It would be really nice to have a pro spell making thread that didn't crap so much o the current system. I agree it could use a bit more variety but frankly I really don't miss some effects like the damage attirbutes spells. I like the way many things work in the present system more than Oblivion or Morrowind, I think its a solid base at the very minimum. I'm having lots of fun with Skyrim's system as it is. I few additions and spellmaking would be nice but you lose me with rants about how broken the spell system is.

My 2 cents nobody asked me for.

Actually, speculation believes that FO4 will release next year, 2013, and it will the last Bethesda game for this generation. They said one of their upcoming games is using the Creation Engine (FO and TES use the same engine) and I doubt they would use the same engine for the next generation.

One of the developers actually said on these forums that certain things were cut because of the release date. Look for the thread yourself if you want. It was on the issue of beast races having digitigrade legs. Release dates dictate quite a lot. If a game has a date announced it HAS TO be out on that date no matter what, unless some utterly game breaking bug is found. That's just how the business works.

Thanks for that, very interesting my friend I will have to look into that.
Where is the speculation on Fallout 4 on this generation, I have not heard anything.

Pretty sure in an interveiw Todd said they would use the Creation Engine for their next several games.

Problem is that xbox 360 has 512 mb ram shared between graphic and CPU, so the cpu can take 300mb or even more if you don't need much graphic at the moment.
PS3 has 256 MB for each so you have 246mb for cpu and can not get more.

Benefit of separate memory is better performance any gaming pc has separate graphic memory, however if you has less memory than the game demands it will not help you much.

Spellmaking being cut due to technical reasons?

Dont give me that garbage!

Its more than likely for gameplay reasons.

They wanted to force something and being able to make your own would have allowed you to step around it!

Its time to put the magic back into magic.
Yes to spellmaking.

That "something" was called Shouts.


Let me paint a picture for you:

If spellmaking couldn't be "put in" after the fact, then it was "out" of the original design concepts for the magic system. This is because "on-paper", player created spells would overpower anything shouts could produce... or maybe some other reasoning was used, but pushing out Spellmaking was a starting point just as Shouts was at the starting point. Then add in that Todd Howard stated that Spellmaking was too spreadsheety. I believe that dual-casting was likely the non-spreadsheety answer to combining spells to Todd. It is something that could be limited to address balance, just by the virtue that you only have two hands and one spell in each. Also, just take a look of the level of utilization the dual-casting mechanic has, it has no use beyond combining the same spell. So I'm forced to ask: Does the level of integration dual-casting has in the game seem like something that justifies the effort of creating a dual-casting system? I don't think so. I think the payoff had to be bigger at one time to justify going down that path. To me that all jives with traditional Spellmaking being out from day one and a dual-casting based spellmaking system was supposed to be the replacement.

Take all this as the foundation of Skyrim's magic system.

-Shouts
-No traditional Spellmaking
-Dual-casting as substitute, it would be Spellmaking on the fly.

So Bethesda makes all the spells and their various effects and then when it is time to go back and address implementing dual-casting, they found that they painted themselves into a corner and realized dual-casting with different spells is impossible because the effects are incompatible. What would combining Ice Storm in your right hand and a Fireball in your left look like or even really accomplish if combined into one spell? Maybe console capabilities made situations worse on consoles, but doing it for the PC wouldn't have been a picnic either.

So now Bethesda has all this work in a magic system that is broken from the original vision of it. Maybe they really did take a second look at traditional Spellmaking... maybe not, but if the simplified dual-casting kind of spellmaking didn't work, the real thing wasn't going to be any easier.

In the end, Todd Howard [censored] it up and he [censored] it up from the very beginning by not realizing [or possibly not accepting] that the dual-casting solution to spellmaking was pretty much incompatible with Bioshock's style of effects, thereby turning the whole foundation of Skyrim's magic system they started with into a striped down broken mess.

One way or the other, Todd and Bethesda really stuck it to a lot of TES fans this time around. We deserved better than this... and we still do.

That point about shouting makes a lot of sense.

But I think magic was never intended to be a full blown spam-casted master-of-elements type of sorcerer, but rather a complimentary force to shouts and melee. If you look at the perk requirements for both weapon schools and compare those to destruction, and how little depth there is with spellcasting compared to melee, it somehow seems like destruction was meant to be complimentary force, rather than something that is used as a primary damage dealing method.

I think this is also the reason why the dual wielding and dual casting method was introduced.

