Good Mage Game

I need your help and ideas , Sup Forums. How would you implement a good spellcasting system in a video game? Lately, spellcasting systems have stagnated. You either have the classical dnd system with toolbar and hotkeys -which I don't hate. Or utterly simplistic action style casting.

Consoles are largely to blame for that, of course, you can't have an in depth system with dozens of spells for a console controller.

So, how would you implement a good magic system? What would you want from it? What good examples do you have of it?

And would it carry over in consoles, or stay on the PC?

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>no replies
This is why fighterfags are winning.

Spellcasting systems, I'm not sure. I can't really think of anything that was really engaging. At most Magicka and Gauntlet, the latter in particular. They made you memorize combos/incantations, which required some amount of practice and focus. While Magicka had a greater variety of spells, sometimes it would end up in a clusterfuck of "find one spell and use it forever", also known as "qfqfsaa". Gauntlet was interesting because each spell had a short cooldown, which forced you to mix them up, but it also had a much shorter spell list than Magicka.

I would say avoid the "draw sigils" system. They get old real fast, I find, and aren't much fun either.
There's another mage game in the making I've seen floating around - Fictorum or so. What it seems to do is it lets you alter particular attributes of spells as you cast them, so you can enlargen area of effect, quicken projectile speed, increase the amount of projectiles fired, cause chain reactions, and so on.

Underrail has an extremely fun yet simple psi casting system which makes casters very hilarious and unique to use. Their direct DPS ain't as high as the one of physical classes but their utility is insane and they can, for example, barricade enemies in a room while raping them with their own shadows.

>This is why fighterfags are winning.
Good, fighting games are better than whatever genre you're talking about

You have no idea what you're even talking about you idiot

heretic

No, I have no idea what YOU'RE talking about, there's a difference

Point is fighting games > whatever genre you're talking about

Do you even Dragon's Dogma OP?

youtu.be/7SrIFyfHTpU

What's the source of your pic? Looks good

Dragon's Dogma magic system is an atrocity, it's just a small collection of extremely boring direct spells with no unique or fun utility. Flashy, but extremely boring. Pure blue DD classes are the most boring to play as.

dark messiah had some neat ideas. it's always fun when a spell has contextual uses. like an ice spell freezing an enemy, but shoot it at the ground to make a slick patch, or at the ceiling to make falling icicle traps

spell mixing is something rarely used too. like a flame spell mixed with an earth spell to make a fireball

Welp, then you have no taste sir in the action genre.

Go and play some Avernum or Pillars of Eternity, or find a group to play some DnD, because that seems more your speed..

Like with archery there just isn't good games for using magic. They can never make it interesting. Best case is magic in Souls games, which is essentially just bright blue arrows and a bunch of pointless gimmick spells.

I think I got it from /tg/

Maybe if you didnt have a little bitchfit about consoles in the middle of your arguement, you would of got replies splurg. PC games have never had good magic that mechanics either.

I really want to see a magic system in the style of Okami's celestial brush techniques. Minimum of direct damage spells, maximum of utility with some sort of a unique way of interacting with your surroundings. High-level spells should allow you to override entire aspects of reality like doing a local gravitational shift or messing with probabilities, for example forcing any next attack done against you to miss at very high expense of mana or high-level casting slot.

How are the magic classes in Final Fantasy 14? I've been considering getting that game and want to know if any of those classes or Bard is fun

If i want a good magic in ARPGs or action games i would rather play in two worlds 2 with its fun magic crafting where i can cast a splintering, ricocheting fireball that summons a skeleton every time it hits something or an anvil rain you can lift into the air with levitation spell using it as a shield around you. Why would i settle for a boring DD magic?

A hybrid between spell crafting and bespoke magics would be best. Because custom spells don't look impressive and bespoke spells are usually limited in number.

it wasn't a bitchfit, I just see it is a limitation. I can't fathom how you can instant access a few dozens spells with 8 buttons. I don't know that many games that do it, at least. I'd love a good magic game on consoles or pc.

It's really sad that souls games, a King's Field successor, have such a shit magic despite King's Field itself having a fuckload of fun spells.

At least we got hilarious mad scientists in bloodborne playing with alium's magic.

>Like with archery
Ranger was pretty fun in DD
>Charged shots can knock griffins out of the air
>Sniping
>Pinning enemies to objects and walls with bind arrows
>DPS out the ass with ten-fold flurry
>Great Gamble in general
And some other utility stuff if you're into that shit.

yeah, two worlds 2 gets shitted on a lot, but it had a great magic system

>trying to play as a mage in pillars of eternity
>i'm overpowered as fuck especially with that dominating scepter but playing as a mage is so fucking shallow and boring i just can't force myself to continue
Who thought that this combination of 10 second long buffs, boring direct damage spells and vancian casting was fun?

