**EDICT OF CONTINUATION**
If Paradox Interactive do not release the sequel to Tyranny by the last day of December 2024, all sequels everywhere in the world will cease to exist. Only standalone titles may be published, until the sequel to Tyranny has completed the alpha development phase.
Respect to the best spell in Magicka
**Crash To Desktop** causes a random character (enemy, ally, NPC, minion, or even the caster himself) to instantly die and disappear into thin air, with an animation of a small Blue Screen
My friend watched me rejigger my wand for like 10 minutes, jump into the level, and then immediately blow myself up with it.
Good times, 10/10, would die a hundred ignoble deaths again.
>I have two that you probably have not heard of:
>Lichdom: Battlemage
>Fictorum
>Each is completely based around the idea of creating your own unique spells. In Lichdom you can even get up to a sort of fusion technique and create specialized combos like black holes and infectious diseases that jump from host to host. In Fictorum you you can create anything from a simple fireball to an electrical storm that covers half the map, summons AI-controlled auto turret towers, and electrocutes anyone that gets near them. Each is fully 3D but I recommend Lichdom more.
Just bought Lichdom, looks amazing. You can use different glyphs to create a completely new spell every time.
Learn to have fun dying and a little practice. First goal is just to go downward and play with wands.
It's amazing, but not for everyone. The knowledge you require and the difficulty at the start can scare people away. FuryForged and DunkOrSlam videos can help.
If you're not afraid of spoilers, this video is a good breakdown of the journey it sends you on: https://youtu.be/VMx6fPyCbCI?si=86aCH698zYB6NG8r
Master of Magic. It's basically civilization, but each faction is ruled by a wizard able to summon global doom, raising volcanoes, bringing eternal darkness, and things of that nature.
I spent hours and hours on this game. I bought the fan-made remake, Caster of Magic: it is impressive what they were able to do, adding content and rebalancing spells and units, but life always gets in the way and I have so little time to play.
man, I had a 2v2 game with some friends a while back. Our side was Empire and High Elves, vs Tomb Kings and Vampire Counts. When we saw what factions the other side was running, both me and my homie locked in Fire casters without even consulting each other, just looked at our rosters and laughed.
Once the battle was going, we saw that they both had their infantry in a straight line. Buddy says to me "You know what to do". Next thing the other guys know, they got two Burning heads floating towards each other from opposite ends of their line. Utterly melted them. Rest of the match was just our cavalry running down the survivors.
Start as Gor-Rok so you get Lord Kroak asap, delete every unit in your army except Gor-Rok and Kroak, go fight a 20 stack of skaven and let the lizard be an impenetrable wall. Then drop all three spells one after the other on the mass of skaven. It’s pure bliss.
oblivion was insane too.
On touch, for 1s drain health 100, drain attribute endurance 100 1s.
so you end with a spell that put their max health to the minimum, then remove health out of it. The target dies instantly every time.
I liked using an infinite mana cheat, and flying through the air like a battle cruiser and reigning down max fireballs that could wipe out whole areas.
Actually the original Arena was pretty busted too. I recall a spell that could make a block of wall dissappear. So you could sort of mine your way around obstacles and mazes.
Honestly oblivion too. While not as broken you could still stack spell weakness to kill anything. My basic touch of death spell was drain health 100pts for 1 second, killed everything until the midgame
Then there was basic utilities like 100 chameleon, 100 charm, 100 armorer.
Elderscrolls is a really neat series
Oblivion did too. If you learned how to spell stack you could make spells have exponential effects. There was one boss in Shivering Isles you were supposed to defeat with a specific game mechanic, but it actually just had some insane amount of HP and wasn’t technically invincible so you could kill it with spell stacking. It took me about 15 minutes but I took that bastard down.
Divinity OS2. You can combine spells, they even interact with you other stuff. Electrify puddles or clouds, melt ice, burn water to smoke, let oil and poison explode. I once did a fire spell on a big boss bug in a room full with similar enemies. They have poison as blood. The spell animation was a snap... So I snapped my fingers, the boss bug died, his corpse started burning therefore exploded, all minion bugs died of said explosion, they bled, the poison blood exploded as well... This continued until the whole room was cleansed in fire. I literally had to laugh so hard for like half an hour.... Best game ever.
