Oh noes, I can't create my Charm 100 pts for 1 sec spell anymore

Honestly, I never used Spellmaking for anything other than getting the more effective variants of the spells I already had without the hassle of seeking out a mage who sells an equivalent. And when I started using magic mods like LAME or Midas Magic, that practice stopped altogether because the alternatives provided by those mods were simply better (and in the case of LAME, also better balanced) than Spellmaking. Without the feature of creating your own spells, a good distribution of spell vendors and a good variety of buyable spells will be more important in the vanilla game, so for me this sounds like a good thing.

Indeed, if they even added a hint of creativity that Midas Magic had with his spells all of the dissenting opinions about creating your own spells would be silenced. The trade off of more useful and creative magic that is dynamically used in real time battles would far outweigh making custom spells from, in my opinion, a much less complex spell system.

From the sounds of it, it isnt nessesary. Like i said in another thread about this, is sounds like spell making will be redundant. From my understanding the casting system will work like this

you buy/find spell effects, not actual spells. Once you know the effect, the damage done is based upon your skill lvl and the way you cast it.

So for example: take a fire spell, say your @ lvl 25 destruction. You cast a fire spell and it does 20 pts of dmg. IF you channel it, or build up the spell, it will do 20 pts / second. if you raise your lvl to 25 you will get X amount more damage. So say if you want 60 dmg @ lvl 25 you have to charge it for 3 seconds, and it will drain X amount of magicka. @ a higher lvl it will take less time to get to 60 dmg and less magicka.

This doesnt even go into touch, AoE, and the other spell effects.

Im not worried, i have faith in bethseda, they have never let me down before.

Actually, I think the inability to combine different spells may be good evidence that it's not a mistranslation. If we can't combine spell effects for technical reasons, how are we going to create custom spells that combine spell effects? And if we can't do that, then spellmaking would be limited to making stronger spells with larger areas of effects and longer durations, which can be done more simply by letting us buy spells (making spells costs money too so effectively it's the same,) and/or letting our spells naturally become more powerful by leveling up the associated school.

So the more I think about it, my opinion leans toward not feeling as though I'm actually losing anything. Effectively, at least. (From a roleplaying point of view, I may be though. Yet I can still "learn" new spells, which was how I perceived "making" spells in the first place. How does one "make" a spell? Scry words on a scroll? To me it was always learning it even though it called it spellmaking.)

That would indeed be god awful. One of the best things about the games is the ability to create "unique" and powerful spells. If that goes. . . psshhhh. Let's hope not.

It'd be nice to know how this works with spells which don't do direct damage... For instance, with the Frenzy spell we've heard about, how will we be able to alter its duration, magnitude, and area-of-effect? Perhaps magnitude will just increase passively as you increase your Illusion skill. Fair enough. And maybe the Frenzy duration will increase the longer you "charge" the spell... but then how do we increase the area-of-effect? Or is it just restricted to a single creature at a time? Or, conversely, perhaps "charging" the spell increases its area-of-effect, but it's always got a fixed duration?

But maybe Bethesda have found a neat way to customise spells along more than one dimension, so that you can independently control for area-of-effect and duration as you cast the spell. I hope so.

But that's the whole point, spells like these are just finding flaws with the current system. They just use the games coded weaknesses. I never used to use spells like this because the game becomes broken.

I'm willing to let Beth breath new life into the magic, while I was originally not hoping for drastic change, I'm beginning to welcome it now. I trust them, they have brought us consistently good games till now!

Midas magic was a great mod. Most of its spells (if not all) were D&D spells. Seeing how I've lived it with D&D fans, I think I can safely predict that even if they took that route there would be lots of dissenting opinions, only this time about balance. :biggrin:

Midas magic was fun, but incredibly broken and limited by the fact magic effects was hardcoded in oblivion. Modders had to use the scripted magic effect for virtually everything. People could do a better job of magic mods if the construction set actually allowed people to mod magic this time around.

300 dmg 'on touch' spell FTW.

ZAP

Ahhhh

Denied, spellmaking only allow values up to 100 unless you modded the ui. :tongue:

You could simply use 3 different spell effects.

Exactly. It would use up all my mana reserves, but I had high enough int for it to refill in a few seconds. Great for a stealth character as you coudl sneak up behind anyone and fry thier ass.

Honestly this isn't a very big loss for most players.

I played through Oblivion and partly through Morrowind as a pure mage and I never once crafted a spell. I never felt the incline to create a spell. Especially since we get special spells that are not as magicka hungry and are more powerful as their than their custom created counterpart.