There's only two damage dealing magic classes, the rest are healers. I can only really speak for BLM, but they're pretty satisfying to play when you understand how they work. At first they're boring because they only use fire, but then you gradually get into aoe magic, procs, flare rotations, until you get ley lines, enochian, and fire IV and you start spitting out massive single target burst damage. Can be pretty punishing though, you want to move as little as possible and often the game won't let you.

I never really played SMN much, but dreadwyrm trance looks like a fun mechanic, and deathflare looks pretty impressive. A good SMN deals huge amounts of of aoe damage, though it's less flashy than BLMs explosions. They get much cooler flavor to them than BLM do after 60 though, since they go from disease-magic with weird egis to dragon-wizards, while BLM stay the same.

>two worlds 2
>fun magic crafting
>shit literally everything else
I love games I can be a wizard in but holy shit did I ever not care about everything in that game.

Bloodborne is the only Souls game with interesting magic for some reason. Most of them are still generic, but things like Augur are actually cool and it builds that theme of the crazy magician who sold his soul for power, which I really like

are there any games (preferably a roguelike) where casting spells isnt just pressing a button or drawing a rune in the air?

what about a game where you actually have to learn the spells with practice and experimentation rather than just automatically having new spells when you level up or learning from a trainer?

I want to play as a grizzled old wizard in his tower, spending his days experimenting with magic to learn and create new spells, potions, magic items, etc.

Yes, the only reason to play in the game is to be a mage.
I went as far as going to the second island by walking towards it on water like a fucking Jesus because magic system allowed me to do it.

>bg2 gives you a magic stronghold
>but there's virtually nothing to do inside
I really want some cute and comfy mage game about a wizard just doing his wizard things and maybe helping people in nearby cities with their magic-related problems. Eventually getting his own disciples for more advanced spell casting.

I also want these things. I think the closest I can get to do this might be in some shit like a nwn rp server. I was actually hoping that new you-can-do-anything game Chronicles of Elyria would allow that, but among its you-can-do-anythings it also does the retarded "magic is so rare you'll never use it" thing, so fuck that.

Thanks for the idea user

Turmoil and conflict could come from thieves coming and trying to steal your magical tools/potions/etc.

You could go and search for powerful artifacts or items/ingredients to experiment with.

If you wanted you could delve into necromancy and summoning demons, which could be dangerous and unstable. Use the nearby towns as fuel for your experiments and watch as they come to fear you and maybe even lash out at you or hire a band of knights to come try and slay you.

Add a mage collective trying to either ban or force you to do something or become a member of some faction with a political element, power struggle and mage duels and it would be golden.

Copy might and magic 6. There's nothing more satisfying than seeing a group of enemies fly up in the air and die from a well placed fireball and the mechanical simplicity of the game lets you focus on exploration and training skills instead of vancian tedium.

If you can actually get it to run and ignore the voices, Lichdom: Battlemage has a fun magic system once you figure it out.

You can only get away with flinging fireballs for so long. You have to switch it up and craft a combo, typically a control to hold them down, a mastery for the multiplier, and then finally the damage.

The game is poorly optimized and I think it uses a Crytek engine. I ran it on this machine at 800x600 and it still made my computer cry.

I only ever played TW1 and it was truly dreadful in all respects. Interesting to hear that no. 2 got some love

>2worlds 2
I happen to have the game though i found it to be bad

But i did not try wizard. Is it worth going trough the boring start to get to the magic crafting later?

It should be centered around resource management. NWN did it great. Basically most spells are very powerful and a single one at the right time can solve most encountees. But, you can only cast a limited number of them instead of having some easily refillable resource pool.
What is more, some spells may require additional components, which bring a different can of of worms. " I could kill this pack of orcs with a fireball, but a fire ruby cost 100 gp, and these orcs probably aint worth it"

All in all, a system that rewards bringing square pegs for swuare holes instead of trying to force a round peg through a square hole.

>unironically suggesting vancian spellcasting for a videogame
what the fuck is this
In a game with few encounters, maybe. The Almraiven and Shadewood modules did this well, but they were also heavily based around magic detective work rather than fighting enemies. In order to craft a certain potion or cast a particular spell, you had to find certain material components to progress, which also meant you had to be careful with how you chose to fight enemies.

It depends on how the game is built. If there is more focus on combat, remove mp bars and spell slots, or expand on them. I actually sort of liked DS2's vancian system, because each slotted spell had charges that could be increased by stacking another identical spell. It felt like there was a limit, but you also had sufficient charges to get through the game as a spellcaster. DS3 shat all over that. Overall I'm more in favor of stamina or individual cooldowns or something like that.

D&D vancian in most D&D video games can go fuck themselves, because those are just hack&slash in roleplay-disguise that try to feed you with the idea of carefully managing your resources, and then throwing hordes of enemies at you every few steps you take.