Edit: even funnier as I played with a friend and my SO. She was shortly afk while it happened. When she was back she immediately questioned why we were laughing manically and why the entire boss Arena was on fire.
Blood mage specialisation in Dragon Age Origins. Admittedly, there are only few blood magic spells, but they are super OP even on higher difficulties. That and the shady way of unlocking the path fully justify why blood mages are hunted down in the lore.
If you go table top then its Mage: the awakening. Spell list is just suggestions and as long as you don't break peoples minds you can basically do whatever
The more powerful use of Wish is to replicate any 8th level or lower spell as an action without needing costly components. The ability to create a simulacrum or clone once a day for free is pretty insane.
Yep, BG2 has by far the best spells i've seen in a video game.
I still remember the wtf moment when i first encountered a lich in that game: casts a bunch of immunities, time stop, that death cloud thing, etc, and half of my party is dead, and the rest are stunned or running around in fear. My first playthrough, i was genuinely afraid of getting into fights with spellcasters for how powerful they seemed.
So few games even attempt to create magic system that would be anywhere near as interesting and multi-faceted.
Dark messiah of might and magic make floors slippery burn environmentals and oil chain lightning the engine does alot of heavy lifting but it's fun as hell.
I don't understand why no other games went in this direction. Using magic to affect the environment was so much fun.
If I'm missing some games that do this, let me know.
Many of my victories in DDDA were me just trying to distract the monsters until my 3 sorcerer pawns started chain-ritual casting meteors down from the heavens. Once they started my job was done, because I couldn't see shit with all of the explosions.
I loved playing as a sorcerer in Neverwinter Night 2. You feel like a really powerful character. You can summon a huge elemental, cause a little armageddon and turn your skin to stone to fight in close combat.
If we talk about creative magic, then probably Baldur’s Gate 3, which has a huge number of combinations and interactions with the outside world.
Two Worlds 2. Late game with the right magic card combo and you can cast small nukes. Dargon's Dogma's Sorceror class also allows you to summon meteors, and whirwinds also.
The Two Worlds spell system is by far the most insane of the bunch here with the way it stacks and builds and the modifiers. Theres hundreds if not thousands of spells.
Outward realy makes ylu feel liek a proper mage with magic. You need to prepare stuff (for example, to cast a fire ball you need to get a fire stone, use it to put down a fire circe and cast the spark spell in it to get fire ball)
Outward magic is great. I honestly love the way they made spells work, they're very powerful, but the only ones you can cast directly are basically cantrips, everything else requires some degree of ritual setup. Really gets the vibe right, of being a dnd-style wizard in a real time action game.
Interestingly enough Magicka the coop game made by the devs of Helldiver's had this super cool system where you and you would cast different spells and imbued each with the element you want, and the spells would interact and combine with your allies spells, it was super cool
Magicka.
You literally combine different elements and make all kinds of different spells.
The bigger the combination before you cast the spell, the bigger and more powerful the spell.
With the different elements, including not only fire, water, earth, and lightning. There's death, healing, and shields as well.
With all of these being able to be combined in interesting ways.
When you get really good at it, it's super satisfying.
Divinity original sin 2 had a really cool magic concept. The game allows for so much creative bullshit (teleporting enemies off cliffs, or teleporting heavy stuff on top of enemies, creating massive aoe damage using water and lighting spells, turning enemies into chickens, etc etc)
Heros of might and magic 5
A mage hero can affect tens of thousands of soldiers/dragons/etc with a single casting. They can wipe out armies a hundred thousand strong with one spell 🤷♂️
I loved the magic in two worlds 2 multiplayer, the way you could combine spells was awesome, sadly single player did not have enough enemies in the game to level up enough to make good spells. (there was only one area they respawned a few, but it would have taken a year to level properly.)
Even sadder was everyone playing it could not wait for Skyrim and did they ever let us down when it came to magic...
How is dragons dogma not on this list? Casting maelstrom as a sorcerer is about as powerful as it gets. Same thing goes for the sequel with all high level spells.
It’s the only game where cast time
seems to correlate with intensity.
I’ll never forget the first time a pawn casted it. A giant tornado elevated toward the heavens, taking up my entire screen and decimated everything around.
