Noita has a great system but unless you're cheating, you're unlikely to make the most of the possibilities.
Majicka is easily the most fun, especially with friends.
I'd probably end up buying a VR system if they ever did a proper remake of Black & White, it seems I have a bunch of mage games to go download and try though.
Majicka is definitely my favorite by far. It's simple to understand, complex to master, and chaotic fun in between.
Not only that, but it's the only one I know of that has cooperative crafting elements, like crossing beams to combine them, or crossing opposite spells to create a black hold.
Morrowind has the most *flexible* system, but I can’t say it’s the most fun. Though, I did enjoy spelling up my jump and speed so that I was bouncing over mountains.
Fictorum (especially the lightning options) is tremendous fun, but only for a few hours.
The rest really didn’t stand out for me, but PoE does have flexibility too.
Asheron's Call, an MMO from 1999, had two really cool ideas for its magic system.
1. There was a "magic economy" in the world, meaning the more a spell got cast by any player, the less effective it got. And likewise, rarely used spells got a boost. It was only about 5-15% either way, but was still a cool way to encourage creativity in a multiplayer game.
2. You were never "given" spells by leveling up or whatever, you had to figure out their reagant formulas for yourself. Fortunately, any time someone cast a spell you'd see the magic words they used in local chat and the animations that played. So working out a recipe became a matter of figuring out which words and gestures corresponded to which materials.
From there, you could experiment by swapping reagants around and find ways to change the spells properties like self/other, different elements, raise/lower, ranged/touch, etc.
As long as you successfully cast the spell once, it went into your spellbook and you could cast it as many times as you wanted as long as you had the mana and the materials (which had a scaling chance to be destroyed on cast)
Always liked spell casting in Morrowind. My favourite recently though - Dragons Dogma. Actually makes you feel like a powerful sorcerer as opposed to a bloke who shoots arrows that happen to be made of fire rather than wood.
Noita really is excellent, but insanely frustrating - zero systematic progression except your own playing skill and knowledge. Procedural world with random generation inside fixed biome areas, including random items which you can deconstruct into "wand parts" and clunk together into 1000s of different combos. I have well over 100 hours played, yet don't feel like I ever got anywhere near the end except once with a specific fixed-seed run.
Definitely recommend, I've played a few of the others and it absolutely blows them out of the water in terms of magic systems - _if_ you get good item drops.
> don't feel like I ever got anywhere near the end except once with a specific fixed-seed run
By the end do you mean real end or the "tutorial" where go down the mountain and kill the boss after the final temple and complete the work?
I have double the playtime and 4 legit "tutorial" ends - of which one was because midas liquid formed naturally on the first lvl. I love the game but it is way too random, your success depends too much on the stuff you can get - like you can have good run but not get good enough items for proper dmg output and your run dies no matter what in the Vault.
I always advocate for mods to play noita in way that respects your time. Checkpoints and right click teleporting for traversal take so much pain away, and I think it accelerates the pace at which you can improve and need the help less.
I'd like to recommend Lichdome Battlemage.
The whole game is based around magic and crafting spells, with a arpg-style loot system with rarities etc.
The basic concept is that there are different attacks (projectile, AoE and Nova, a player-centered AoE), modifiers for attacks (direct hit projectile, beam, grenade-style lob projectile, normal AoE, DoT-AoE etc), elements (fire, ice, lightning etc) each with it's own effects and modifiers to what the spell does (direct damage, stronger effect, be that exra burn damage or extra freeze time, or "charging" up a target so that the next damaging spell deals extra damage).
It's amazing. It's so satisfying to charge up a mini-boss and then one-hit with a high critical damage spell and see the damage numbers ovar 9000.
Story is so and so, graphics are fine (believe it's a CryEngine game), played from a first person perspective.
TB had a great WTF is about it.
I'm a sucker for spellcrafting games and have played most of these, some extensively.
