I kind of agree with this--IF (and that's a big "if") they do actually implement it in such a way that spells really do matter and some may even be quest or major enemy rewards, similarly to, but not as rare as the shouts. It would be nice to be wondering when you're going to get a specific spell, or if it even exists and then get some random magical item or even the scroll that has such a spell. It was fun creating your own spells in the previous game, but unless you are some giant pillar of self-control, you typically ended up with overpowered and obnoxious spells, even if you just used the vanilla spell creating system. It was so easy to make one hit kill spells or spells that did massive area effect while also healing you over time X per target.

They never announced this either, but there may be a perk that allows you to combine two different spells together, and they already have all of those combinations mapped out. This would not work with custom spells (although it could if they wanted it to).

Yeah, let's have unlimited freedom ... this is always the best.
So give us god-mode, jetpack and machine guns in Skyrim!



I personally rather have good and balanced gameplay instead of Spellmaking.
Sure, they could have just done it better than in Oblivion, but they decided not to and invest their ressources somewhere else instead. Just think about this:
The amount of awsomeness Skyrim is loosing, because there's no really well made and balanced out spell making system, is added somewhere else in the game (and even in the magic system). So magic is just as awsome without it.
Just stop crying and be thankful/happy, that the magic system didn't got destroyed by SC like it was in Oblivion. Alone by removing that feature, magic already got more interesting and better.

The Rp that SC added might have been meaningless to you, but obviously not for others, including me. If rp'ing with just your mind without feedback from a game is meaningless, I don't believe there is any game that could have what you think true rp is, if there is one i would like to know.

I don't know about SC being limited, it certainty didn't feel limited to me, but maybe i'm just more imaginative than the average gamer, or the things i enjoyed about sc are just that different than what some might feel should be in a game, I really never thought of it as "how to be more effective in combat" i thought of it as "conform/shape spells more to your play style" an example: I had a character who i wanted to play on the hardest difficulty, i soon realized that i was dying very fast against normal encounters that were usually easy for me, (the ruins outside the sewers) so as soon as i was able to make my own spells, (i was playing a mage) i made spell for 3 fire damage for 45 seconds. One of my fondest memories of the game was just spamming that spell on every enemy i encountered while running away. Yes, it took a lot of time to kill stuff, but in the end i had made many low damage over time spells. I really enjoyed that play-through because it offered something different then what i was used to in Ob.

Again, i never really looked at the SC system and thought about exploits, it was usually how to fit the spells i had at my disposal suit my needs more. i recently took the time to make a drain speed spell. Though i did not notice the difference in my opponents speed till higher magnitudes, it helped with casting a few Dots and running away strategy that iv'e been having success with recently. As far as exploits existing, instead of taking it out, how bout we try to balance it? In oblivion IIRC sc worked like this, the more magnitude you have, the more the spell costs in terms of magicka. It seemed very linear, maybe it should have a magicka boost after a certain point? Example: 5 drain life- 5 magicka, 10 drain life- 10 magicka, 30 drain life - 45 magicka. not exactly a 1-1 ratio, but enough to balance it out. It would keep increasing to the point you were better off either using a weaker version, or draining all your magicka when you did use it, im not talking about an insta kill spell either, just a more powerful version of an existing spell.

I don't think we should take something out just because it was ab-usable in a past game (Alchemy). I really don't think it would be too hard to balance SC maybe the more paralyze you had the less other effects you could have. I don't think spell effectiveness scaling with level or being able to duel wield spells eliminates custom spells at all, how bout we assign a general number to a spell, like 1-10, being a more damaging spell, so it's power increased more with skill level, but so did the magicka cost. and it could be like that in all fields. Or just make it possible to delete spells so we had to make stronger versions every now and then, but i'm sure some people would find that tedious. I think the only thing that needs to scale with skill level is damage, not area of effect or duration. They could make it so crossing two different spell types had enough cons to balance out. example: a fireball custom spell with destroy armor on it would cost less than a fireball spell with frenzy on it because they are from separate schools.

Also, it seems to me that your saying i'm not going to get the full experience unless i play on a pc. I don't think Bethesda should be thinking of mods as a safety net that will catch all the players they can't satisfy. (I'm not saying that they are either) Skyrim should just have a more balance spell making, I honestly don't see what the problem is. Don't sit there and complain that it is spread sheety or imbalanced. Make it less imbalanced make it more immersive, if no one has ideas i will make some suggestions, i don't want a gimped SC or a Overly statistic anolysis one, i want all the options we had in oblivion and more. I understand something that can break the game will ruin someones overall view on the game, and honestly i don't want that. I've been thinking about this latey while listening to Weezer and i have a lot of ideas that i would love to share.

