

Interactive Element Magic

My only problem with element locked magic, is all users no mater what element has access to the same basic spells with thier special element that seperates it from other classes. Magic that effects the environment and evolves the environment as you magicly interact with it. You cast a force push and rocks fly at the enemy, or in your cast lets say you summoned a puddle to throw an ice spire instead of chucking rocks. The enemy mage reacts with a force wall to block your ice attack and his wall absorbs the ice becoming a ice wall. He using force push and sends it back at you. You Dispell the ice wall, and send the water back at him as a binding move to hold him still etc. A back and forth tug of war of power, not just numbers. A magic battle should be more of a conversation then a spray and pray battle.
Mages should be allowed to specialize if they want, but unlocking the ability to control different elements through quests spread across the world, rather then giving them elemental control through leveling up. Staggering the elements could give the impression that an element you would get later on is better then one you would have early access to. No one should be locked into a element, if you want to be a jack of all trades, you should be able to do that. Specialization should on the user’s part to choose to only use certain spells or combinations. If you could only use one type of magic, it may open up jobs for mages to get people into dungeons blocked by certain elements. Wind jumps gaps, water freezes or parts, earth moves rocks, fire burns debris.. or boils fluids in steam powered locks.. kinda stretching it for fire but.. Branches and vines shouldn’t just be burned, nature should be a element of its own, a lot of crowd control there.

(I have accidently deleted this three times trying to edit it T_T)


  • Mixing elements to gain access to different forms to use in magic. The higher your level the more pieces of interactive environment you can use in one spell use. Using wind, and water to create a mist into a cloud, then using Earth, fire to make magnetic energy to charge the cloud, forcing the cloud to release lightning that charges the area and allows use of its spell enhancing effects for its duration of the cloud. Kind of a long chain of actions, but I think spells should have preparation time. Those actions would be what your character would be doing during their casting time, might as well allow the character to choose to make the wait count or feel like it leads up to something they really worked to show off.
  • I like the idea of how you can earn skills through questing, but there is an issue about that. Once players know where to get the skills, they can just go to where they would earn the skill, and then just finish the quest. But if the quest was really hard, lets say for only a level 35+, then it would be pretty interesting. I also like your mixing elements idea. That would be also pretty neat! Mixing fire and earth to create something like lava! If fire has a faster dps rate than earth, but earth does more damage, lava could be slow, but damages the opponent really quickly, when hes touching it.
  • You have a good point about having them be a mid game unlock, but in the beginning no one knows where to go, and if the node changes, maybe the skill cant be learned there. Having to change an area to an extreme way to have the quest become available to run into.

    It would be cool to have the environment change with the element that it has contact with. Like if you were to concentrate enough steam/mist you could cause it to rain. Lava turns the ground it touches into more molten lava that can move around leaving trenches of lava as temporary trap pits. Structures made from lava that act like normal rocks when cooled that are linked together until they are damaged, then they fall apart into normal separate pieces of stone.
  • Higher level spells have more slots for more elemental components to allow you to mix up wider verity of spell mixtures, or focusing of one specific type of element. Allowing more material for a impressive casting preparation, the elements following the commands of the mage binding them in a weave of power.
  • Hi, Zelhart.

    I saw your post about this either earlier today or over the weekend. I like it extremely for sure. It reminds me a LOT of Magicka and an even older game, The Wheel of Time, which was a FPS "magic battle." However, having a complicated magic system like the one you described has been a bit of a stretch for MMOGs (maybe more than a bit). Vanguard is the only AAA MMOG that I can think of that had elements of what you described (nullification and reflecting of enemy spells) and it was pretty enjoyable. I know at least one of the team members at Intrepid Studios worked on Vanguard, so who knows: We may get a pretty sweet magic system. If the magic shown in the videos so far is in any indication then there is certainly hope!
  • Yea it is pushing the limits of what a game can handle. especially thinking about how the effects of magic summoning those pieces of interactable environments all over the server, and having them change all over in multiple ways would put a lot of issues processing wise.. It would be a harder issue to deal with then just removing particle effects, Being a piece of the environment and something you have to interact with a ability to do what you want to do forces the game to have to render that.

    One way it would work is using Cloud Computing.. But that is reaching very far.
  • It would be a hard task to keep track of all of those pieces of environment spawning in and out of exsistance changing into different elemental power across the whole server. It would put a toll on your processor.

    One way to split up the processing needed to power such a system could be cloud computing.
  • I've long been hoping to find a game with a really interesting and challenging magic system. One thing that always gets me is the process, like I go kill 20 boars and now I can cast ice bolt. Kill 200 more boars and now I can also cast fire blast or something. I'd love to see a game where improving your magic ability was more akin to crafting. So for example you kill 20 ice sprites and eventually get a drop of a minor ice core and you can then study that to get access to basic ice spells. Later you encounter a larger ice creature and might learn something new from that. Something like that anyway, I think it's probably going to a while before I see someone try for something that complicated in a game.

    I think Vanguard did have the most interesting magic system I saw, the countering and reflecting spells made it much more dynamic. Though my favourite in that game was psionicist with the illusions and the psionicist only chat channel. ;P
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