Of course you would have to change things, I've been saying the whole time that the spell making system would need to be rewritten! But you certainly don't need to change anything else. The point is that the new spell system and some sort of spell editor are absolutely not mutually exclusive. You very well could design such a system that wouldn't make the game unstable.

The biggest problem though, what would happen if you combine a custom spell?

How would you charge a custom spell?

Man I just don't get why bethesda doesn't just add guns killstreaks and multiplayer already I just want it to be like if world of warcraft and call of duty had a baby it would be epic leets.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8Hi_NCYNTM&feature=related

While spell creation hasn't been confirmed out yet, it doesnt look good.

I didn't call anyone lazy. I didn't supply a motivation for their choices, I only pointed out a pattern in their decision making. When faced with a particular system that is proving troublesome, they too often choose to blow it away rather than fix it.

They may be doing so because they're lazy, but I don't think so. I really think it's a matter of focus. Anyway as I said earlier in a clarification, I definitely don't think Bethesda has been lazy with their development of Skyrim. I only mean to say that they have taken the easy path on certain things that I consider important enough to be worked on and balanced like crazy.

You could make it svck, though.

The way they have it set up, it sounds like each and every spell effect has a very specific role and purpose, and if you allow people to arbitrarily combine spell effects it could unbalance the game very easily, since you could create spells that have all the advantages of several effects and almost none of their disadvantages. I've seen mods try and balance the old spellmaking system. It never works. It was inherently broken. The only real way to balance it would be to heavily restrict what you can do with it, and when it gets to that point you wonder why the hell it's in the game at all.

Beyond that, spellmaking necessitates more generic magic. I personally very much prefer a magic system that is balanced and has well-defined tactical depth that allows enemies to defend against and respond to my spells as well as I do to theirs to one where I can do absolutely anything (and probably have it all look the same) for the same reason that I don't want to be able to dual-wield two-handed weapons and shoot arrows out of my eyeballs. Freedom's great and all but there can be such a thing as too much. I wasn't free to join House Hlaalu when I was already Arch-Magister of House Telvanni, after all. Choice is nothing without consequence. and a lack of restrictions means a lack of consequences.

I also have never seen anyone actually say what kind of spells they'd like to make in the new system, despite asking numerous times.

And anyone who has ever worked on implementing a large scale project knows you can't just implement everything. Decisions have to be made, do we spend time on this or do we spend time on that? This doesn't work the way we want, do we have resources to make it work the way we do want or do we get rid of it or do we do something else entirely?

Spell making in particular would require a complete overhaul from the way it worked before to work with the new spell casting mechanics. My guess is they simply don't have resources to make it work the way they want, and who knows they may be working on it at this very moment. We don't know any of the technical or resource constraints that may or may not make any particular issue a no go.

You can't just "make everything work". That's completely unrealistic when you are working with budgets and timelines. You can feel free to agree or disagree with the reasons things were either added/removed/changed, but saying the devs simply "take the easy way out" every time they had a decision to make is incredibly short sighted.

Spell creation is make or break for me. Removing it removes limitless possobilities and RP potential.

Obviously those are tough design challenges, and look, I don't know enough about the spell casting system to give a really good solution to them, but to act like they're insurmountable is just nonsense.

I consider a spell making system worth the challenge, and if I were on Bethesda's team I would love to tackle it.

They've cut 8 attributes and added 280 perks...... yeah that is lazy and I am very annoyed :facepalm:

And you are aware they took 2 years developing the dragons design and their AI to the level they are at, by given them free roaming, being able to use the land and structures to rest on etc..... that doesn't sound to lazy to me

Yeah, cause Todd said that it must be true! Who needs free thought and self anolyzing when you can just be told what to think. Coming from someone that hates a huge amount of free will, my god...

I agree with everything except the merging of cuirass and greaves. I think the logic behind it is perfectly fine, and I don't think it will take anything away from the game, seeing as I hardly ever mixed and matched armor in Oblivion anyway.

Which possibilities are those? What spells do you want to make in Skyrim that you can't?

