How melee combat works is limited by the color of the sky. Hey look I can make affirmative statements with no backing as well. The spell system is not or needs not be limited by spell creation. All that this does if it is true is take out spell creation. It adds nothing, you can pretend it does if you want, but it doesn't.

Make a poll option that says "Show me where it says spellmaking is out or stop [censored] rumors", please.

It's a good thing assuming we get more interesting spells and more balanced spell casting out of it. The magic system in previous games was awful, I think players are defending it mostly out of nostalgia and fear of change.

Unique effects and animations should be well worth the loss of spell making.

We were just adjusting the numbers of existing spells anyway, it's not like we really got to make anything fantastic, mostly just making up for premade spells being cost ineffective or abusing the mechanics.

Its not nostalgia LOL, its customization and allows different game-play/role-play styles. There really is no defending the removal of spell making. If I want snazzy magic animation I'll go play a Fable. Spell making set the ES games apart from lesser RPGs.

This. This over 8000 times. This till the cows come home.

So let's not have an open world because all those trees are nothing fantastic

Essentially we'd be losing an aspect of the game that contributed to freely creating a character that we wanted. Spells creation wasn't mundane, it was an aspect of freedom and customization for mages that greatly contributed to roleplaying.

I was able to custom tailor specific spells for each of my mages (and most of those spells were unique to those characters in terms of strength, effect, and magicka cost) and that made my characters more like actual characters rather than just a slag of pixels.

I'm afraid I don't understand your post. Having read it twice, I still don't understand what I think you are saying with it.

I will say that no matter what effects they add to depict spells, the notion of designing one's own ~regardless of appearance in game is still a strong draw to the player that fancies their PC as a being mage.

I don't really remember spell crafting that much (I don't think I've played Morrowind more than 40 minutes yet), but if it means that you can craft a spell that you choose the name, and theme, and cost and effects, then I'm all for it, and it sounds like a sad development if that option has been lost in TES.

Wait, you never played Morrowind Giz? What about Oblivion?

Completely and utterly unreasonable desire.




You don't get to choose the cost. It's not that exploitive. Still exploitive enough to be removed though.


Let me ask all of you "omg, where's mah TES" people a question. What makes you think that any game mechanic can be made to work with any other regardless of implementation? You sit in the comfort of your chair waiting to spend 60$ on 4 years of hard work and you think that entitles you speak as if you have any idea how the game mechanics of Skyrim are all working together as a whole. You spout out demands in a rush to have your voice heard as if Bethesda will suddenly take notice and halt game production after 85% of the development cycle is over just to change the final product for a couple hundred out of 5 million.


Just know in your mind and confirm it before you go to sleep tonight that absolutly nothing negative that is said about this game from now till release is going to be taken even remotely seriously by anyone at Bethesda. Nothing and I mean NOTHING anyone can say at this point will change the course of development for Skyrim. Period.

A clearer picture will present itself in time and when you see whether or not your deal breaker features are present, then you can speak the only language Bethesda is going to understand before launch, the language of money. Speak with your wallet and be heard.

By all means though keep telling Bethesda how you feel about their game 9 months before it's released. :shakehead:

RWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!! :gun:

It's not just better animations but more interesting game play because they'll be able to make individual spells more unique without worrying about the horrible balance issues they'd create if we could abuse the mechanic in some way with the spell making system. They'll be able to balance magic much better.

In Oblivion you could kill pretty much every mortal NPC with a single spell that made you completely invulnerable and never emptied your magicka. I know because I did, I played around a lot with the spell making system and while it was kind of fun a balanced and more varied magic system would be more fun than basically having god mode enabled.




Having the option to use the spell effect equipped in multiple ways on the fly will bring a lot more freedom than the spell making system ever did, and it will be more fun to play. How you play your character - what spells you specialize in and how you use them - should be more interesting for role playing than just being able to make your fireball do +20 damage and +10 yard radius over a preset spell. Having each element offer different secondary effect will actually make the spells functionally different instead of just being a different color.

We don't have all the details, but it all sounds way better than previous games.

