And what would that be? Draining-spells and runes are not more complex, they are just different. Each of those 'complex' spells will come in 4-5 forms from Apprentice to Master level, and that's it. Magic is reduced to the complexity of weapons.


Certainly there are technical limitations on how to convey the dynamics of spellmaking. However in the new system, you cast everything like you 'normally would' as well, from apprentice to master level. Without different effects to put together.

chain lightening, sprays, glyphs, pbao's, placed aoe's, charge-up, who knows what else.

a step up from touch/target blob of diff color.

AoE's? Well...

I agree on the need to keep arguing the same thing needs to stop. This is a new game with a new feel. You can't argue how past games work for how Skyrim will work, which makes everything you say invalid and sound petty. If Bethesda, the makers of the game think it should be gone, they probably have a much better reason than you, the person who has never touched the game. I enjoyed spell making in previous games, however I also like the new direction. Part of the fun for being a warrior for me is always looking to loot the next best sword or piece of armor, but you miss out on that with mages. Looting spells fixes this for me.

I'd also like to add that you people seem to be consistently ignoring the vast improvements to the magic system that seem to be present in Skyrim.

It was good in Morrowind.

I sort of wish that they would have removed sneaking from thieves or blocking from warriors just so I could say I was glad that an extremely important and valuable part of their class that many people enjoyed was gone. Maybe some people would think twice about rejoicing about losing mechanics if they realized it was as important to us as sneaking is to a thief or blocking is to a warrior.

The fact now is that mages have zero way of customizing their spell set now. You either buy the spell or randomly find it in a tome. One of those is idiotic and goes against the idea that Bethesda was trying to make mages more arcane feeling (buying them from Bubba Jim in Ye' Olde Majik Shoppe), and the other is based on random chance to give you a tome.

So what do you think about Invisible borders in Oblivion?
I see thats cool place, lets go there wait but there is invisible wall thats told you cannot move there.


Strange but I can do thats before in Daggerfall and Morrowind,
OK from other side thats cool thing dragons pursuit you just go into city, because mystical dragons cannot fly over walls.

Maybe low draw distance at console, few tweaks in your ini and few mods for better LODs and you can feel wind of high skies, true Kynareth blessing.

Well what stops from implement them correctly?

In such cases It doesn't matter if we have claymores or not if they do exactly the same as warhammers...

Spellmaking as high level perk will awesome option to complete removal of such feature.
Think about Epic spells from D&D.

^^^ Is... is that from Wishbringer the text adventure?? Nvm, it speaks volumes when modders can do a better job at enhancing magic when Todd & co. simply aren't bothering. See Supreme Magicka.

I'm COMPLETELY happy with the new system. The new spells are awesome, and we just saw a small part of then.

But they are still much more dynamic. Want to check quickly behind a door to see if an enemy is in the room, detect life drain, use it for a second, hardly uses any magicka. Need it to last longer to check around an area? Hold it. Need a larger detect radius? Put in both hands. Three uses covered in one spell, which you can control in real time.

What'll be more interesting is how they will combo together. Use a frost rune in front of you to slow a sprinting warrior, switch to dual frost drain to slow him to a crawl and drain his stamina (so he can't sprint to close the gap), then finish him with a dual fire/lightning blast. The favouriting system will make it easy to set up regularly used combinations. Rather than lump everything into one spell, switch between them logically, way more control.

We've still yet to see all effects too. The description of destruction mentions ice spikes, which I'll assume is the charge version of frost. What happens when this is combined in two-hands? Does it fire off a large spike, or a large cluster of them? Then there's the AOE from self spell seen in the trailer, that was used with both hands, can they be used single handed? If so you could put fire in one hand, demoralize in the other, then pull both at the same time to set a group who's mobbing you on fire and make them run away.

Just because we can't lump effects into one, doesn't mean there is no potential for spell set-ups and combinations in this new system. Considering most can be controlled how strong they are (charge by holding down the trigger for example) you have much greater freedom. I could charge up fireball to hit a group with AOE for example, or I could spam tap it to pepper a single target with a load of blasts to make sure he stays on fire, taking more damage over time.

Most people say it makes the game too easy if you have spell making, like in TESIV. That's only if you choose to exploit it that way and if you're character is high enough in skill. It's the same argument with fast-travel. I don't exploit things like when roleplaying. It's mostly that people can't resist stacking spells and making their character super powerful. And I agree, it is tempting. I used to play like that all the time in Daggerfall. I was a powergamer. And even when I first started TESIII I powergamed. But then I realized it was a lot more fun to deliberately make things a challenge and to make my character handicapped in critical areas. But to each their own.

Not having levitation technically limits the developer from implementing things.

For all the talk of "verticality" or whatever with Skyrim's mountainous terrain, very little emphasis is put on the verticality of Morrowind's dungeons. The daedric shrine in Mournehold's dwemer ruin would have never been possible without the ability for the player to levitate.