Everyone keeps getting up in arms about levitation, mark and recall, and yes, those were cool spells to have. However, Bethesda has a point - they can potentially screw up a game if you aren't careful, even if used appropriately.

Lets take a totally different example. If you ever played Ultima Underworld II: Labyrinth of Worlds, you probably remember the Ethereal Void. (The equivalent to Oblivion, I suppose) Well, if you toss back a certain plant (the ones with white flowers) and go to sleep, you end up "lucid dreaming" in the Ethereal Void. It's just like going there, only you can fly, and you can't die (though you do seem to take damage)

That is interesting enough, but once you add in moonstones, it gets more interesting. If you go to sleep after eating the flower, while holding a moonstone in your hand, you can toss the moonstone into the void. Normally, this would be kind of dumb, but every once in a while, you actually end up at the Shrine of Spirituality, which is in a cage. (important in the main Ultima series, it was used to imprison the Time Lord)

MUCH later in the game, you are supposed to defeat the Ethereal void, end up here, and snag the blackrock gem. Well, here you are dreaming of the same place, only you have a moonstone in your hand, can't really die, and can fly. Toss the stone through the bars, wake up, then cast gatespell on the other one (which you should have on the floor), and bam - you just bypassed the entire Ethereal Void. If you do this enough, you can even get the experience of having gone there for real, but with little real risk - and the advantage of waking up if you take too much damage instead of dying.

I would argue that this was on the hairy edge of being an exploit, or a cheat, except that the game already had the flowers that would let you travel to the Void in your sleep, and using moonstones to get past these sorts of obstacles was used elsewhere. Did the game designers imagine you would do this? Who knows, but it was a neat stunt.

So, I can see where Bethesda is coming from on this one.

All the possobilities. Spell creation>putting a spell effect on both hands and feet for that matter. Dont want to make OPed spells, dont make OPed spells. Dont like spell creation, which you dont, then dont use it. It takes way less self control to turn the difficulty all the way down than it does to make a bunch of OPed spells.

ding ding ding ladies and gentalmen we have a winner .....I totaly agree

I never said they should do it all the time, but I do consider these issues important enough to tackle. When player freedom is at stake, the extra effort it worth it. I never said they do it every time. I said they do it too often, and mentioned a few specific examples.


Another post claims that spell making requires more generic magic. No it doesn't. Not even a little bit. It is the job of a good game developer to generalize complex natural phenomena. I know for a fact that I could generalize Skyrim's magic system enough to make it work with a spell creation system. The point is, it's worth it, it can be done, and it should be done.

All of these posts are telling me that a given solution should not be implemented because of all the problems it would have. All I'm trying to say is that a solution exists to any problem you can point out. And Bethesda unquestionably has the expertise to find them.

That sounds like smart thinking on the part of the player. An exploit is taking advantage of the game's shortcomings in things like AI or bugs like item duplication. Utilizing tools in ways that make sense within the context of the universe, potentially allowing you to bypass challenges, is called being cunning.

More games need to lay the framework of a world where players can experiment and figure out different ways of doing things that the developers may not have foreseen or intended. That sort of player agency is to be encouraged not removed. Anything that results in less purely scripted solutions is a good thing.

[immature link removed]

So you don't have to make it more generic, but you can make it more generic so that it will work. Thanks for clearing that up.



So you can't think of any possibilities, you're just angry on principle.

And again, spell "creation" was never anything more than stacking effects on top of one another, most of which had zero interaction with any other effect. You can still do that, you know, you're just limited to two effects at once now.

Like I said, if you disagree with the why, that's fine. Want to debate that feature X is more important than feature Y, have at it. Simply making a laundry list and saying "they took the easy way out" isn't very constructive though, not to mention a bit rude.

And we can no longer max all our skills like in Morrowind or Oblivion , we are tied to 50 perks...

Welcome to next gen gaming! :sadvaultboy:

These threads are the definition of "can't see the forest for the trees"

So next gen gaming has better design? Beautiful.

Excellent.