I've owned Morrowind , Tribunal, and Bloodmoon for years, but I've only played the game for about 40 minutes, yet.


Ah... I was under the impression that you could shape the cost to cast by your choice of effects and damage.

I never bothered with spellmaking in Oblivion. In Morrowind on the other hand I used it to be able to travel across the countryside faster.

Also, spells kinda gathered up in a big annoying clunky list if you gathered to many of them so I never bothered with them to much.

How so? I got it in Morrowind and Oblivion.

You could do that but you couldn't just change the cost lol. Everything had a 'Base Cost' that was subjected to a formula based on magnitude, duration, etc. So you could make a 10 pt Fireball for 16 or so points of magicka or a 100 pt spell for 160. As for the actual problem as far as what spell effects to use:

Example
You want to make a Fire spell and a Damage Skill: Blade into one spell. Fireball can do Flamethrower, Projectile and Rune while DS:B can only do Rune or Projectile. Just make so any created spell can't use an effect unless all the spell effects in the spell can use it. So in this case Flamethrower would not be usable with this spell.

Also, seeing how that would make so all the spells would always use the same effects just choose the effects of the first one on the list. So in the example above if Fire Damage was first it would use the animations for Fire Damage, if DS:B was first it uses the animations for DS:B.

I think this way most people would be satisfied, as many would really just be ecstatic that they can make spells still lol.

EDIT: @Xarnac: No it had limits, either with casting magnitude caps or not having a high enough level or enough magicka to cast. Endless customization is unreasonable as is any absolute. Even if you could tweak it to anything and add as many spells as you want after a while the game wouldn't be able to process it and it would crash.

If you don't want OPed spells, then don't make them. If the system is truly gone then thats a fail. Like I said before, its essential to certain people and their role-plays. I don't really care what the new magic system can do, if you cant create spells. Also, I'm definitely not talking about some OPed fireball spells. I have certain builds that use a distinct set of skills that amounts to vastly unique game-play types. If spell creation is gone, all those builds are in the toilet. Not having spell creation limits game-play styles. The same drive to make an OPed spell is the same drive to turn the difficulty down all the way and one hit everything. If you want to do that, then go ahead. I'm not going to, but I'm no one to tell someone else how to play their single-player game. We all get a different kind on enjoyment from ES games and in the past its always catered to everyone. I don't want to lose options. Then again I think we might have spell creation, I doubt they would scrap it entirely.


With all the different variables and possibilities, yes the spells you could make were nearly endless. Has to be in the trillions. My games never crashed from it and I'm on a 360. I didnt make spells with 30 effects, but I made some interesting ones.

In Oblivion it was extremely stupid when you had to join mages guild to be able to do your own spells, so no custom spell making at all will be just perfect

Uh...changing the damage of the existing effects in Morrowind and Oblivion was redundant since you were able to buy different damages of the spell...just sayin'. :blink:

No spell making just means no more rewarding players for being imaginative, and that dear sirs and mams is a BAD thing in my humble opinion.

Single player games do not need to be balanced, they need to be FUN, and for the life of me I don't get this mentality where "balance" gets bandied around as an excuse to minimise the fun in a single player game.


I've loved alot of things about the TES games I have played over the last 17 years, but in all honestly, if they gut the magic system of its customisation it will quite posibly kill the series for me.
Cusomizable magic was the second key diferentiator TES had from other gaming series, and the first (open world play) is already coppied in dozens of games.
In business, when you loose the things that make your product unique, you lose your brand.

That was only true for people who did not have the mage tower DLC, and even without that, you could have added a mod to make spells outside the mages guild if you were really all but-hurt about it.