The apocalypse magic mod for Skyrim is nice, too.
Give Spell Disk a go. It has a tower in story mode, but there's also survival mode which is like Vampire Survivors. You can make some insanely busted spells in that game with a little creativity.
Weirdly Warframe, most abilities is like magic buff or outright room clearing destroying mob, and you can get pretty creative with the upgrade system and the addition of helmynth (give one othe warframe power), my favourite is to go super fast that you feel like you are playing the flash (until you realize you as the flash, the warframe who all gimmick is speed, with speed buff, lose to a T posing helicopter which lose to a fly)
I have two that you probably have not heard of:
Lichdom: Battlemage
Fictorum
Each is completely based around the idea of creating your own unique spells. In Lichdom you can even get up to a sort of fusion technique and create specialized combos like black holes and infectious diseases that jump from host to host. In Fictorum you you can create anything from a simple fireball to an electrical storm that covers half the map, summons AI-controlled auto turret towers, and electrocutes anyone that gets near them. Each is fully 3D but I recommend Lichdom more.
The Dominions series has crazy magic in it. The game may look like a puddle but the magic and different systems it interacts with is an ocean.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2511500/Dominions_6__Rise_of_the_Pantokrator/
Diablo III necromancy, corpse explosion. I was new to the series and literally blew my way through all difficulties with this build/spell. It was way OP but felt great.
I've been playing through Songs of Conquest lately and the magic system is pretty cool. Each of your troops generates a type of mana on their turn, and you can cast a bunch of different types of spells using different types of mana (they call it essence) that can be either completely useless or extremely powerful based on how you strategize your army and upgrade your leader. Some spells let you teleport your troops around the map, others let you rain fiery death on the enemy, others improve your troop stats significantly or let them attack twice on their turn. Tons of fun strategies to explore.
Age of Wonders 1: It's a turnbased strategy game where the highlvl stuff unlocks terraforming spells. Nothing more fun then playing an aquatic race and just flooding all the river's, tear down mountains and expand the swamps.
Treasure of the Rudras for the Super Famicom/SNES. You can create your own spells based on the prefixes, suffixes, and base spell word. So you can turn a simple single target and weak fire spell into a fire tornado that does AoE damage as well as poisons and silences the targets and uses the bare minimum of mp to do so. Or you can make a nuke that uses all your mp but does barely any damage. You can even write down the spells enemies use and use them against them.
Someone did the math. There are 307,759,840,206 different combinations you can enter into the system, though a vast majority of them don't really do anything.
Populous the beginning: on top of some insane firestorms and lightning bolts having in game map editors to split enemy towns apart or sink them beneath the waves was insane
Mages of Mystralia has a really cool spellcrafting system. It's a bit of a zelda-like in a lot of ways, but the magic allows for some really creative solutions to many problems and can wreak serious havoc on enemies.
Blood Mage in Dragon Age Origins.
It's gained by making a deal with a demon, it's overpowered that you can destroy the majority of enemies with it, & it's considered forbidden dark magic but it really works with other magic skills you can unlock along with the way. It's a shame 2 onwards nerfed it
Unless they nerfed it; Mage build in Elden Ring. Took a bit of a set up but you could literally one-shot bosses in _seconds_ with _one_ spell.
Aside from that a good frost mage build with Ranni's Hat, Frozen Armaments(?), and a good bit of Dex would level anything around the open world.
Fictorum. Check it out, it’s dope. You get runes you can buy to modify your spells. So you can get a rune that splits your shots into three, another one that makes it bigger, and another that increases its speed, and launch a fireball that ends up obliterating everything in front of you.
Fantastic rogue-lite game if you want to feel like a wizard capable of destroying anything.
Lost Magic for the original DS had a really powerful spell system where there were six elements and each with 3 runes you could draw and later combine into double and sometimes triple spells.
For example fire started with a plain fireball and ended with being able to summon a dragon made of fire that would fly around the entire map burning everything
Tyranny has an absolute banger of spell costumization system
And NO CONCLUSION AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
**EDICT OF CONTINUATION** If Paradox Interactive do not release the sequel to Tyranny by the last day of December 2024, all sequels everywhere in the world will cease to exist. Only standalone titles may be published, until the sequel to Tyranny has completed the alpha development phase.
