Why you no likie magic?

[Fedora Master]

Ultima and Might and Magic had pretty "out there" magic.

 

[HarveyBirdman]

~

Voila! Magic!

 

[Farewell into the night]

Why games suck?

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Has there been actual gameplay regarding these types of magic? The closest one I know is this RTS game with limited time travel

Definitely not what you're looking for but "Life Is Strange" is designed around time manipulation.

 

[Hassar]

Well, it’s really just because “magic” already exists in the gameplay elements we take for granted. For example, most developers and players really have no experience in combat or martial arts so they don’t think that hand-to-hand fighting is exhausting and it is superhuman and “magical” to swing a sword multiple times with unlimited, regenerating stamina while taking the same damage concept and applying a graphical explosion is interpreted to require “more” resource use just because of how the numbers and graphics appear onscreen.

For example, a number of writers have written about the nature of magic in fiction. It is usually something like the ability to make difficult things easy with a thought, make nature do what man wants, or to enable entry into another dimension of the world.

In most video games, ammunition and crafting are instantaneous (even combat is usually more about pressing a button) so the difficult is already easy, the only difference between a lightning bolt and a sword swing is often just the numbers assigned to each, and you are already in another world where death is usually meaningless (indeed enemies are usually mowed down in a genocidal fashion with no real impact because they are also an endless resource).

So magic usually just boils down to another way of doing what you can already do. This is probably most evident in RPGs because you have these seemingly lethal monsters being killed by weapons with no real delineation most times to indicate when mortal weaponry will be useless.

 

[Vulpes]

As far as I see it, the main problem with magic in videogames isn't that the spells are uninspired but that magic has no use outside of combat. Tell me, how many RPGs do you know that let you solve quests using magical means? The only ones that come to my mind are the Quest for Glory games and some of the NWN 1&2 modules

 

[Hassar]

As far as I see it, the main problem with magic in videogames isn't that the spells are uninspired but that magic has no use outside of combat. Tell me, how many RPGs do you know that let you solve quests using magical means? The only ones that come to my mind are the Quest for Glory games and some of the NWN 1&2 modules

Yeah, FF is a big culprit of this. Magic has no use outside of combat. And even in combat, it ends up being more efficient to just max out your regular attack damage.

 

[Bigg Boss]

magic in rpgs often lack esoteric aspect.

i believe rpgs could benefit from learning studies of magic from great magicians like fulcaneli, austin osman spare, aleister crowley...

So good it gets a giant brofist.

 

[Tweed]

magic in rpgs often lack esoteric aspect.

i believe rpgs could benefit from learning studies of magic from great magicians like fulcaneli, austin osman spare, aleister crowley...

No, hell no. I still remember those fucking candles in Ultima VIII.

 

[Lhynn]

Because developers have no imagination.
Balance is a retarded excuse, so is coding being teh hard. If a dev is ambitious and creative enough the sky is the limit.

 

[Neanderthal]

Because developers have no imagination.
Balance is a retarded excuse, so is coding being teh hard. If a dev is ambitious and creative enough the sky is the limit.

And if he isn't then Skyrim is the limit.

 

[Bigg Boss]

Because developers have no imagination.
Balance is a retarded excuse, so is coding being teh hard. If a dev is ambitious and creative enough the sky is the limit.

Sure, until the Publisher jams multiplayer down their throats for no reason and launches the game 6 months early.

 

[Goral]

Because they probably have some templates ready for fireballs or some other lightning bolts but epic stuff like this is much harder to create:

I don't know any other game where you had such power as in Sacrifice. Creating a volcano or giant stalks or an enormous hole that you bore in seconds or summoning death itself is just awesome. Even in games where you supposedly played as god (Black and White for example) you were much less powerful than as a mere wizard in Sacrifice. Then again using spells like these would make sense only in open areas whereas most fantasy RPGs force us to play in dungeons or some other confined places which are much easier to create. In Baldur's Gate open spaces are just boring and serve as a grinding range where there's nothing to do. In Arcanum it was similar but there we've at least had some interesting, non banal spells (like manipulating time or the light or death) and "dungeons" or cities were interesting. Plus they've at least planned such epic things like walking on water.

Anyway, it's one of the reasons why I prefer non- or low-fantasy RPGs or RPGs that offer an alternative to magic. Fantasy RPGs are usually uninspired, banal and without any depth (see Baldur's Gate series). But there are also RPGs with shitty/banal/boring spells but which are great overall like Betrayal at Krondor or Planescape: Torment (and Witcher :>).

 

[Bigg Boss]

One way to avoid that magic is to put a barrier of sorts in town areas, then it would get to where they would use it to gate areas off from such content to save time. NO MAGIC IN TOWN.

 

[Lhynn]

Sure, until the Publisher jams multiplayer down their throats for no reason and launches the game 6 months early.

2005 called, they want their retarded excuses back.

 

[Bigg Boss]

Sure, until the Publisher jams multiplayer down their throats for no reason and launches the game 6 months early.

2005 called, they want their retarded excuses back.

Sure thing friend. You are obviously a world renowned expert in video game development with such a large post count.

