We Need to Talk About Magic in Games

Magic can take on many forms. Customization features are found in a lot games but sometimes it's just the basics. What do you think magic in video games would look like if it wasn't for some modern literature? And what should it look like in a few years? This video was a lot of fun to make. Especially, because I got to log in into my old Dark Age of Camelot Account. My first character in an MMO ever is STILL alive, can you believe that (no, it wasn't the caster)?! 🤣

Magic has always been my way of playing Skyrim Especially necromancy\conjuration

I think for an RPG to have more interesting magic, everything needs to be more powerful to keep it balanced. If Wizards can do nearly anything with their magic, the Warriors and Assassins need something that makes them special and just as appealing. If I made a single player RPG like Skyrim, I would let players sacrifice any magic potential to instead gain limitless strength or speed potential. It would be cool if the Warrior was the class that could potentially throw a dragon by its tail, or if the Assassin was the class that could potentially dodge and deflect projectiles as fast as bullets.

Great video! When I think of customization for magic I always think of Oblivion where you can make your own spells with different effects than just an average fireball.

I'm already in love with your channel. Very easy subscription, my friend - I look forward to seeing you grow over the months and, hopefully, years to come.

Great Video! I actually never or rarely think about the system how magic works in videogames. Although I play mostly as a mage in games😅But I'm also playing games more for the stories. I still like how dragon age handled magic with a lot of story around it with the fade and the blight and that magic could be the reason why everything happened.

When I think of magic, I often think of Avatar the Last Airbender. It's just the way that the bending was shown throughout the series, as an extension of ones self, therefore, there would be a lot of personalization to each individuals bending style, or in this case magic, I would love to see new games come out with the ability to customize your magic in a way you'd find cool or interesting. Great video I'm glad I'm not the only one who thinks like this!

This video was very well edited, but the script seems very scattershot, leaving me confused. Every example seemed to be a non-sequiter, with few comparisons drawn between each kind of magic, and each example was only explored for such a short time, I felt I could not really understand the details without having played the games myself. Not to mention that some of the ideas it seemed you were promoting as good, also raised big questions on how they could be practically applied - e.g: "Magic systems should be deeply tied to the story and character development... and allowing players to create and customise their own spells, leading to endless possibilities" - how can a player created spell be deeply tied to story and character development? Overall it leaves me asking what the "point" of this video was? Which is a shame because this channel seems like it has a lot of potential. I'm not a "video essayist" or anything like that, so I don't know what the answer is myself, but maybe it could be good to try to go a little more in detail with the specifics of just one or two examples and draw more comparisons between them to talk about what does and doesn't work; what the strong suits of each approach are. Then maybe if you still want to include so many examples, turn a video like this into a short series of videos?

I actually think about this topic way more than is probably reasonable to and if I ever actually get around to learning to edit videos and write a script it's actually a series I want to start at some point. You've already mentioned my personal favorite magic system, Magicka, but a couple of others are Mages of Mystrelia and Outward. Personally I think Mages of Mystrelia is pretty good already, the best way to improve that one would just to be add more base options for spells to build upon, the spellcraft system in that game is already incredible for both combat and puzzle solving. I view Outward more as a proof of concept though, I don't think another open world game has even tried to make a magic system that makes exploration a part of it's casting system but there's so much more that can be done with it. At the end of the day Outward only has 3 items in the world that are required for one of it's four casting methods and all of those items can be stockpiled in the first region. On top of that, there are really only like, 4 spells in that casting method that are really worth casting in the first place. Hopefully Outward 2 will fix these issues because I genuinely loved the meticulous inventory management and glyph set up required to fight properly and it's a shame that the glyph system is overshadowed by the rune and hex system and that the chakra spell casting is more or less just a weapon that uses mana than an actual casting class. Did I mention I think about this topic way too much? XD

You need the XP for destruction magic and a💯 and every perk in the tree the experience points are the icing on the cake 🎂🍰