Why did beth take out the best part of the magic system and cut out most of the spells and effects in general? Does anyone have a good idea to improve it for the next TES? Also, don't turn this into a this game is dumbed down vs. this game is perfect flame war. This thread is for ideas to help improve the next TES.

apparently it was too complicated for most people to understand.

I'm wondering how said people are even alive if they couldn't count to 100. You'd think most would be roadkill now, which would have lessened the overall ignorance of the world just slightly after their departure.

I'm not sure. I don't think it was to appease casual gamers, because even casual gamers can enjoy all the silly spells you could make. I think they underestimated how many people liked spell creation and thought that excluding it to save on production costs would be okay.

As for the removal of many useful spell effects, I have absolutely no clue. That was dumb as hell IMO.

I hope soooooo much they add spell creation and more spells in some sort of DLC.

On another note, I love that Gerald Ford quote.

Simply put I think they did a good job for the most part but they made it a broken way of playing at the higher levels. Sure you can cast spells for free but the damage output is pathetic in most cases. Some spells they took out so people would not abuse them I am guessing. So your asking for ideas on how to improve it?

More Summons. With the variety of summons available in previous game it is almost insulting how few Daedra and other summons there are. On that note why no summoning undead? We summoned them from Aethurius before. Raising them is a cool new feature but still we should be able to do more imo.

Make spells more effective and cost less to cast as you level. Reduce magicka reduction a little bit to balance it. Every spell you have should level with your skill when applicable. i.e. Flames should get a damage bonus so that it is still useful at higher levels. Like doing 50 dam a second or something at master.

Improve the lighting spells. Magelight and Candlelight are useless and really you do not even really need to use them but they still should have a larger range.

Thanks.

I have noo clue. I was really looking forward to create a cool mage-character, like I did in Oblivion, but in the end it just seemed pretty boring; I was just spamming firebolts with the impact perk. I switched over to a thief/archer and am having much more fun now.

If you ask me Spellmaking was unnecessary.

The only purpose it served was to either make a spell that wasn't as powerful as a stock one, so you could use that in the meantime, or to make a spell that was incredibly powerful and beyond the stock spells offered by the game.

It was probably a nightmare to balance, and the whole thing involved a load of loopholes, so they seem to have just avoided it all by taking it out.

What bugs me is that while spellmaking was removed, they also removed a boat load of stock spells too. That shouldn't have happened.

Really wish there were more options.

Spell Creation had a lot more purpose than that. It was only limited by your imagination and creativity.

http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1303444-excusion-of-spell-making-a-bad-developing-decision-and-why/, most people want spell making back, some defend a blatant lack of options which really makes me wonder how TES games will end up being....

not true at all. spell making was completely necessary for some builds. it all depended on what kind of character you wanted to make(back when we got to choose how we actually wanted to play)

I think the people in favor of removing options are ruining TES.

"I have no self control, so Bethesda should gut features like spellmaking to prevent me from being too strong!"

I think people saying stuff like the above is why spellmaking is gone, a ton of spell effects are gone, and spell effects remaining are often nerfed (like invisibility being somewhat useless).

Wheres Xarnac when you need him?

Who is Xarnac?

I like creating spells but tbh they were all the same and being a mage was boring, now its hella fun.

Some say he is a god, others know him as the undisputed, championed martyr of Spell Creation. Others argue that he is no more than a cagey troll. But, like a Charleston Chew, he's really just a Mystery wrapped inside an enigma.

That's a good question, I haven't seen him in a while. Did he get banned or something?

Don't know, maybe he just went silent for release.

I can't see how magic is dumbed down when all they did was remove several spells; reducing quantity is not even close to dumbing something down. Maybe if they made it so that you have infinite magicka by default, auto-aim, flat out tells you if this spell or that spell will not affect this or that enemy, and completely takes thinking out of the equation, I would be inclined to agree. The thing is that using magic still requires thoughts and tactics. The closest thing to "dumbing down" is constantly summoning two Daedra Lords so they destroy everything for you and even that is not the game being dumbed down because it is a tactic that you've decided to use.

Yet they did it perfectly in every past TES game.

"But I could make a 'one-shot-kill-all' spell in former TES games!"

Yes, and chances are at that point you were already so high level it wouldn't have mattered anyway if you got one hit kill spells or just killed your enemies in two successive standard fireballs. Also there is no need to balance a single player game like that, yes there is a need for challenge but spell making is a feature you can do anything with, it's your choice if you break the game or not with it.

Because here is the crux of the matter, when you opened spell creation the spell creator didn't suddenly take hold of your character and force him to make a spell which abused many layers of weakness spells coupled with damage spells and then took all of your gold away and then overwrote the rest of your spells with one-shot-kill spells binding them to every key from 1 to 8.

No, it was YOU, who did that, not the game, but YOU, not just you with normal letters but bold, underlined and in caps, because this cannot be stressed enough. No one else but you (excuse me, YOU) did that to your own character if you did it at all.

I again link people to these two threads.

http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1303444-excusion-of-spell-making-a-bad-developing-decision-and-why/

and

http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1302338-a-small-observation-on-the-amount-of-spells-in-the-game/

because there are many TES players who really feel the spells section of Skyrim is really lacking and would like to see improvements on them. This is the worst spells have ever been in an Elderscrolls game yet and it needs to be fixed either by modders or by Bethesda, preferably by the latter.

Yes he did. infact save for what....five people, much who were active on the forums before the Games release and frequent these forums for the past year have disappeared or Renamed as far as I know anyway.
I'm with the "removing options removes Options" crowd, I don't care how great ones lack of self control was to not abuse spell creation, since people just abused everything else and still cry foul it was great to have and had massive potential in coupling with the effects in Skyrim atm, so much potential

If you ask me, smithing is unnecessary. Like spellmaking before it, you can use smithing to easily make the very best gear and enhance it to a degree no in-game is, and that unbalances the game in a similar way that spellmaking did before. So I don't think it was balance issues that caused them to axe spellmaking (unless they didn't playtest smithing much and realize how broken it is)

But yeah, they at least should have kept in the other stock spells, like open lock, feather, water walking, and absorb/reflect/dispel magicka.

@ Ellert, well said...

To keep the forum alive.

Spellmaking will probably be added to the game in one of the first DLC's. My only guess is that they weren't happy with it originally and left it out due to lack of time/resources.

As much as some people like to bs and say it was ultimately about appeasing some concept of "dumbed down" gaming. Giving what little we've read on the issue world design issues seems to have played into the removal of a number of spells in the game.

Personally I'm satisfied with not speculating unless I'm lucky enough to see an article or get the information directly from an industry insider on exactly what realities of game design and decisions were behind the design choices in Skyrim.

That might not be a satisfactory position for others to take of course...