If i missed anything in your argument feel free to tell me and i will respond to you in a kind and polite way my good sir/mam.

I just want everything that made me fall in love with Ob and Mw and Df and Arena + more, i understand we all can't get what we want but i will still hope for myself and my fellow gamers :foodndrink:

It's nice to assume that they devoted their time and resources to "gameplay" elements, when you have nothing but "faith" to go off of. If anything, they spent most of the "content" time on the graphics.



That's a lot of text just to say "I am easily amused with spells that do the same effect, but I'll change them just enough so that I can truthfully say that they are "different" from something else, even if the end result isn't any different.".

That guy doing the "cheer up" thing reminded me of Todd for some reason.



Oh, ye of little faith. A PC gamer will baww enough about it to do something themselves. I would probably look at how Oblivion did it, where a new spell entry is created in the savegame plugin. You add in a nice GUI that lets you decide how strong the spell is, how long it lasts and how large of an area of effect. It then tells you how much magicka will be used per cast. Nothing is impossible when modding a TES game, just time-consuming.



You again....

Don't you remember our little talk yesterday? You agreed to bite the bullet when you bought a console instead of saving up for a gaming computer. Get over it.

It makes me a little sad that you think i feel that way, but i didn't make small changes, i made my own spells, and really if thats all you think spellmaking is, why can't me and the people who liked it have that? :sadvaultboy:

So you want to be able to clutter up your spell library with dozens of spells of different levels of power that all do the same thing, some of which cost more magicka than you have?

see, their could be restraints for this, not being able to create spells which cost more magicka than you have. Easy enough unless there's something i'm missing.

also, i like your avy.

I wouldn't mind an improved, or changed one - it is developers prerogative to tune and change the features according to needs of every specific game, but I object to it's complete removal.
As for exploits and "unbalancing" - Skyrim is a singe player game, it does not need balance, and if someone wants to exploit the system and finds it fun, so what? It's not like we are competing with anyone but ourselves.
I'm not a fan of combat for example, so not having to run around, hide behind the bolder and preform other "tactical moves" every five minutes of game play is a + for me. I don't want challenging combat, because I don't care for TES combat at all :shrug: There are games in which it is fun, like Assassin's Creed or The Witcher, but TES does not have enough depths in combat for it not to become annoying in a while, so having a "I win" button on demand is not that bad.
And since you have to "invent" our "win spells" it adds to role playing and verity for me

Because in a good TES game, such as Daggerfall and Morrowind, you could delete spells.
Not being able to name my own spells. Gah, Im going to miss that.

Eh, you know the people implementing potential gameplay features, and people working on graphics are probably two entirely different parts of the dev team, right? Like, they have to do something while they wait for artists to make textures and meshes and whatnot.

I'm sure we're going to have access to every spell effect anyway we'll just have to find them. Maybe even the ones we didn't have before, like Reflect Damage.

Whenever you make a destruction based spell, in almost all cases they were the same. They simply had a different particle effect. Summon spells ended up being the same no matter what you did and stat spells were similar. You basically had:

1. Direct damage explosion spells that were typically inefficient, but gave you more burst when you needed it. -- does not matter what element you used either.
2. Dot spells that were extremely slow, but ultra efficient and could kill just about anything in the game. -- does not matter what element you used either, although fire seemed to be the "cheapest".
3. Attribute modifiers that would allow you to gain more health, jump higher/run faster/hit harder or the inverse for the enemy.
4. Healing over time spells, or a heal that does a "decent" amount of health upfront and then added a regen like effect since healing large amounts of health at once would completely drain all of your magicka.
5. Magicka or Health transferring spells which in almost all cases would have to be small increments over an extended period of time.
6. Auxiliary spells such as bound armor, summoned creatures, open locks, invisibility, Burden, Featherweight etc.

Mixing those simply added to the cost and all it did was cut down on casting time and made it so you had to hit one or two less hotkeys. Adding area of effect attributes simply allowed you to hit multiple targets, but the cost skyrocketed as well. You can like that all you want. All I was really saying is that in the end it's nowhere near that varied and many of the spells people create really are "samey" despite some custom name. Usually they also ended up being broken and trivialized an already easy game.