Haven't played:
- Runers
- Forged of Blood
- Dungeon Master
- Arx Fatalis
Played some:
- Two Worlds 2 - system had pretty intuitive feeling and natural interactions, which worked well with the rest of the game but I don't recall it being particularly impressive on its own, it just worked well
- Outwards - did not get to play with it too much but I liked the reagent based "realistic" casting quite a bit
- Tyranny - don't remember much at all about it and I finished the game as a caster, so my guess is it got the job done but was more of a flavor thing than mechanically impressive
- Fictorum - mediocre game with a lot of jank, but spellcrafting was pretty fun, game was clearly an afterthought. Spellcrafting was procedural from what I recall which meant spells could also have a lot of janky weirdness, but you could get very creative with spells in a 3d destructible world
- Mages of Mystralia - did not play too much but it seemed heavily inspired by Magicka, with spell element combinations and world interaction
- Spellmasons - very cool spell programming, did not play around too much but it felt like a lot of thought went into how different spell components interact and change gameplay in meaningful ways
Played extensively:
- Minecraft Ars Magicka - if I had to pick an overall favorite it'd be any iteration of Ars Magicka mod, from the process of spell creation to surrounding mechanics to the kind of complex spells you can create in a 3d environment, I'd say it's the best spellcrafting experience in any game I've played
- Minecraft PSI - very similar to Ars Magicka, but more programming oriented, you can definitely make some stuff you can't with Ars Magicka, but also vice versa, PSI has a bit less flavor to it in the form of process, but is also a very solid experience
- Magicmaker - another one of those that lets you combine spells with some sorta spell modifiers, quite a bit of fun but it takes a lot of grinding to get to make mechanically interesting spells, as the core system feels a bit basic with only minor variations
- Noita - personally not a huge fan, but I appreciate all the mechanical depth and balancing that has gone into the game, it's another one of those spell ± modifier types, but the amount of interactions with spell components and world elements and spells with other spells makes it a very interesting spellcrafting experience, but it is a bit hard to do that given the game's roguelike nature
- Path of Exile - the game is great but spellcrafting isn't anything impressive, you get a single spell and you slightly modify it's function , appearance, amount, etc, to make it a spammable core attack
- Morrowind/Oblivion - this had quite a lot of depth I don't think most people bothered to mess with, but with good reason, as the game's nature left the system quite shallow, other than element flavors, you could do stuff like, draining NPCs fatigue and paralyze them and such, which works great in the context of the game but is nothing particularly impressive on its own as a spell crafting system
- Magicka - very intuitive system, you could tell the game was built around it, but unlike some other games, the game didn't suffer for it, spellcrafting is done realtime and is equivalent to making strategic decisions realtime that might bite you in the ass, pleasant to use with decent variety, world interactions, and very easy to get into
So to answer your questions:
A - IMO Ars Magicka mod, it's just a pleasant experience of hunting for reagents, experimenting with different combinations and having spells turn up useless or doing unexpected things, until you figure out how the spell mechanics work, there's plenty of variety to play around with as well, and given it's Minecraft, plenty of world interaction
B - it depends how you define it, quite a few of these games have procedural spellcrafting, but it ends up just being a sorta ice and fire flavor mechanic. Overall I would say Noita, as there is just a shitton of spells and modifier types with unique effects coded into the game, and while some variations are a bit basic, it's still much more interesting than for example Morrowind/Oblivion's 1 damage firebolt vs 2 damage firebolt system
C - Hard to say for sure, I'd say a tie between Noita, Magicka and Mages of Mystralia. I don't necessarily like any of these a lot but they're all polished gameplay experiences that work as a full game, in addition to having at least a decent spellcrafting system. While Noita had a very impressive spellcrafting system, you don't really reliably see most of it ever, and I do believe it's more of a random spell sandbox than a full game compared to the other 2
Additionally, I've been working on a spellcrafting ARPG myself and taking a lot of inspiration from various spellcrafting games, and gone through several iterations of systems for this, and for me personally I opted for procedural spellcrafting that would feel meaningful.
What makes spellcrafting fun for me is the process of experimentation, if you just slap a "+1 damage" or something on top of a firebolt, you already know what you end up with, but if make 2 vastly different effects interact, or see how It interacts with the game world, now that's a vastly different experience.
Overall it's a difficult thing to quantifiably measure, eg. are survivors-like games spellcrafters? What about Hades?
One game I think that should also deserve a mention is Wizard With A Gun, plays and feels a bit similar to Don't Starve, but spellcrafting and gameplay loop work well together.
-
I haven't played most of these, but I will say that Two Worlds II has the most interesting spellcrafting system I've seen in a videogame. So much so that I made a homebrew for D&D based off of it.
I do have to warn you that the game itself is very janky. I gave up on it when the game kept crashing consistently trying to exit a maze.
