I hope spell making is in a game,i love to create spells and combine different effects.(especially elemental)
Without spell making magic will be just like in Gothic or Dragon Age. :thumbsdown:

I think this is interesting because everyone who wants the spell making to remain seems to assume that it for the sake of dumbing down, making the game more 'casual' or removing depth. When you see the interview with Todd to me it came across as the exact opposite! They are changing the spells themselves to give them more depth variety and complexity. (Which lets face it they needed). As a result of this it is making programming for spell making difficult. Due to complex contradictions between spells, as someone said early there are conflicts between spells such as fire and ice. But there is also conflicts between there effects, such as casting a fire spell that does small damage to a large area for say 5 secs and a shock that does damages on target for one sec. How do you comfortably marry these together? what is the benefit of casting both a one new spell over just casting each separately? There is a lot to work out and so many possible combinations that its hard to implement. Todd even said they want spell making in, that they are trying to find a way to make it work! So this idea that spell making (maybe!) not being in the game is to appeal to casual gamers or dumb down and remove depth and complexity is just plain wrong!

Combat isn't supposed to be about self control, and it's not at all the same as not pressing a clear "I win" button - it's many different options that can add up to "I win" when combined in various ways, but there are no set rules on what is exploiting and what isn't, and you have to use some of them unless you want to lose. So you're just deciding how much you want to gimp your character against the helpless NPCs, and there's no real threat involved in combat which makes it dull.

Weakness spells in Oblivion were multiplicative? Holy smokes... I never knew. That's insane... and I never built a weakness to spell...

Personally I want to feel powerful at higher levels, but I guess that's something that spoils the fun for some people.

http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Weakness_to_Fire

Back when ob came out I said likely the next elder scrolls wouldnt have a spell maker.

Reasons are simple..

charm... do you need a spell maker if charm simply works at your level or around it and lasts longer the longer you keep the button pushed?

shield.. if a shield spell simply works by being set to one of your hands like a shield does.. what is left for a spell maker to do?

summons.. if summons last till they die again nothing left to spell make.

if a fire spell grows in power as you skill grows and your level grows... and there are several versions of it what is left to make?

If built in spells didnt svck......

But it goes beyond that... what if in making a spell they start scripting things and adding bits that simply arnt in any way compatable to a spell maker?

Or what if they decide to just dump the spell maker and make spells far better and more interesting simply because thats what they want to try and do this time unlike doing the same bleeping thing again and agaun and again..

It was fun in erena it was fun in daggerfall.. its not fun anymore so frankly I dont care if its gone as long as what comes out is FUN.

You just changed around a bunch of variables, not really changing the spell. That's not what we are going to miss about spell creation. Its about adding different effects together for unique game-play or role-play purposes. Other than the Destruction spells, I don't really see that many spells that need extravagant animations/effects. A lot of spells are just AI changes or stat modifiers. Do we need some awesome Soul Trap or Night Eye animation? If spell effect negate each other like fire and Ice, then just don't let the player put those effects together.

It's MAGICAL fire and MAGICAL frost. If we already agree that a character can control the elements and spawn/direct it wherever he/she chooses, why would we not be able to mix?

Who says it's magical fire and frost?

Maybe it's physical fire and frost that we conjure into existence.
Or maybe we're magically increasing or decreasing temperatures, so doing both at the same time would just cancel it out anyway!

:)

Why not? I obviously worked for Spears, Medium Armor, Crossbows, and a lot of other obviously "broken" features that apparently "nobody wanted".

I'd rather see spellmaking as an "on the fly" system, where you learn the base spell type and can adjust a set of sliders for strength, duration, and area. The sliders would be heavily limited by your skill, so at low levels, you'd only be able to edge them up a little bit above rock bottom. Better, if it allowed you to "push" them about 20% above that limit, with a CHANCE OF FAILURE, or play it safe by keeping them within your abilities, I'd be thrilled. That way, if you want to walk the cutting edge, you could try it, but it still wouldn't be "over the top" and game-breaking. If you don't want to take the risk, then "don't use it", which actually IS a viable option in this case.

This is a absolute disappointment when making a new game no features from the previous games should be removed only expanded on. Some of you may think it is good to have this feature removed, no it is not. Spell making no matter how bad it may have been in Oblivion was a extremely fun feature that I missed greatly while playing Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas. I know Fallout is a different game but a game with mutations should have had some kind of magic in it. Anyway back on to Skyrim, I can see that Skyrim is going to become the GTA IV of the TES series. Its going to be loved by many of you and the critics but hardcoe TES fans like my self are going to hate it. That last statement is just a prediction which I do not want to come true but it looks like Bethesda is going to make it happen. What are they going to do next? Announce that the game is changing its name to Fallout Middle Earth?

I was hoping for a 'spell creation' type system in the new Fallouts through a weapon building system. I Agreed, though there's really no way to spin it, not having spell creation is a bad thing.

Maybe your point about how the spells are essentially all the same are why I never really used spells. Let me pin someone with Bigby's Hand and hurl some Magic Missles at them

Dunno, the whole designer spel lthing just never appealed to me :shrug:

So, if the spells are more unique, not so much in their animations/effect, but in their core (flying knives a la a Blade Barrier) then it could be nice.

Yeah I was also expecting Fallout 3 to have magic. It makes alot of sense since there is radiation. I was thinking that your character would mutate from the radiation and get magic like abilities.

I could live without attributes, but I feel like a good chunk of TES has died with the loss of spell making. I know this will be a focus of the modding community.

