the magic.