See this stuff you're mentioning here? That's half implementing things. Excluding open cities is an exclusion not an inclusion. Light shafts and pits in Dungeons are an inclusion, but the ability to navigate through them is an exclusion. That's not a fully realized idea, and it';s only been made partially possible through the exclusion of other systems.

You might have a point if they added a complex sword fighting mechanic, but it is going to be the same as oblivion just with slightly better animations. Hey look I play flail away with my sharp pointy object, so much was added to my flailing away animations that we can't have variety. :unsure2:

I'm a bit sad that it's out, why would anyone be glad? Just because it was overpowered in Oblivion doesn't mean it must be now, and the feature is entirely optional. They is no point in the game where it forces you into making a spell, nor using it to make an overpowered spell.
On a side note, in Fallout: New Vegas, there was Spears, Throwing Spears, Throwing Axes, etc...

Well with all the PVP in the game the balance of the archetypes is very important. And now that mages are weaker those with leet skills will lower themselves to playing a mage for a change because now there might be a challenge.

They could have been a mage before and just turn the difficulty up, or stick to pre-made spells.
And there is zero PvP in the game.

Indeed you can by self establish limits for your power, I for example combine magicka drain overtime and levitation in Morrowind, invisibility and silence, chameleon and drain speed.
OBSE add more flexibility to magic in Oblivion mods like http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=25844 thats add more chaos and law to Arcane arts, http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=24099 thats make illusion more balanced, http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=38960 thats establish scripted limits to magnitude as well as various other improvements and tweaks help much with saving my enjoyment from falling into power gaming abyss, and I still was able to express my creativity and expand my roleplaying experience with custom spells, what was one of classical features of TES since Arena.

I've come to realize that the elimination of spellmaking is all of a piece with many of the other things they're doing - broadly, what they're doing with this game is designing it so that inferior tactics are viable and superior tactics are gimped.

Look at how many people complain about magic in Oblivion because they got something like Enemies Explode (or worse, Fingers of the Mountain), but couldn't cast it enough times (or at all). They thought that the way to use magic effectively was to get the most powerful, magicka-wasteful-but-big-and-showy spell possible and just blast away with it, and then when that didn't work, they thought that was some sort of failure on the part of the game.

So Skyrim is being designed to accomodate those poor tactics, but in order to ensure that those who use good tactics don't end up overpowered, the keys to those good tactics are being gimped, or even eliminated entirely.

Since I've come to that conclusion (which was originally inspired by a thread on archery, but is rooted more in the things I've observed about two-handed weapons), I've seen more and more of it. Magic is just another example of the same thing, and I have no doubt that there are more.

I think a lot of people seem to agree that levitation is a bad thing. At least in the way it used to be. But it could be implemented better so we had the possibility at great sacrifice, where using it for mountain traversal and pure flying would be so inconvenient nobody would use it like that. Like my broomstick/thruster idea, constant drain taking character weight into account. At 100 skill it would be able to remove 100lbs from your weight, and if your weight is less would allow like a 5 second thrust in the direction you viewed. If you was 90lbs, you only had 10lbs overpower, and would be forced to point pretty much directly up. At 50lbs you had 50lbs overpower and now you can move faster horizontally. The amount of overpower could also be the limit in height you was able to reach in that small amount of time, when pointing straight up. So it's basically a feather/buoyancy spell with possibility to cancel gravitation at high powers. Level design would have to be aware of this, but should be easy enough to prevent exploits where you didn't want them, by ensuring long enough distance making points too far to reach even at best conditions possible.

Terror, I have noticed that all of your threads are highly subjective. "Cheating" would be using glitches or other coding tricks to overwhelm the game. If the NPCs and the game were an actual living entity capable of having its feelings hurt, then yes, that would be cheating. As it stands, no one is being cheated by your character having vast powers.

Making use, however effective, of Anything already made available to you in the game is not cheating.

Exploit, the other word you keep throwing around, is, in this context, nothing more than a nasty, deragatory way of saying that someone has used the tools given to them to the best possible advantage in an efficient and meaningful way.

Overpowered, your third favourite term, is subjective bull manure. One person's "overpowered" is another persons "sufficient power." And still a third person might deem the same capacities underpowered. That word has no value beyond biased demagoguery. You really should stop trying to tell other people what the categorical definition of a fun game is, and subsequently telling them what they do and do not/ should and should not enjoy in a game. Most people can decide for themselves what kind of game experience they enjoy, and you are no more entitled to dictate what their gameplay should be like than they are entitled to dictate yours. An extraordinarily (but still appropriately Lore and game fitting) character is not going to be and should not be easily harmed, let alone defeated, by every brigand, upstart necromancer, Goblin chieftan and rabid dog. You like it that a level 10 player stands almost no chance against some ancient lich, or legendary gladiator champion? Well, when you become a master Archmage as poweful as an ancient lich, or a master warrior with all the skill and prowess of a legendary champion, why should every low to mid-level joker in the game be able to fight you to a standstill? And what good is being highly skilled or having phenomenal powers if you either cannot put them to full use, or if they don't actually serve their purpose and allow you any advantages over anything?