They were planning to remove attributes? What? Ow god I hope they don't use the S.P.E.C.I.A.L system. Please Bethesda if you see this please do not put anything Fallout related into Skyrim besides perks.

And this is exactly why we need spell creation, so the people that didnt use it, can if they want. Its about adding play styles not taking them away. If you want to make a bunch of warrior characters, or your the type that only makes one and does everything, ah salute, but you should have the option to delve deeper like we always have before. Obviously the people that didnt use magic wont care about spell creation and are not getting everything ES games have to offer. Though thats OK, but you should still have that option.

Spell making may still be in! " can you combine more than one spell? “We're not talking about that,” Howard says with a smile. “We're not sure. We'd like to; it'd be awesome.”
Why is everyone insisting on saying it isn't? This is all unconfirmed! We may as well be talking about how its a travesty that they're taking out Khajiit or the Argonian's I haven't seen any pictures of them yet!

I think when making a new game if you think that something needs to be removed then you need to be fired. Seriously ditch graphics focus on gameplay and features. If they want graphics make the game a PC and PS3 exclusive so then they can make the game as graphic intensive as they want and not have to remove features to be able to fit in new ones. Yes I blame everything on the 360 and I always have since reading about GTA IV having to shrink down the map size to fit the game on a 360 DVD.

I actually kind of have to agree with this.

In TES, summoned creatures can be soultrapped. Also, Azura's Star is a daedric artifact. Its abilities are already set. It's bad enough that BGS likes to bend TES over with each new installment, but if they're going to start changing the lore to cover up their bad ideas and laziness, that's just going to piss off even more people. Having Enchant as a skill is just gimping it. It should stick to the altars and cost money so that powerful enchantments cost LOTS of money as it was in Morrowind. That way it's balanced without limiting your enchantments and making enchantments weak and restricted. Also, that would allow scrolls to be made without the problems already discussed because a powerful scroll would cost amounts of money that would take a long time to accumulate.

Daggerfall is probably one of the most non-linear story driven game out there. Morrowind was a little more linear, a little more restricted, and that's not good, but fortunately it was still an amazing game. Oblivion was a LOT more restricted and it felt shallow and robotic, and you were given a LOT less freedom (locked doors that require keys, skills with a cap-off at 100, where even skill fortifications had no effect upon raising a skill above 100, loss of a lot of cool spells, a gimped magic and enchanting system, less armor slots, etc...). It was more balanced, but balance should not be achieved at the cost of fun, at the cost of gameplay, and at the cost of many of the things that make the game what it has been. Balance should also not be restrictive. If something is easy to exploit, the answer isn't to remove it but to make it a challenge to achieve.

As I said before, if making a scroll that does a bajillion damage is overpowering, then make it cost so much money that you'd have to play dozens of hours to accumulate it, that it would be a focus and that you would have to go through a lot of the conventional, standard gameplay to get there. That way we can still have overpowered enchantments and spells, but we have them as a reward for a lot of effort and time and thought to get there.

Under that philosophy, all the people who completely lack self discipline (I'm looking at you people who say "I want the game to be balanced, and I hate stuff that's overpowered because then I use them when things get difficult. I'd rather not use them and I'd rather do things in a way that's more challenging", which is perhaps one of the stupidest things I've ever heard) would be less tempted to go for the same things a lot of us enjoy, not to mention achieving the level where you can make your character that powerful would put you through a lot of that gameplay those people prefer anyway.

But this is only me speaking in ideals. gamesas is obviously going to continue to limit and restrict and gimp every new game they make until eventually TES games will be developed by Square-Enix and BGS will just publish them.

Summed up, change is bad!!!
Bethesda have enough money and a big enough team to make the elder scrolls games what they are and on the scale that they are because they are accessible to the masses and make enough money to make reinvestment make sense. Either you want Beth to make changes and try and improve or your happy for things to just stay as they are, in which case it sounds as though you have Morrowind, just play that! Everyone on this forum is SO pessimistic! Give the new stuff a chance! And let not assume we know why they are making the decisions they are! they doing this to dumb down! make more balanced! To appeal to the 'casuals'! Because they're money grabbers! And can we also stop deciding things are facts! this on spell making - "can you combine more than one spell? “We're not talking about that,” Howard says with a smile. “We're not sure. We'd like to; it'd be awesome.” And I have no idea where the Azura's star stuff comes from!

Pity: it was fun to create our own spells with funny names (Hadouken - 33 fire frost and shock damage 33 x 3 secs) or useful ones like bound an entire armor for a bit of time, with high conjuration.

Did you notice that you called it Bigby's Hand spell and not grasping hand, or crushing hand or clenched fist or whatever. Why is that, oh because a wizard named Bigby invented them. A lot of wizard players want that ability, the ability to make their own spell and name it. It is a big part of role playing the game to them.

Here is my take on why there may not be "spellmaking," at least in the way we are thinking of it.

When making spells at one of the altars, you can change things like duration, magnitude, and radius. However, if I remember correctly, with the new spell system, there are spells that act as a flamethrower, others that can be charged up (used in both hands to make them more powerful), and the possibility of putting a spell in each hand. Thus, thinking of the flamethrower spell, you are basically deciding the DURATION right there. Same with charging it up, you are deciding the MAGNITUDE right on the spot. And the customization of using a spell in each hand allows you to basically add different effects. Thus, the way I see it, spellmaking has become more dynamic. Instead of pre-determining the stats of your spell, you decide them whenever you use the spells. There may be other parts of the system that we do not know yet, but optimistically, spellmaking is not gone, it has just changed from statically creating spells to dynamically creating them.