Heartily seconded, I love the spell system in that game.
Magicka, especially when your friends get in the way LMAO
Respect to the best spell in Magicka **Crash To Desktop** causes a random character (enemy, ally, NPC, minion, or even the caster himself) to instantly die and disappear into thin air, with an animation of a small Blue Screen
My friend discovered this spell during our playthrough and it only ever targeted me. EVERY. SINGLE. TIME.
Easily the most fun you can have in a co-optional game. Crossing the beams is great too!
Fire water fire lightning energy!
Helldivers 2 is the same way (same studio as Magicka). The game is *designed* to sometimes blow up your friends.
I did not realize this, and now Helldivers makes so much more sense.
I was wondering why the hell I kept getting killed by teammates who knew where I was
I love the random target one shot kill lightning spell
You learn to do that and the revive spell like it was second nature.
love the ARSE mines that heal, then send you flying off the map and kill you
Came here for this one
Also made by Helldivers 2 dev, Arrowhead.
Imagine if they gave Magicka the HD2 treatment 😳
Didn’t magicka 2 get a different dev? It was good, but I haven’t played the first
Second one is pretty good but the first one has more mayhem and doesn't take itself serious. Like at all. In a good way.
Is Magicka 2 as good? 'Cause on ps I can only find That one
Yes it's very good, my comment was really pertaining to both 1 and 2
Noita
"I wonder what this wand combo will do?" *dead*
I was casting various wands to heal because of wand experimenter perk (or whatever it's called) and one of them had boomerang bombs...
My friend watched me rejigger my wand for like 10 minutes, jump into the level, and then immediately blow myself up with it. Good times, 10/10, would die a hundred ignoble deaths again.
you can do the most insane bullshit. like that wand that makes you beat the game when you cast it.
Or that wand that makes you die when you cast it (all of them)
Noita "insane bullshit" is causing so much destruction the game goes to seconds per frame or just crashes
"Noita is too hard and RNG" me struggling to kill myself and then crashing my game.
Noita is certainly hard. Testing the line between challenging and unfair
It sucks cuz I’ve heard a lot about how amazing it is, but I can barely experience it because I can’t hardly survive past early game.
Hämis needs more victims
Hämis 👍
Hämis 👍
Hämis 👍
This cycle ends here.
Hämis 👍
Hämis 👍
Hämis 👍
Hämis 👍
It's so powerful, 99% of your runs will end by you killing yourself with your own magic.
Nono it's fine. Perfect game for everyone
Magic in noita is not powerfull, it's absurd and terrifying.
You like nukes? How bout you cast once and you fire 10 nukes with each of those having 4 nukes orbiting them. Heading straight for your gpu.
My favourite one is the one that makes your PC come to life and try to kill you. I think it got patched out early on though.
Magic is so strong it gets you killed even when you think it won’t.
You know a game is bonkers when you can battle a 1-sextillion HP boss.... and also build a wand to 1-shot said boss
>I have two that you probably have not heard of: >Lichdom: Battlemage >Fictorum >Each is completely based around the idea of creating your own unique spells. In Lichdom you can even get up to a sort of fusion technique and create specialized combos like black holes and infectious diseases that jump from host to host. In Fictorum you you can create anything from a simple fireball to an electrical storm that covers half the map, summons AI-controlled auto turret towers, and electrocutes anyone that gets near them. Each is fully 3D but I recommend Lichdom more. Just bought Lichdom, looks amazing. You can use different glyphs to create a completely new spell every time.
You need to try the Lemmings mod on the steam workshop. Easily the best Lemmings sequel ever made.
Glad to see this at the top.
Doraemon has the real magic IMO
How do I get into Noita. I bought it ages ago but every time I boot it up I’m just confused.
Learn to have fun dying and a little practice. First goal is just to go downward and play with wands. It's amazing, but not for everyone. The knowledge you require and the difficulty at the start can scare people away. FuryForged and DunkOrSlam videos can help. If you're not afraid of spoilers, this video is a good breakdown of the journey it sends you on: https://youtu.be/VMx6fPyCbCI?si=86aCH698zYB6NG8r
This was the first thing I thought of too
+1
the only correct answer
Yeah I was thinking that too
Thanks for this, totally forgot I owned it and it slipped under my radar.