It's possible, but not probable. Bethesda has been on the decline of the "content" aspect since Oblivion and is focusing more on the instant "wow factor". Considering their target audience is the teenager section anyway, graphics and "non intrusive gameplay" (aka ezmode) are what they are going for most likely. All I've seen so far from Skyrim have been major improvements to graphics while stripping away even more of the RPG elements to make it just an action game (very limited at that) where you traverse pretty mountains.

I don't know about every spell effect, like the staff of worms one.

I just can't help but think how awesome SC would be in skyrim with spells like chain lightning and frost rune.

Your thinking in terms of oblivion though (i still had lots of fun playing with all the things you mentioned though, whether you liked it or not :kiss: ), in skyrim i'm pretty sure there is no DOT thunder or frost spell, AOE frost would slow everything inside, it could be balanced by not being as slow as a single target spell would have been. Direct damage spells in skyrim are different from oblivion now.

Direct damage frost will slow, thunder will drain magicka, and fire will either have a DOT or a better magicka to damage ratio.

How bout every spell has a template, and every template will have different effects you could control? i could give examples.

How about it's three months to the day before the game comes out and they're not changing anything that fundamental now?

There's a good chance spell making will be in the game. I don't remember where, but there was an interview somewhere online where I remember Todd saying something like, "I know spell crafting really has that spread sheet aspect, which I know some people like, but we think that kind of takes the magic out of magic. But we think we've found a good way around that. So, it's something we're messing with." It's not definite by any means, but it sounds like there's a good chance.

DLC still makes me happy!! :celebration: te-he

it's still fun to think about ways it might have been added to skyrim, even though im pretty sure it isn't.

I gotta say I'm not liking the removal of a spell creation system (some of the most fun I had in Oblivion was using seriously complicated spells I made myself), but I understand why it's been removed. With all the new spells being created, it would be very hard to create a system that combines the effects in a proper way while also trying to prevent game-breaking spell combinations.

Imagine combining a fire spell with a chain lightning spell, so you have an electric ball of fire that jumps of surfaces, that sounds awesome doesn't it? But to try to create these spell combinations requires a huge number of custom animations and scripting. You're not just hurling a ball of X element at someone like in Oblivion, you're torching them with a flamethrower effect, laying ruins on the ground, or arching lightning off them. If the game featured such an intelligent spell creation system, you can be Bethesda would have shown some of it and just completely left everyone's jaws on the floor.

But hey, maybe they are creating something like that and haven't done enough to show it off, maybe it'll be in a DLC, we can only hope.

I guess I misunderstood what you were talking about then? Although I'm not sure how anyone could mistake your post for anything other than your adventures with spell crafting in Oblivion.

Rofl, i'm just saying that, just becuase you found SC to be a burden,lack-luster,boring,spreadsheety-imbalanced-or just nor right for the game, there's no reason it can't be changed for skyrim.

About what you said about my post, what is so wrong with the way i'm looking at SC in Ob, i'm trying to show you my interactions iv'e had with it as a player, that is what the game is about right?

The same thing can be said for many of the problems that were in Oblivion though. Some of which are getting addressed, while many seem to have gone through such insignificant changes that they may as well have not even bothered.

With the Skyrim system of "hold down the button for a more powerful effect" there is no need for the mana limit, that will be automatic when used. The only customisation possible in Skyrim would be to combine effects, perhaps in differing proportions (50% fire, 30% frost, 20% soul trap). Then, with the combined effects hold the the button for longer for more power. This would make it auto limited.

Given that (and I am guessing a little here) spells are limited by mana and holding down the button to ramp up power it will already be possible to have very powerful spells. So I think why they haven't included SC is because of the animations. Lightning can go round corners and leap from one thing to another, should fire be able to? Possibly, it does leap from building to building IRL. Poison? Probably not. And some combinations could be OP, such as weakness to fire and fire, although nothing stopping someone firing one and then the other in quick succession with dual weilding...

My opinion is that it probably isn't much of a loss given how the new magic system works, but something like what you have suggested where spells are visually mixed in proportions could work. Choose spell, hold down button longer for larger proportion, different effects fill a sphere hovering in front of you with the proportion of power, when it's full press both fire buttons to create, colours mix to give the spell's colour and there we have it. Auto name to effects and %s with option to change name. That way people who don't want to do anything stay entirely in the game, those who want to have named spells can do that.

Acrobatics and athletics are gone, i can still run and jump, i can even sprint now, why cant we have some SC too?

They could make it so certain spells can do certain things and not others, every time you make a spell, you base it off one you know and change some parameters or add some things too it.

Do not be afraid ;()