Rock, Paper, Shotgun - The Lost Magic of Magic

Myrthos

Myrthos

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Rock, Paper, Shotgun write about magic in games, which isn't as it used to be. They showcase how magic is used in various games, such as The Legend of Korra, Baldur's Gate 2, Ultima, Dragon Age 2, The Witcher 3, Skyrim and Divinity: Original Sin 2.

So, how can magic be made more interesting? It’s not simply a question of pushing up the power, and returning to the old Linear Warriors, Quadratic Wizards problem that soon sees magic users becoming living gods and leaving everything behind, but treating magic as something that needs to be feared and respected in and of itself. It should take some effort to acquire and to master, and ideally feature at least some degree of consequence. That can mean elements like corruption. It can mean things like wild magic, where every spell is a bit of a gamble. It can mean friendly fire, so the mage’s incredible power has to be used precisely to avoid taking out the team.
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Without an element of mystery, magic just becomes a mundane substitute for technology. It needs to be presented as more than a mere combat tool.
 
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Magic in books is something fantastic, mysterious, powerful and at times pretty random.

Magic in games needs to be a little more pressed in a restricted rule/resource system, otherwise it would be pretty hard to balance mage combat/skills.
 
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Usually I prefer to play warriors and/or thief types. Magic used from afar just seems like a cheat, heck I rarely even like to use bows. I prefer to get in there and melee toe to toe, crush my enemies, drive them before me, and hear the lamentations of their women. =p
 
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"Magic shouldn't just be damage dealers"

Couldn't agree more.

In some fantasy books magic is a function of belief. So if you believe it is possible it is. The more you scientifically learn about the world the more you restrict how you can use magic.

For example ogre mages were travelling across vast distances and defying gravity in the process and an accompanying mage commented on how this shouldn't be possible according to physical laws as they knew them. She speculated that it was because of there more primitive belief system that they were able to use magic in this fashion.

D:OS has the best modern take on it gamewise that I've played. At least it allows for creativity and non-combat uses.
 
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It's possible that the 'death' of party based RPGs (until recently) made it so magic had to be basically a reskin of normal weapons. With party-games you could have asymmetric classes. So what if your mage could die in two hits? So what if your cleric cleric couldn't kill a fly? Other members in the group would make up for that, and they would have other support abilities (healing, crowd control) that more than made up for the lack of damage dealing.
But for about 10 years, party-based RPGs disappeared, and if you wanted to make magic viable in single-character games, you had to deal damage.

Hopefully that's already changing, as we're in a party-based cRPG renaissance.
 
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In practically all games, I kind of miss "The Path to Magic", that is such a large component in so much fantasy literature. When you read about it, becoming a mage/wizard is a struggle filled with study, frustration, trial & error, experimentation and usually copious amount of practice to cast even a small bolt of flame.

However, in most games I feel like I always *start out* as a highly trained and accomplished wizard.Learning new spells & magic skills is simply a matter of going into battle and leveling up, so basically it requires no effort at all except from the killing of foes, looting and maybe collecting gold in other ways (things I would do even if I played as a savage barbarian).

I'd pay a lot to have a fantasy rpg that manages to incorporate the *learning* of magic in an interesting (and challenging) way….
 
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@Feist

Yeah - just think of Pug in Feist's Midkemia novels. I love the first book Magician.
 
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I wonder why magic hasn't been used much more in dialogs as a substitution for Persuasion/Diplomacy/Intimidate checks like in this famous Gandalf/Bolbo scene.
Only games I remember that did something like this (but in a less daramtic way) are SW:KotoR with Jedi mind tricks and Witcher with Axii.

That's a nice simple way to increase the spehere of magic's influence in games.
Additionally I would make spellcasting a necessary component for crafting. If you want to create that fire dagger you'd need someone who casts an appropriate spell.
 
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rjshae said:
Without an element of mystery, magic just becomes a mundane substitute for technology. It needs to be presented as more than a mere combat tool.
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How so?
Magic is involved in combat oriented products. It shouldnt be more than a mere combat tool.
 
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HiddenX said:
@Feist

Yeah - just think of Pug in Feist's Midkemia novels. I love the first book Magician.
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Right, that was the first example that struck me as well. Both the somewhat experimental training of "The Lesser Path" and the later scholarly study in the Assembly for "The Greater Path", all adding up to a tremendous amount of effort to really use magic effectively. I really feel that there has to be a way to incorporate this in an interesting way to create/build a magician.

Like mentioned above, I also would enjoy far more non-combat usage of magic. Like, for example, using personal glamours to hide your characters identity, using levitation to glide up and enter a locked building through an open second story window, water walking to cross uncrossable rivers, mental spells to affect conversation etc. etc.

Heck, I'd love to play a mage character that had a similar role to a "Decker" in shadowrun. In other words, a role that had only minor use in actual combat but could accomplish many important/useful tasks outside of combat.
 
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Good old D&D handled it best, in my opinion. Lots of utility and quirky spells in that system.

Most computer game adaptions left out the untraditional spells, which is a shame. But games like NWN and NWN2 had a reasonable amount of them.

I'll second Quest for Glory as a neat way to handle spells, as is the Kyrandia series to a lesser degree.

One of my old favorite games, Loom, also had a wonderful approach to spell casting.
 
Loom was great. The puzzle solving (musical magic tunes) neatly fit the game play and story which is super rare for an adventure game. Game designers could learn a thing or two from that game.
 
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Another interesting approach to magic was Arx Fatalis: Casting by performing gestures/symbols with the mouse cursor.
 
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Cacheperl said:
Another interesting approach to magic was Arx Fatalis: Casting by performing gestures/symbols with the mouse cursor.
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To be fair, it was done a bit before Arx in Black and white :)

That said, it didn't work very well in either game. Same goes for the spell casting in Dungeon Master and Legend of Grimrock. The idea is nice enough, but I find it counterproductive to fun and fluid gameplay.
 
wolfing said:
It's possible that the 'death' of party based RPGs (until recently) made it so magic had to be basically a reskin of normal weapons. With party-games you could have asymmetric classes. So what if your mage could die in two hits? So what if your cleric cleric couldn't kill a fly? Other members in the group would make up for that, and they would have other support abilities (healing, crowd control) that more than made up for the lack of damage dealing.
But for about 10 years, party-based RPGs disappeared, and if you wanted to make magic viable in single-character games, you had to deal damage.

Hopefully that's already changing, as we're in a party-based cRPG renaissance.
Click to expand...

The reason for the above is that during the last 10 years proper 3D games were be taking over from isometric games and its hard to control and manage a party in full 3d world where players expect to see all the party members in the game world. Having said that 3D games like DAI have gotten better to handling party members but the number is still limited to 3 or 4.
 
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I don't really think it has anything to do with the move to 3D worlds. I think it's simply that the mainstream market isn't perceived as viable for the relatively high-brow tactical party-based RPG subgenre.

We're seeing a return to it because of the crowdfunding explosion more than anything else.
 
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