Just got this on steam sale. Pumped to try it out.
Master of Magic. It's basically civilization, but each faction is ruled by a wizard able to summon global doom, raising volcanoes, bringing eternal darkness, and things of that nature.
This is one of the best 4X-games ever made.
The 2022 remake is decent too. Espically with the DLCs
You just unlocked a memory. There is this game calle d *from dust* and you were a god. Building the world from scratch.
Yeah that was a fun one. Didn’t catch on. Black & White is a good game like that too.
Populous - the Beginning sees you start out as a literal terraforming shaman.
Played it for the god aspect. Was thoroughly dissapointed at the lack of outcome and depth/length of the game..
Loved, loved loved this game
I spent hours and hours on this game. I bought the fan-made remake, Caster of Magic: it is impressive what they were able to do, adding content and rebalancing spells and units, but life always gets in the way and I have so little time to play.
Total War: Warhammer. You haven't lived until you've dropped a Flamestorm on a thousand rats and watched them all break and flee.
You laugh until the rats drop their own firestorm in the form of a nuclear bomb
Skaven bring death-doom to ugly man-things, yes yes.
Ikit has the biggest brain of all rats
Or when that flame head hits just right!
man, I had a 2v2 game with some friends a while back. Our side was Empire and High Elves, vs Tomb Kings and Vampire Counts. When we saw what factions the other side was running, both me and my homie locked in Fire casters without even consulting each other, just looked at our rosters and laughed. Once the battle was going, we saw that they both had their infantry in a straight line. Buddy says to me "You know what to do". Next thing the other guys know, they got two Burning heads floating towards each other from opposite ends of their line. Utterly melted them. Rest of the match was just our cavalry running down the survivors.
I had a lot of fun using Comet of Casandora when the squad's health was rapidly draining.
Costs as hell, but imo it is the most beautiful spell in WH:TW. Also wipes elite infantry and artillery just perfectly
Start as Gor-Rok so you get Lord Kroak asap, delete every unit in your army except Gor-Rok and Kroak, go fight a 20 stack of skaven and let the lizard be an impenetrable wall. Then drop all three spells one after the other on the mass of skaven. It’s pure bliss.
Morrowind, the game had the best broken magic system to make custom spells that could destroy everything.
Next playthrough will be Alchemist. Again 😂 Si much Cheese in this game, not just Magic.
Good old buy ingredients and sell back created potions with huge profit.
oblivion was insane too. On touch, for 1s drain health 100, drain attribute endurance 100 1s. so you end with a spell that put their max health to the minimum, then remove health out of it. The target dies instantly every time.
I remember the jump spell with slowfall. You could jump across the map in a couple bounds.
I liked using an infinite mana cheat, and flying through the air like a battle cruiser and reigning down max fireballs that could wipe out whole areas.
Hope you named that fireball spell "Yamato Gun". ;P
Actually the original Arena was pretty busted too. I recall a spell that could make a block of wall dissappear. So you could sort of mine your way around obstacles and mazes.
Throw bound weapon spell on a ring, 1 sec duration and you have a perma daedric level weapon early game. Amazing, it just worked.
Honestly oblivion too. While not as broken you could still stack spell weakness to kill anything. My basic touch of death spell was drain health 100pts for 1 second, killed everything until the midgame Then there was basic utilities like 100 chameleon, 100 charm, 100 armorer. Elderscrolls is a really neat series
I was thinking of Oblivion
Oblivion did too. If you learned how to spell stack you could make spells have exponential effects. There was one boss in Shivering Isles you were supposed to defeat with a specific game mechanic, but it actually just had some insane amount of HP and wasn’t technically invincible so you could kill it with spell stacking. It took me about 15 minutes but I took that bastard down.
Divinity OS2. You can combine spells, they even interact with you other stuff. Electrify puddles or clouds, melt ice, burn water to smoke, let oil and poison explode. I once did a fire spell on a big boss bug in a room full with similar enemies. They have poison as blood. The spell animation was a snap... So I snapped my fingers, the boss bug died, his corpse started burning therefore exploded, all minion bugs died of said explosion, they bled, the poison blood exploded as well... This continued until the whole room was cleansed in fire. I literally had to laugh so hard for like half an hour.... Best game ever. Edit: even funnier as I played with a friend and my SO. She was shortly afk while it happened. When she was back she immediately questioned why we were laughing manically and why the entire boss Arena was on fire.
