The Magic System

[Alex Darkcrowne]

Personally, one of the best magic systems I've seen. Ever.

The ability to create different spells and different iterations of said spells with expressions and sigils is just amazing in my book.
It's the reason I always spec on Lore, because spells in this game are insanely useful.

What do you all think.

[fauxpas]

Yep.

[Coffee Break Hero]

Yep 9000.
When I hope one day there's a mage RPG (wod) I hope it's done with a similar magic system design

[SmellofNapalm]

The way it's implemented isn't ideal as it leads to the constant need to update spells according to their Lore stat and newly acquired crafting elements.

But other than it's pretty good and fun to play around with.

[Babbles]

Stolen straight out of 'The 4 Crystals of Trazere' - except not as good, as you can't make fireballs that heal the target and damage everything around them :)

[D'amarr from Darshiva]

Originally posted by Alex Darkcrowne:

What do you all think.

Continue playing the game a lot more, since else it is a preliminary judgement. Spell shaping and modifying spells hasn't been invented by Tyranny, and it is implemented in quite a limited way which makes it too tedious.

[Hellmasker86]

Agreed, it's fantastic.
I don't normally enjoy playing mages, but they're great fun in this game, wish there was more like it.

[Alex Darkcrowne]

Originally posted by D'amarr from Darshiva:

Originally posted by Alex Darkcrowne:

What do you all think.

Continue playing the game a lot more, since else it is a preliminary judgement. Spell shaping and modifying spells hasn't been invented by Tyranny, and it is implemented in quite a limited way which makes it too tedious.

I played it plenty, just not on Steam, matey.

[jotwebe]

Eh, I don't really feel like I'm inventing spells, just uncovering from a premade list. Agree that it's very useful, but that's IMHO too much of a good thing. Or maybe that's more a problem of the other stats being underdeveloped.

I liked it better in Daggerfall and Morrowind, but that may be because I was young and naive back then when I played those.

These days I prefer when there's premade spells that have interesting strengths and drawbacks - it's basically the same problem like with unit designers. If you're good at exploiting those, it makes the rest of the game more boring (Alpha Centauri has that problem, and the TES game with the magic variant). Sure it makes you feel smart when you break it the first time, but in the long term it makes the game worse.

If it's limited enough that you can't break the game with it, it tends to feel a bit bland. (Tyranny is on that end of the scale, IMHO.) You can't do truly exciting stuff with it.

[Coffee Break Hero]

Speaking of cool magic systems. I just finished "the wizards dark time". you cast spells in VR by doing dr. strange movement. It's really cool. Imagine if different sub-gestures or fingers extended modified spells in cool ways.

[MeanEYE]

What on earth are you talking about? Each of the cores defines element of magic and then you chose the type. That's it, the rest are modifiers. It's just pointlessly complex menu and progression system. You are not making magic, you are just selecting it in a roundabout way.

In reality there's 4-5 spells per element and then you modify range, intensity, etc. It's not a new spell because you chose longer range. And spells have almost 0 synergy with one another. I took frost and lightning thinking you can combine water/electricity. Naah, nothing happens and frostfire makes them even weaker while asking for 30 in lore.

[SmellofNapalm]

The way it is is fine. Not as good as it could have been, but it gives a lot of options and even allows people with low Lore to cast some useful spells. The latter makes little sense, but at least it gives more options for party-building and combat.

I have more of a problem with how little choice in core sigils there is in the beginning and how random it is to get the various other bits and pieces we'd need to actually build anything interesting. And it leads to annoying situations like having to include Lantry in the party or at least shake him a little until his core sigil falls out and then throw him out of the party again. I wish they had at least placed some teachers in the game to make it less of a random hunt.

[Lminith]

Originally posted by Babbles:

Stolen straight out of 'The 4 Crystals of Trazere' - except not as good, as you can't make fireballs that heal the target and damage everything around them :)

That's pretty cool, didn't know that.
I figured they were inspired by Magicka which also does similar stuff.

Originally posted by SmellofNapalm:

The way it is is fine. Not as good as it could have been, but it gives a lot of options and even allows people with low Lore to cast some useful spells. The latter makes little sense, but at least it gives more options for party-building and combat.

I have more of a problem with how little choice in core sigils there is in the beginning and how random it is to get the various other bits and pieces we'd need to actually build anything interesting. And it leads to annoying situations like having to include Lantry in the party or at least shake him a little until his core sigil falls out and then throw him out of the party again. I wish they had at least placed some teachers in the game to make it less of a random hunt.

Yeah I felt the same. The Lantry part was really stupid.

[OwlRaider]

Speaking about good and complex magic systems, Lichdom Battlemage did a great job with that, even better than Tyranny's. I mean that game is all about the magic system, basically a wizard FPS so the magic system being the core game mechanic obviously receives even more attention than Tyranny, but as we all know more focus doesn't always yield better results. In this case it did with all the different synergies available in that game, something some here are missing in Tyranny's version.

[Callirgos]

A good showcase of what video games can do that Pen and Paper struggle with.