The only people I see being pissed off about this is the very deep traditional mage players, and even then, when it comes to magic creation, they brought back enchanting right? That's something to work on.

As someone mentioned earlier, you can simply add in the spell effects through the CK. This means 'technical limitations' as a reason are bunkum. If we can create different spells through the CK then why wouldn't we be able to add them in the game? Either way it doesn't matter to me since I will just add them through the CK if you can't make them in game and make them in game if you can.

Wouldn't it be nice to not have to fix a Beth game though? Relying on mods isn't good.
Not that mods aren't good...

Agreed. Too many people seem to want to rely on mods. I've only used mods that extend game play or extend the game world. Not ones that were supposed to "fix" something.

Not necessarily. Just because we can create a custom spell doesn't mean we can create one with multiple spell effects in combination. That's what Todd said they would like to implement but as of his last interview, they cannot, for technical reasons. And if all there is to adjust are area of effect, duration, and magnitude, and the game does that on its own as we level the associated magic school (or just lets us buy spells with those attributes,) then I can see them feeling spell creation would be redundant.

It is not a big loss for me, but that is more because the only magic I ever used in both Morrowind and Oblivion was Restoration spells. But I can see why people want spell creation to be in.

It's all a matter of opinion. Just because someone made a game doesn't mean you have to like it in its entirety. Mod-ability lets a lot of people enjoy your game in their own way. I am of the opinion that Oblivion's leveling system was god awful and Oblivion XP does a nice job of fixing it.

It would be peachy if Skyrim's magic system was easily modded because, even if it is a rock solid system, many people could be extremely creative with new content that would add longevity to the game.

Besides, just because if spellmaking is not in the main game of Skyrim does not mean that they could not add it back in as downloadable content later. They have done it before for things that they were not completely finished with before game release, so they can do it again.

From your link -


Yeah, doesn't sound imbalanced...

Also you could make improved versions of spells like this with weakness included, and/or absorb health in there to make it spammable on reflect enemies without killing yourself.

It was broken. Honestly, without NPC AIs built to handle it, invisibility was hands down the most overpowered ability in pretty much any game I've ever played.

I never said anyone had the like the game in the entirety. What I am saying is that we shouldn't just rely on the Mod community for things. What if the Mod community does and equally [censored] job on something you wanted "fixed". Well then you're doomed either way. Also, most other developers don't have readily available kits to mod their games. So it puts more pressure on the devs to make a system that satisfies the most people. That pressure is a good thing. I don't want Bethesda to take the attitude of "we can ship this out [censored] because the mod community will fix it if its wrong". And none of us should have that mentality either.

When I play games, I don't consider anything "broken" unless it's something like a glitch that the developers didn't intend to have in the game. With that POV on it, nothing ever needs to "fixed". Just altered to fit my preferences. But just because I personally don't like it doesn't make it broken.

So in conclusion (haven't used that line since high school english), it's not broken just because you don't like it.

I'm very disappointed if this is true

How will this work anyway? Are there going to be spells that are leveled in addition to spells we can purchse? If so how are they going to make sure that those spells that are leveled http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Leveled_Spells#Finger_of_the_Mountain so that they're pointless to use?

The basic spells that were for sale in Oblivion were often terrible, cost too much magicka to cost (and even then most of the time they weren't that effective against enemies), and often just plain didn't have the effects I wanted to add with an attack spell.

How much magicka will we have? Cost effective spells that were made during spell making were often the most important spells you could have as most of the spells that were for purchase were often too much magicka for even altmer and bretons.

It just gets down to the point that I just don't trust Bethesda to be making my spells for me. They just don't seem to do a good job at it.

Removing spell making would destroy the pure mage class totally, yes mages was powerful in Oblivion but not more than twice melee or archers. With only boring default spells it would be incredibly nerfed and also boring to play, remember all the hours I have used testing different spells in Oblivion and Morrowind.
No Oblivion spell making was not broken with the possible exception of weakness to magic stacked, however if you played as a pure mage you simply increased difficulty.
Most people who did advanced spell making in Oblivion was hardcoe roleplayers who used lost of time studying the game.
Also you was able to make better spells as you levelled up, this is radically different than being able to get the best equipment at low level, ruining the fun of the game.

Morrowind magic was broken, far to slow to play as a pure mage unless you used the fortify intelligence potion exploit.
So it looks like magic will be broken in Skyrim to, can live with it but see it as a major [censored]up, probably larger than level scaling in Oblivion as it's easy to fix.