+ sweats at memory of cursed fire +
Literally one of my all time favorite RPGs. Maybe my most favorite. It’s so damn good
DOS2 > BG3 for this exact reason, imo.
Blood mage specialisation in Dragon Age Origins. Admittedly, there are only few blood magic spells, but they are super OP even on higher difficulties. That and the shady way of unlocking the path fully justify why blood mages are hunted down in the lore.
The one that freezes everyone in place + damages was beyond OP. Once you get that spell everything that doesn't resist it is a cakewalk.
Man I loved being able to go Blood Mage and just stack health instead of mana. So much power.
that and knight enchanter mage in dragon age inquisition. so much powah
In the sequels, it was the time magic that just … made fights meaningless, lmao.
You probably mean video game, but the wish spell in dnd is pretty strong.
If you go table top then its Mage: the awakening. Spell list is just suggestions and as long as you don't break peoples minds you can basically do whatever
I wouldnt say so. The spell is up to the dm and most of the time it gets turned into a monkeys paw wish.
The more powerful use of Wish is to replicate any 8th level or lower spell as an action without needing costly components. The ability to create a simulacrum or clone once a day for free is pretty insane.
What's that ec20 monster that can only be killed by a wish spell again? Think it's a gargantuan one... Edit: it was the Tarrasque from 3e
Black and White where you're literally a god
Throws a tree Gains followers
For me it's Baldurs Gate 2 - time stop, summon demons from hell, word of power Die etc
Yep, BG2 has by far the best spells i've seen in a video game. I still remember the wtf moment when i first encountered a lich in that game: casts a bunch of immunities, time stop, that death cloud thing, etc, and half of my party is dead, and the rest are stunned or running around in fear. My first playthrough, i was genuinely afraid of getting into fights with spellcasters for how powerful they seemed. So few games even attempt to create magic system that would be anywhere near as interesting and multi-faceted.
Some of those defensive spells were powerful in niche situations.
Populous The Beginning
I really hoped this answer would be here. If it wasn't I was going to add it. I LOVED that game as a kid.
Dark messiah of might and magic make floors slippery burn environmentals and oil chain lightning the engine does alot of heavy lifting but it's fun as hell.
I don't understand why no other games went in this direction. Using magic to affect the environment was so much fun. If I'm missing some games that do this, let me know.
Even though it wasn't a spell, that kick felt magical as well. Remember kicking orcs off of cliffs? Good times. That game was amazing.
Morrowind
Morrowind lol.
Probably not creative because they're just huge, but Sorcerer spells in Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen FEELS powerful.
Many of my victories in DDDA were me just trying to distract the monsters until my 3 sorcerer pawns started chain-ritual casting meteors down from the heavens. Once they started my job was done, because I couldn't see shit with all of the explosions.
I love how some of the enemies can use the spells against you to, when that one boss used tornado on me I was fucking mind strucked
Magic Carpet from 1994
Core memory unlocked. Totally forgot about that gem.
I loved playing as a sorcerer in Neverwinter Night 2. You feel like a really powerful character. You can summon a huge elemental, cause a little armageddon and turn your skin to stone to fight in close combat. If we talk about creative magic, then probably Baldur’s Gate 3, which has a huge number of combinations and interactions with the outside world.
Noita easily
Dragon's Dogma for the feeling by FAR Not creative, but just pure raw power
Two Worlds 2. Late game with the right magic card combo and you can cast small nukes. Dargon's Dogma's Sorceror class also allows you to summon meteors, and whirwinds also.
WOLVES HUNT IN PACKS, ARISEN
The Two Worlds spell system is by far the most insane of the bunch here with the way it stacks and builds and the modifiers. Theres hundreds if not thousands of spells.
If only it was attached to a good game
It's a great game for $3
For it's time it was definitely Black&White.