Come on, where my magebros at?

I'd rather have a system that ditches any limiters whatsoever beyond simply the complexity of the spellcasting process itself, with the occasional one requiring a special magical component to serve as a catalyst. If you want to summon the heavens themselves down on a single solitary wolf that's fine, but that wolf is going to rip out your throat long before you finish even the most basic of incantations unless you have proper wards set up, which are in themselves time-consuming to cast, and so on and so forth. In the end the process of killing a wolf by blowing up a star on its face should be technically viable, but just incredibly inefficient and a waste of time when simply setting it on fire or having a necromantically-infused skeltal bodyguard deal with it would be much easier.

It should be simply a matter of applying the right combinations of tools to each encounter and being prepared for eventualities. Mages should be glass cannons whose gameplay centers more around knowing the proper wards and defenses to set up and the occasional magical servant to bring along than simply "how to optimize my MP use?"

Arx Fatalis I guess.
You have to find runes and while some spells appear in your spell book, some don't.
And of course you have to learn how to draw runes.
The best spell in the game is not even in the spell book.

Vancian spellcasting sucks ass for videogames. There are better ways to do resource management in computer RPGs. For example, you can have resources like gems in the early Might and Magic games as an additional resource on top of Spell Points for the more devastating spells.

>>
>D&D vancian in most D&D video games can go fuck themselves, because those are just hack&slash in roleplay-disguise that try to feed you with the idea of carefully managing your resources, and then throwing hordes of enemies at you every few steps you take.
This is true. BG1 threw so many trash mobs at you but doesn't penalize you in any way for spamming rests so you just fight, rest, fight, rest, talk to someone, fight, rest, and then watch the ending cutscene.

Demon's Souls has a pretty OP magic system. It's the reason the rest of the souls games are the way they are now.

Op and boring, like in all other souls games.
Nothing can justify "1000 versions of soul arrow" and "200 versions of fire orb".
At least in DS3 they started to understand they suck at making magic so they forced some spells to behave like melee combat abilities. BB too.

iv tried it, and its almost what im looking for but its kinda dated. but I kinda dont like any sort of "draw symbol in air" mechanic. I dont mind typing out magic words in a roguelike or something simular. I sure hope VR allows for a good spell system with voice recognition, hand guestures, etc for a true spell casting system.

>dated
Played and finished it this year for the first time.
Tho I can easly play older games I never played like Thief for example.
Just install Arx Libertatis and you are good to go.

>dated
faggot

Demon's Souls was actually ok about spell variety. Simple, but none of the spells were obsolete.
What was op about DeS magic again? I only remember it had an mp bar and a ring to recover mp, but that was it. There were spell slots so you had a max amount of spells you could attune, with some of them occupying two or more slots. It was pretty basic.

I remember cheesing a fight in BG1 by casting fireballs down a corridor where there were enemies while staying out of their field of view, resting, casting fireballs again and repeating until there was nothing left.

One day I'll make a game with a spell casting system similar to how VIM (the text editor) works.

Each key on the keyboard has its own meaning and you can type different keys together to get different effects.

So let's say
p = projectile,
f = fire,
l = launch,
d+(wasd) = direction

So cast a fireball you have to do type:
lpfdw and it will launch a fireball up.

Different keys act like functions that take different arguments, so for instance the projectile key can take an element argument, which is why [pf] in lpfdw becomes a fireball. Similarly, the launch command takes an object and a direction: [pf] parses to an object (the fireball) and [dw] to a direction, which means that the complete command passes and you can cast the magic. If you mess up the order of the commands then you'll fail to cast and so on.

You can have lots of modifiers with a system like this and it could be really cool

It wasn't like other Souls games that had finite amount of spells you could cast without returning to a bonfire. Like with grass, you could farm spice to constantly replenish your magic meter. This meant you could do any spell as much as you wanted, especially because all of Latria drops a ton of spice and the enemies there are magic resistant. You're essentially going through a whole chunk of the game hardly using magic, but getting tons of magic pots for later.

In terms of actual overpowered spells, Inferno (I think that is what it is called) was the single strongest attack you could do in the game and you could easily do Inferno - > Spice - > Inferno to kill most bosses because it was just that strong. In terms of AI, DeS AI is really wonky with some characters not even reacting to you using ranged moves so bows and magic can be used in a lot of situations to clear enemies with minimal effort.

It's the strongest magic has ever been in a Souls game, but as usual I think people exaggerate the effectiveness of magic. There's a huge circle jerk to honorable knighthood stuff in Souls games so people look down on ranged playstyles of any kind. It's OP to three shot someone with a spell after investing a ton of stats into it, but it's not OP to have a stamina and health gauge that goes across the whole screen and still have enough stats to two shot everything with a fast sword that can clear waves of enemies around you and has far better constant dps as magic.