Why should the game be made to deny another player an optional feature they may greatly enjoy, just to give you the comfort of knowing that the feature doesn't exist? If you didn't like it, you didn't have to use it. You CERTAINLY did not have to use it to gain the most extreme possible advantages offered by it. It is about choice. I have NEVER played as a Breton. I like them in theory, both as a mixed race and for their advantageous stats, but I preffered to play full Elves and I did. Once I choose a role, based on my personal tastes and interests, the perks of other options became moot. Only powergamers base all their decisions on what arrangement is going to make them as close to all powerful as the game will allow for. And if that is how they want to play, then more power to them. But they should have the grace not to go complaining about how powerful the game allowed them to be, like a bunch of damned ingrates, when maximizing their power to extremes was part of their original goal anyway. If you were in no way obligated to use the feature in the first place, and could get through your game well enough without ever touching it (which could be done, and which many players have done), then your insistence upon the need for its removal seems like little more than a sadistic desire to rain on other people's parades.

Also, it is worth noting that for all your glee about how the so called "overpowered" spellmaking feature is removed, you seem to have overlooked the fact that some of the same abilities you deemed "overpowered" will STILL be availalbe with the current Skyrim magic system. Perhaps there will be fewer of them available, but plenty such abilities will still be present.

Read my last post. This new system is far from 'inferior tactics', almost the opposite in a way.

If something in the game is flawed then it's a bad game design. I'll give an example, Attributes in Oblivion were horrible, they interfered too much with leveling, and if you didn't power level the game got harder. Now from what your saying you would want that type of system in Skyrim because you liked it, even though you know that it's a mess and would cause the same issues that occured in the last game to occur again. That also is the same thing with SpellMaking, it causes a lot of problems because people exploit the system whether it's something harmless as a a second spell or something more dangerous, it's going to happen. Sure people can limit themselves but why should they have too. Fallout 3 had that exact same problem no matter how much I held myself back my character is still going to get broken.

I don't know if it's confimed but I think it's likely that spells gain power as you advance in level now. That, and perk would modify the magic too.

So this mean various part of a spell could increase seperatly with spell making? Also adjusting the slider only to later have the game do that aswell...

More imprtantly, lightning spells bounce of surfaces, fire spells puts surroundings on fire, light spells stucks on surfaces and remains shining. Would adding firedamage to the light spell mean it becaomes a shining ball that when walked into burns you? Do a fireball spell have duration anymore? Probably not, but a frenzy on target does. Would adding those together men you could only choose duration for one of them even if techicly it isnt a fireball spell but a frenzy spell with fire damage. You can't combine, "Touch, target and slef" in the same way anymore, you couldnt make a Frenzy spell that activates as you press the button combined with a healing spell that you're suposed to hold the button for an effect. Even if they made that possible would you get both animations? First a frenzy spell on target then the healing animation? But what if we throw in more spell effects?

(Strage example, Flamethrower + shield on self 1 sec + Chain Lightning + Frost Rune + Healing per sec u hold down)

Okey fine you say, you can't combine every different sort of effect, Maybe you got to choose what kind of spell it has to be, "thrower" "Charge" "rune" but then again... what kind of spell effect you also aply to the spell you are creating will have an effect on it so choose a lightning effect first to get the benefit of chain lightning to all other effects.

I don't know, stuff like this makes me think a spellmaking system would be weird unless changed dramaticly from oblivion, and they have prioritized other things in the game then trying to create a spell making system that makes sense.

I mentioned something like that in another thread before. Good post, it does highlight the complexity of spell making with the new system (and the rest of the game, like perks).

Yeah but it's a bit cluttered, I'm sure there is a better way of saying it.

As a side note, I don't think something being overpowered necicarily means you should remove it from a game like this. It's another thing if say you started with a fireball that did 100 damage for 1 magica. Spellmaking in Oblivion can make very powerfull spells but you don't have to make powerfull spells or even use it. Even if you use it, you decide how powerfull it should be etc. They could atleast fix what is overpowered instead of using it as an excuse to remove it compleatly.

At last, I don't think Bethesda purposly "removed" spellmaking, it's more of a matter that they couldn't implement it in a good way to the magic system they allready had created.

And lastly I don't get why anyone would be happy that it's gone. If you didn't like how it could make overpowered spells then wouldnt it been better if they removed ability to make overpowered spells but keeping it? I get people who like the new changes and think the way they are outweights the lack of spellmaking, I'm one of those.