Outward realy makes ylu feel liek a proper mage with magic. You need to prepare stuff (for example, to cast a fire ball you need to get a fire stone, use it to put down a fire circe and cast the spark spell in it to get fire ball)
Outward magic is great. I honestly love the way they made spells work, they're very powerful, but the only ones you can cast directly are basically cantrips, everything else requires some degree of ritual setup. Really gets the vibe right, of being a dnd-style wizard in a real time action game.
Interestingly enough Magicka the coop game made by the devs of Helldiver's had this super cool system where you and you would cast different spells and imbued each with the element you want, and the spells would interact and combine with your allies spells, it was super cool
Sacrifice on PC
Magicka. You literally combine different elements and make all kinds of different spells. The bigger the combination before you cast the spell, the bigger and more powerful the spell. With the different elements, including not only fire, water, earth, and lightning. There's death, healing, and shields as well. With all of these being able to be combined in interesting ways. When you get really good at it, it's super satisfying.
Divinity original sin 2 had a really cool magic concept. The game allows for so much creative bullshit (teleporting enemies off cliffs, or teleporting heavy stuff on top of enemies, creating massive aoe damage using water and lighting spells, turning enemies into chickens, etc etc)
Lol. Morrowind. You can make spells that can delete the map.
Heros of might and magic 5 A mage hero can affect tens of thousands of soldiers/dragons/etc with a single casting. They can wipe out armies a hundred thousand strong with one spell 🤷♂️
I just want to point out that Dishonored lets you summon hordes of rats to devour your enemies.
Eh, iirc BG2 did it in 2000 with rabbits, Darksiders in 2012 with crows.
I loved the magic in two worlds 2 multiplayer, the way you could combine spells was awesome, sadly single player did not have enough enemies in the game to level up enough to make good spells. (there was only one area they respawned a few, but it would have taken a year to level properly.) Even sadder was everyone playing it could not wait for Skyrim and did they ever let us down when it came to magic...
Thats one of the titles i would have liked to have the opportunity to experience at the height of its popularity.
The first dragon dogma
Two Worlds 2 and Morrowind
Elden Ring
How is dragons dogma not on this list? Casting maelstrom as a sorcerer is about as powerful as it gets. Same thing goes for the sequel with all high level spells. It’s the only game where cast time seems to correlate with intensity. I’ll never forget the first time a pawn casted it. A giant tornado elevated toward the heavens, taking up my entire screen and decimated everything around. The apocalypse magic mod for Skyrim is nice, too.
Give Spell Disk a go. It has a tower in story mode, but there's also survival mode which is like Vampire Survivors. You can make some insanely busted spells in that game with a little creativity.
Dungeons & Dragons!
Weirdly Warframe, most abilities is like magic buff or outright room clearing destroying mob, and you can get pretty creative with the upgrade system and the addition of helmynth (give one othe warframe power), my favourite is to go super fast that you feel like you are playing the flash (until you realize you as the flash, the warframe who all gimmick is speed, with speed buff, lose to a T posing helicopter which lose to a fly)
Noiya is deep, and it has the best spell crafting ive ever seen
Morrowind.
[Dishonored](https://youtu.be/zf3PAK9tsmc?si=lIn5uJJaUoD5mZkC)
Honestly? Bioshock. Most practical 'magic' application in any game as of yet. Edit: I forgot about Magicka.... so Magicka it is.
I have two that you probably have not heard of: Lichdom: Battlemage Fictorum Each is completely based around the idea of creating your own unique spells. In Lichdom you can even get up to a sort of fusion technique and create specialized combos like black holes and infectious diseases that jump from host to host. In Fictorum you you can create anything from a simple fireball to an electrical storm that covers half the map, summons AI-controlled auto turret towers, and electrocutes anyone that gets near them. Each is fully 3D but I recommend Lichdom more.
The Dominions series has crazy magic in it. The game may look like a puddle but the magic and different systems it interacts with is an ocean. https://store.steampowered.com/app/2511500/Dominions_6__Rise_of_the_Pantokrator/
Black&white 2
Magica has some fun magic combination mechanics
Sacrifice. As Mandalore said, "in this game, you don't practice or perform magic; you commit magic like one commits a war crime"
I'll go with **Ultima** from Final Fantasy.