I actually have to agree with the topic, honestly, and have expressed a similar sentiment in a past thread on a similar subject. I think spell making is a good concept in theory, because it lets players create their own spells, rather than being confined to the default spells available in the game. The problem is that, as was said in the first post, spells in the Elder Scrolls series have been rather generic and boring, which I blame on Bethesda needing to create a spell system that makes making spells easy. Thus all spells can be narrowed down to a number of different effects, with variables for strength, duration, area of effect, and whether the spell is cast on the caster, on touch, or on target. The end result creates what sounds like a massive amount of different types of spells, but actually translates to supposedly "unique" spells that are actually just variations of the same spell with changes to how strong the spell is or how long it lasts. Which is true not just for custom spells, but for the default spells as well. By comparison, in games that don't have spell making, which is... every other RPG featuring a magic system I've ever played, spells can be much more varied, which, in a well designed magic system, means that each spell is distinctly different. Even spells with similar effects, like fire spells, may have very different effects. One might be a spell that shoots a fireball which explodes on target, which can be made in Morrowind or Oblivion, one might be a sort of "flamethrower" like spell that shoots a short range blast of flame that hurts any target in its range, and you might also have a defenseive spell that causes any enemy that attacks you in melee to take fire damage, just to use some common spells I've seen in a lot of different games. That's the kind of variety that was never possible in Morrowind or Oblivion. Where we just had fireball and slightly stronger fireball that makes a bigger explosion, and touch fire spell that does exactly what fireball does, except only at close range. In conclusion, spell making is one of those ideas that sounds like a great idea when you hear about it, but when I think about how spell making has probably limited the spell system in the Elder Scrolls, I can't say I feel it's worth it.

I think the reason Bethesda chose to remove spell making, if indeed they did, is to allow for more variety in spells. What other purpose could there be to removing it? And if it's removed for that reason, I won't mind, so long as it accomplishes the intended goal.

So many spell effects in Oblivion were stupid. and the rates of damage and length of time were also silly.

Especially illusion spells ... except charm - that one made sense. But, rage and pacification - ehh. Only thing more useless was the poisons. How about drain speed for 5 points - how'd that hold up as a useful spell?

You already had to be super rich/powerful to even make useful spells.

in other words - better to have fewer spells with more punch or flexibility (chargeable, touch or range), than many but often useless effects that can be combined for ho hum spells.

Besides modders will add them if they don't change their mind by then.

If the system is capable of creating bad things, fix the system, don't remove it.

One of my mages liked to add a small paralyse effect to her spells - that made her play very differently to the one who added large speed drains, or the one that focussed on long duration small damage spells, or so on. Removing that system and replacing it with 80 or so chargable spells just doesn't fly with me. It'll mean that every magic character plays the same, because there's no customisation in the system. Sure, I can choose different spells, but that makes it *more* complex to do multi-effect spells, and long-duration-small-damage spells look impossible to pull off. So no, this isn't nostalgia, this is me [censored]ing because all of my magic characters will be the same thing, with different spells. Why don't we remove all customisation so that bethesda can focus on making a really, really good lawful good knight simulator? It's the logical extreme of "This system is implemented better so it's ok to remove choice". If player choice means sacrificing fancy features like charging or combining (PROTIP: It doesn't, it just makes it more complex, but nothing that you couldn't handle with clever thinking), then I say keep player choice. It's what the series is known for.

I don't actually recall them confirming it was out, so untill then i really am not going to worry about it, though i would miss it a little, i do so enjoy making spells if not for anything more than simply giving them really dumb names lol

At the risk of this getting a little too meta, I think it's worth pointing out that balancing a single-player game is often important to making the game more fun... Different genre, but an unbalanced Starcraft would be nowhere near as much fun as it is - an important part of what makes it enjoyable is that so many strategies are viable.

Similarly, for a game like TES, it's not enjoyable if you feel like you are having to trade off immersiveness against game progression. Now, I don't think TES ever really forced you to do that, but it came close in that there were some perverse incentives: you could get very far in the game fairly quickly if you were willing to break immersiveness - like having your character sneak against a wall out of sight of the only NPC in the room, or constantly casting cheap spells, etc. etc. I think it's good for Bethesda to get rid of these, because they can leave this nagging feeling in the back of your mind - "come on, just give in, just a little". You might say: well, don't give in. Fair enough, but I don't see what you lose if Bethesda eliminate cheap exploits which break immersion. I think that's an aspect of "balance" worth striving for.

That said, I don't see the need to limit your characters to being less than godlike in their power. If you've built up enough skill and whatever, then you should be able to fly over cities and obliterate them. You've earned it.