if and i say if you manage to get in and want to buy it also , you should try the magic system from Two Worlds 2. http://store.steampowered.com/app/7520
the game itself was good but didnt got far. but for the creation system for magic in it was soo awsome. just pointing it out that i would still be playing it if the producer keep supporting the game. or just watch some made video of ppl that played it. am still waiting for a 3 part to come if it will.
P.S sorry for the necroing of this post :P

I liked levitation and water walking in Morrowind, too. I wouldn’t want to play the game without them.

Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow on Nintendo DS has a couple of really funny movement spells. Like: Throw a doll, then switch places with it. Or summon skeletons to carry you on a stretcher.

@Karthik
Dominion sounds pretty awesome. I was going to mention the various terraforming spells in Age of Wonders but it has nothing like Utterdark. (How does that not totally break the game, btw?) Changing the world from your wizard tower feels much more wizardly that just being fantasy artillery, but I can also see why developers don’t want that kind of stuff in a CRPG.

Absolutely agree. I remember being disappointed by Dragon Age Origins because its spells were basically limited to “damage, stun, debuff, buff, heal” with a couple of summons. The game it was designed to be a spiritual successor to – Baldur’s Gate 2 – had all these and tons more – invisibility, knock, polymorph, contingency plus the various spell sequencers you could have fun filling up…
Even that is much more limited than what you describe in Morrowind, but it was still a lot of fun being able to lots of stuff as a wizard.

I second this notion. Reducing the function of magic to act as a gun or cannon is nearsighted design. And Inquisition, which I have put over seventy hours into, is infuriatingly backwards, conservative and streamlined in most of its mechanics. (As opposed to the narrative, which does a few subtle interesting things. Incidentally, I’ve been playing as a rogue assassin because I figured she would kill things fast enough to make combat less of a chore. And she does. I killed a dragon solo in ~30 seconds yesterday.)

And it’s such a shame because Bioware could have done so much with Dragon Age’s concept of magic as channeling the essence of the Fade. The plot even revolves around it. But no: here’s your fireball and chain lightning. Go have fun.

As you mention, this is an MMO mechanic now imported into Dragon Age, and RPGs more generally. I expect to see it continue in Pillars of Eternity and The Witcher 3, although the new Torment game might do something more interesting given its setting and ethos.

I can think of at least two games (both non-RPGs) that handle magic much better. The first is Dishonored, where your powers are as utilitarian as they are martial. I had more uses for Blink outside combat than I can recount on ten fingers. Wind Blast could put out fires, topple things and subvert dart traps, Pull (from the DLC) could pull items to you, Possession was super useful to explore spaces, and you could Bend Time to evade traps and bypass those electric gates.

The other fantastic aspect of magic in Dishonored was that the powers were composable, like Unix shell commands. You could pull off some spectacular combinations, like double jumping off a roof, blinking forward, possessing a guard at street level just before you crashed and walking away. (Incidentally, Dishonored has the problem opposite to Inquisition’s: Strong, inventive and varied mechanics and spaces but an ineffectual and emotionally vacuous narrative.)

The other game I’m thinking of is Dominions 4, a 4x strategy game where high level spells can completely (and permanently) change the state of the world. Spells are events in this game. Here are a few from the wiki:

Utterdark: A global enchantment that extinguishes the sun and plunges the world into an eternal night where only the undead and cave dwellers can see.

Wish: A spell that allows the one who casts it to obtain whatever it is they desire, ranging from magic gems, to artifacts, to friends, to a swift death.

Storm: Reduces the precision of most units on the battlefield, rendering all archers in play useless.

I love this because this is magic by way of mutators or mods, essentially changing the rules of the game. And it’s fitting, because performing magic should be (i) about creating diffs in the source code of the world, and (ii) Dangerous to everyone, the user included.

and i think all this is sad.

you have magic! the strange ways of doing everything what you can imagine. How it works? Doesn’t matter! its magic!

…and then it’s broken down to beeing just another weapon. :-/

Oblivion does have lock picking magic. The spells were tiered to alteration ranks, but they were there. I spent a couple afternoons spamming Right-Bumper on my brother’s xBox 360 maxing out my Alteration skill, and coincidentally gaining at least 10 levels.

The way new kinds of movement influences level design was exactly why the flight and jumping spells were absent in Oblivion. Making sure locations were properly closed so that you couldn’t fly out of the world and making sure areas otherwise made sense with flying characters around increased the time required to develop the game, because they’d already set a visual quality target that was pretty high. I miss the movement magic when I play the later games, but Bethesda wasn’t going to compromise the pretty pictures so something had to go.

@ Chris Wellons:

I usually don’t survive long enough to learn spells in Nethack :P But Nethack is one of those games where magic actually feels powerful and scary. Finding a magic item or a spell book is always a gamble: you could try equipping it, or reading it but it might be cursed. And the curse will either kill you, or hamper your progress.

In general I think cursed items are under-utilized in modern games. My favorite item in Morrowind were the “Boots of Blinding Speed” which would give you max movement speed but also make you blind. :P And then of course I figured out that the curse is applied when you put on the boots, and not continuously. And that the Resist Magic effect only resists negative effects but leaves buffs intact. So I crafted a 100% resist magic for 1 sec spell, and then I would cast it every time I put the boots on, giving me max speed without the blindness. Was this abuse of game mechanics? Yes, of course.

But at the same time it made me feel like a clever wizard who has outwitted the curse. So meta-gaming does not necessarily need to break immersion. :P

@ Federico:

Heh, good point. But I think it stems from the fact that most video games give us so few ways to interact with environment. In Elder Scrolls games for example, most interactive actions that do not involve combat (either dealing damage, healing, buffing or summoning combat companions) involve movement or opening/closing chests/doors because there is almost nothing else you can do.

So you suggest using magic exclusively to hurt, heal and move around? (just joking – nice post)

What do you think of NetHack’s spells?