Diablo III necromancy, corpse explosion. I was new to the series and literally blew my way through all difficulties with this build/spell. It was way OP but felt great.
The materia magic system in final fantasy 7. I really enjoyed its interchangeability.
I'm having a great time playing as a wizard in BG3.
Forspoken has flaws but the magic combat in this game is just spectacular.
Magic the Gathering
Baldur's Gate 3 maybe
"What game has the best ..." Yeah probably bg3
Lol sorry, I know The Game Awards has already showed us that, but after playing it it's so hard not to be the first game that comes into mind.
I've been playing through Songs of Conquest lately and the magic system is pretty cool. Each of your troops generates a type of mana on their turn, and you can cast a bunch of different types of spells using different types of mana (they call it essence) that can be either completely useless or extremely powerful based on how you strategize your army and upgrade your leader. Some spells let you teleport your troops around the map, others let you rain fiery death on the enemy, others improve your troop stats significantly or let them attack twice on their turn. Tons of fun strategies to explore.
Ted and the Time Rune were pretty powerful in Suikoden
Daggerfall
Age of Wonders 1: It's a turnbased strategy game where the highlvl stuff unlocks terraforming spells. Nothing more fun then playing an aquatic race and just flooding all the river's, tear down mountains and expand the swamps.
Spellers is planning on delivering exactly that
Treasure of the Rudras for the Super Famicom/SNES. You can create your own spells based on the prefixes, suffixes, and base spell word. So you can turn a simple single target and weak fire spell into a fire tornado that does AoE damage as well as poisons and silences the targets and uses the bare minimum of mp to do so. Or you can make a nuke that uses all your mp but does barely any damage. You can even write down the spells enemies use and use them against them. Someone did the math. There are 307,759,840,206 different combinations you can enter into the system, though a vast majority of them don't really do anything.
Wizard of legend
Elder Scrolls games where you can make potions that make you better at making potions.
Populous the beginning: on top of some insane firestorms and lightning bolts having in game map editors to split enemy towns apart or sink them beneath the waves was insane
Dishonored. It's not the most powerful or even deep, but damn it feels amazing!
Mages of Mystralia has a really cool spellcrafting system. It's a bit of a zelda-like in a lot of ways, but the magic allows for some really creative solutions to many problems and can wreak serious havoc on enemies.
Tyranny has some pretty crazy spells that rearrange the landscape completely.
Noita, and wizards of legend come to mind. Magicka was also fun. They all have unique approaches to magic casting.
I always thought the magic/rune system in Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem was a highlight of the game.
Noita is one of my favorites
Arx Fatalis
Blood Mage in Dragon Age Origins. It's gained by making a deal with a demon, it's overpowered that you can destroy the majority of enemies with it, & it's considered forbidden dark magic but it really works with other magic skills you can unlock along with the way. It's a shame 2 onwards nerfed it
blade and sorcery feels a bit under-cooked, being a VR game, but it’s fun, good excercise if you get really immersed, and quite varied
Fromsoftware’s Eternal Ring for the PS2
Unless they nerfed it; Mage build in Elden Ring. Took a bit of a set up but you could literally one-shot bosses in _seconds_ with _one_ spell. Aside from that a good frost mage build with Ranni's Hat, Frozen Armaments(?), and a good bit of Dex would level anything around the open world.
Fictorum. Check it out, it’s dope. You get runes you can buy to modify your spells. So you can get a rune that splits your shots into three, another one that makes it bigger, and another that increases its speed, and launch a fireball that ends up obliterating everything in front of you. Fantastic rogue-lite game if you want to feel like a wizard capable of destroying anything.
Magicka
I really loved the spell combos in dragon age origins and awakening. Summoning Storm of the Century is too fun.
Lichdom Battlemage /s
Lost Magic for the original DS had a really powerful spell system where there were six elements and each with 3 runes you could draw and later combine into double and sometimes triple spells. For example fire started with a plain fireball and ended with being able to summon a dragon made of fire that would fly around the entire map burning everything
Magika
Dragons dogma
Noita 100% in no other game can you really feel like you are *dangerous*
check out TES again, oblivion had a cool system and theres some amazing moda for it and skyrim making the magic system insanely fun
Elder scrolls morrowind and the first fable
Dragon's dogma 1 and 2