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.

Complex spell effects are a bogus excuse. Just give such effects to the element that does the most damage in the current spell, or let the player choose which effect applies to the spell when mixing them.

I'm hoping it's a mistranslation. I am in favor of almost everything I've heard, but I'll be extremely disappointed if there is no spell crafting. Perhaps disappointed enough to not bother making a spell caster as I planned to.

Complex spell effects was in reference to not allowing spell combining. As in, if you have a Ice spell which slows down the targets movement speed, and a Lightning spell which drains magicka, you wouldn't have a new spell effect like draining magicka + slowing the regeneration of that magicka. It would require Bethesda to try to predict all possible spell combos in order to program them into the game. I think what Todd said is that the engine can't handle creating those spell effects on it's own.

Okay that makes sense. For spell making though it's not a good excuse.

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.

Because flamethrowers and fire traps that explode when walked on are soooooooo laaaaaaaaaaaaame.

Please, Skyrim's magic system is going to be through the roof in terms of pure "bad assery", and as people have pointed out, the custom magic system was mainly used to abuse the game's mechanics and create stupidly powerful and spammable spells.

Please, Skyrim's magic system is going to be through the roof in terms of pure "bad assery", and as people have pointed out, the custom magic system was mainly used to abuse the game's mechanics and create stupidly powerful and spammable spells.

Because flamethrowers and fire traps that explode when walked on are soooooooo laaaaaaaaaaaaame.

Please, Skyrim's magic system is going to be through the roof in terms of pure "bad assery", and as people have pointed out, the custom magic system was mainly used to abuse the game's mechanics and create stupidly powerful and spammable spells.

The person who translated the italian article said that the article said this

"
-The article says that you will not be able to combine and create new spells. yeah, this really svcks, I hope it's some kind of mistake..."

This doesnt mean no spell making, this just means most likely that the frost and lightning perk for example wont combine to create a stunted magicka regen or something like that.

Can we stop the complaining now?

Does anybody else want to make spells especially to name your spell?

I'm really going to miss my Thunderpunch

Hold on here. You realize you can have two spells at the same time right? It doesn't matter if you can't cast them at the same time.

Right hand, cast summon Skeleton.
1second later
Left hand, cast invisibility.

OR.

Right hand, cast ice bolt at that charging warrior to slow him down
Then
Left hand, cast lightning to damage that mages magicka.

Oh no! I'm being surrounded by a group of bandits.
Holds right hand attack to cast flamethrower creating a circle of fire around me
Left hand casts invisibility
Fire dies down, I sneak away. The bandits are seriously confused.

Skyrim's magic is going to be awesome.

Can we stop the complaining now?