I guess, though, at some point Bethesda thought that maybe not having your typical newschool RPG archmage playstyle in there would somehow blow away a percentage of players, and they haphazardly tweaked it a little bit to make it function barely on lower difficulty settings.

I did not like spell making what so ever in oblivion i actually never used it besides once and hated it when i did.

@thegreatsquare

I know you are just reading tea leaves in a way, but what you say makes sense. Looks like we may get some spell combining through dual casting as DLC. Seems like a poor substitute for spellmaking to me but it may be all we get.

I'd love to get spellmaking in DLC, but it seems like Bethesda did not want to let spellmaking outshine its shout system. Hopefully we will at least get spellmaking back in TES VI.

I am praying to the Night Mother that Mr. Howard's prejudice against spreadsheets suffers the same fate as horse armor.

I think they use the whole casual gamer thing as just an excuse to streamline and be lazy in the creative part of the games. I have not seen LOTR movies since they came out and just watched them yesterday. TBH I think the creative teams for both TES 4 and 5 had their heads up there butts and used alot of little things from those movies, just plain lazy IMHO. Sorry folks but to me Morrowind was probably Bethesda's peak of creative genius in the last 12 years and then.....pfffft

Not only don't you get to craft spells, but the lame ones they give you don't lvl like any other item/weapon in the game...

Its silly. Being a mage in this game is about endurance, how little can you cast spells for and how long can you bog enemies down with the knock back perk thing. As far as destruction goes anyway.

i understand your point of view, but that was the great part of TES. The option of using it or not. keyword OPTION. haha. and they've taken that away.

Oh, let's be a little more honest, shall we? It was not optional to use spellmaking in Oblivion if you wanted to be a halfway effective magic-user.

Yeah, if they were going to scrap spellmaking and reduce the number of spells to a mere handful, they should have made damage done with those spells level with the Destruction skill. They introduced this really cool Rune spell, but by 25th level of so it becomes entirely useless because of the paltry amount of damage it does.

Spell-making was still an OPTION. whether you want to realize that or not.

You have other spells at your disposal. I think it's great that Destruction doesn't scale. Makes me use Alteration, Restoration, Conjuration a lot more.

You can be a "halfway effective magic-user" in Skyrim? That's news to me.

I was stuck conjuring and hiding in a corner, using a weapon when enemies found me was always a more effective way to deal damage than destruction spells.


Todd Howard's magic system is the worst thing about Skyrim. He should be ashamed of himself.

Right. Like it was an option to run around naked with Wabbajack. You could do it, but it wasn't going to work too well.

As I already said (and you didn't contradict), if you wanted to be at all effective in any school of magic, you had to use spellmaking.

and skyrims magic system makes you an effective mage??? hahahaha now thats funny nerevarine. anyway that wasn't my argument to begin with. my argument was the options beth has taken away in skyrim. including spell making. we'll see what they do with DLC tho

Well i'm going to complain about them taking away the OPTION of choosing a defined class which imo is bigger then magnitude and duration sliders...

You could be effective in Oblivion without using spellmaking. You could not be an uberpowered pure mage, but you could certainly be effective.

Anyone who could not be effective at magic in Oblivion without using spellmaking must be just crappy at games. I don't have that good hand/eye coordination but combat in Oblivion was so easy that it was just not that hard to be effective with any playstyle.

That Wizard's Fury spell you got from the Mage Guild questline was badass if you waited until level 30 to get it. You did not neet spellmaking to be effective, even as a Destruction mage.

Waiting another ~5 years for TES:VI is unacceptable. It is Skyrim's magic system that is incomplete and broken. Todd had his chance and failed us miserably. Now the consoles could very well not be able to handle combining spells in their current form. Can Bethesda bring themselves to give official game features to the PC alone?

This is why I think Bethesda porting a tweaked Oblivion's system to Skyrim as a mod has some viability. Bethesda has already offered a mod for Skyrim on PC that the console doesn't get, so the precedent is there for that avenue. Secondly, the consoles can handle an Oblivion Styled system. Third, if the mod comes from Bethesda, it is their IP and they could offer it as an option to consoles to be included in future DLC without much issue. Fourth, it could be supported for compatibility with DLC. Finally, there are those that like the current magic system as is [...weird, I know], a mod would truly be optional.

I would like to see something as you describe. Don't know how much faith I have that it will happen, but I will continue my prayers to the Night Mother.