 

[Funposter]

because magic is for nerds instead of cool guys with big muscles

 

[Kruno]

Investors don't see the time spent on such things worth while as they can extract money from whales, dolphins and fish in other ways. Indies have become more prominent and have been adding their own spin on things. Designing game systems is a very difficult thing, especially if they aren't just shoehorned into the game. Nethack is really creative in its gameplay, but the game did come out in the 80s, so the OP's insinuation stands!

 

[Kyl Von Kull]

We need a CRPG where the PC can only be a magic user with different classes of wizard who specialize in different awesome things. Maybe you can recruit some meatshield companions to help out, but they’ll always be massively underpowered compared to anyone who can cast spells.

I figure a developer could work in some very cool stuff if they only had to deal with wizards, and not a dozen different classes or even the holy trinity of fighter/mage/rogue.

 

[Baron Dupek]

Because game engines.
Too much work and coding to implement anything beside basic fireball that would melt your GPUs with ease but deal mere 1-3 DMG +0,5% burning stacks.
On older engines, when you have people who made these engines from scratch, sky was the limit.
I have hard time to imagine how these soy fed burning with depression folks having enough imagination to survive mass layoff, not to mention making new spells or anything that makes their game standing out from bland banal shit boring RPG crowd.

 

[mohrg]

Actually, boring cookie-cutter magic could be the most realistic approach. Like tech in our world, only a relatively small group of gifted people really understand and develop the science and engineering, and only a bunch of multibillion dollar fabs manufacture the parts that go into hi-tech gizmos; and almost no one know who they really are. So, you know, guys like Mordekainen or Abi-Dalzim are like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. The local archmage is a computer salesman, and the evil necromancer is like the campus BOFH. Your adventuring mage is like that geek that fixes your computer, and knows how to cast install and use a few spells apps. The warrios, thieves and clerics are the clueless lusers (don't touch that button!). It's all a lot of mainstream, trite shit, full of marketing trends and backwards compatibility winning over technological advance. The Einsteins, Teslas and Von Neumanns of magic are forgotten demiliches no one normie cares about.

 

[Lhynn]

Sure, until the Publisher jams multiplayer down their throats for no reason and launches the game 6 months early.

2005 called, they want their retarded excuses back.

Sure thing friend. You are obviously a world renowned expert in video game development with such a large post count.

We've had tons of kikestarters and indie devs and not a fucking magic system worth a shit. Closest thing to creative came from larian and their elemental combos.

You are just another ignorant retard.

 

[Sacred82]

Why is it that every RPG has gimped magic that is boring an uninspired? What happened to commanding reality into doing the impossible? Nearly 20 years ago we had a game that let us manipulate time, clone, cloak, toss about metaphysical death, and all manner of arcane shenanigans...yet nothing that has come out even compares.

Because that game would be all about mages. Either that... or it would have to be balanced by making mages useless/ skill monkeys with a crossbow for most of the game except those rare instances where they resolve shit single-handedly. Which people whose power fantasies are way out there won't like.

 

[Alex]

magic in rpgs often lack esoteric aspect.

i believe rpgs could benefit from learning studies of magic from great magicians like fulcaneli, austin osman spare, aleister crowley...

Hell no. Keep real magic far away from RPGs. That shit not only is dangerous, but is ultimately a bad match for the normal gameplay in CRPGs. This kind of thing might work well in an adventure game (not that it would be any better to use it in that kind of game), but for a game where combat is usually an important aspect of what you do, it would be rather hard to make this kind of magic fit. Maybe you could have it affect battle stats or something, but that is even less interesting than what we have today.

I think D&D has some of the best magic for use in role playing games. It combines the strangeness of old weird fantasy with a potential for ingenuity in their uses. There is an old article on Dragon Magazine number 169, called "Creative Casting", that showcases this idea pretty well. While some of the uses in it are a bit underwhelming, such as covering Tenser's disc with swords so you can use it to slash enemies during combat, it nevertheless shows the spirit of what I mean by ingenuity.

Consider the many illusion spells, for instance, whose uses are all basically focused into tricking your opponents. Or the prismatic spells, where each different colour can have a different and completely unrelated effect on whoever is hit by the casting. These things have, as far as I can tell, very little to do with real magic. I mean, you might argue that the colours of the prismatic spells might look a bit like esoteric knowledge, but I think the idea of turning to stone or becoming poisoned according to the different rays that hit you is much more close to something from Jack Vance or some other pulp author, not any more connected to real world magic than the old gods of lovecraft are connected to any real world religion.

 

[rzh]

It's not that hard to implement a better system, unless you want it to be equal to melee or ranged which is retarded. If you want good magic in a game, by definition it should be the focus of that game. Remove any sort of mana system (let me wait 5 seconds so I can cast fireball again), make it more fluid and free. Different schools of magic, different types of spells each depending on the traits/attributes/personality of the character using it, make it as OP as you can. To prevent it from breaking the game, make magic expensive and hard to learn. The Mages willing to teach you basic stuff (you can't understand anything complex) live in towers in the middle of the desert, for example. The bigger the impact of the spell, the more it can backfire and kill you while trying to cast it. You need unique artifacts and tons of experience in casting lower tier spells for the highest tier ones. There's tons of way to do it.