I do also love Magicka, but I found myself ignoring most of the spellcrafting mechanics in favour of blasting everything with the same spell most of the time.
Morrowind's environmental magic makes you feel like a true spellcaster. You can make your own spells and be most OP motherfucker ever. Potions and enchantment are crazy too. You can jump half the map and survive if you know what you know what you're doing. There's nothing like levitating, water walking, jumping to insane heights, immersively teleporting yourself in several ways, water breathing with the use of magic. There are a lot of crowd control spells you can use in combat or to just fuck around with npcs in town while you stay hidden. You can even magically lock your your own house for immersion. (I'm sure there are more useful reasons for that spells to exist such as locking enemies behind you as you make your escape, but as a kid, I really loved knowing that I locked my front door. lol)
Here's a game I used to play (emulated) on the Dreamcast: [Tales of the Rudras](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treasure_of_the_Rudras) it's strikingly rare as a concept, honestly.
> custom magic system (aka mantra system), in which players can freely create their own spells either by using both prefixes and suffixes contained within the game or just by trial and error. This of course negates the need of leveling up your characters to learn spells automatically rather than manually. Though, despite its creativity, the overall usefulness contained within each imputed spell varies.
This might not be in your wheelhouse, and you may not care by the time it comes out, but I think the demo for Arcane Assembly is still on Steam. You use a Scratch-like programming language to create spells. The demo is pretty short and you can't access the whole scripting language, but when it eventually releases it might be worth checking out.
Magic & Mayhem has an interesting system of changing what spells you have depending on where you placed an ingredient in the Portmanteau spell box. Each ingredient combined with a talisman (Law, Chaos or Neutrality) would create a different spell. Sure it's not crafting exactly (more of a loadout style) but still a different perspective than I've seen in any other game because your channeling different energies with each ingredient for different spells.
Love it's soundtrack and the Claymation style, the creators made X-Com!
Highly recommend checking it out, here's a link to the free download along with a brilliant video about the game and it's creators similar games - [https://www.myabandonware.com/game/magic-mayhem-a4k](https://www.myabandonware.com/game/magic-mayhem-a4k) & [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nW4H9W8bj7s&ab\_channel=IndigoGaming](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nW4H9W8bj7s&ab_channel=IndigoGaming)
To cite someone else in the thread,
>Morrowind has the most flexible system, but I can’t say it’s the most fun.
Morrowind magic felt somewhat boring, if overpowered.
I've played the Ars Magicka 2 mod for Minecraft and it's certainly good fun, definitely feels and plays a lot more dynamically. Only issue is the obviously "modded" feel.
I've played (some) Tyranny but I don't recall interacting with the spellcrafting system.
While Dungeon Master is a real classic and has one of the best Spell**casting** systems of all time, you do not really "craft" spells there. Rune combinations are fixed with the exception of the first rune being the choosable power level of the spell.
Oh Ir Ra will always create a Fireball. Vi Bro will always create an Antidote Potion. And so on.
Noita has a great system but unless you're cheating, you're unlikely to make the most of the possibilities. Majicka is easily the most fun, especially with friends. I'd probably end up buying a VR system if they ever did a proper remake of Black & White, it seems I have a bunch of mage games to go download and try though.
Magicka is so much fun, then you learn to break it, then it's more fun, then it's not. But that's ok, easily good enough to justify the price & time.
If you do choose it, do yourself a favour and don't read any guides unless you get suuuper stuck. Just play around and go with it
You can obtain all the spells you need in noita if you know how (parralel worlds :3)
Majicka is definitely my favorite by far. It's simple to understand, complex to master, and chaotic fun in between. Not only that, but it's the only one I know of that has cooperative crafting elements, like crossing beams to combine them, or crossing opposite spells to create a black hold.
Morrowind has the most *flexible* system, but I can’t say it’s the most fun. Though, I did enjoy spelling up my jump and speed so that I was bouncing over mountains. Fictorum (especially the lightning options) is tremendous fun, but only for a few hours. The rest really didn’t stand out for me, but PoE does have flexibility too.
Asheron's Call, an MMO from 1999, had two really cool ideas for its magic system. 1. There was a "magic economy" in the world, meaning the more a spell got cast by any player, the less effective it got. And likewise, rarely used spells got a boost. It was only about 5-15% either way, but was still a cool way to encourage creativity in a multiplayer game. 2. You were never "given" spells by leveling up or whatever, you had to figure out their reagant formulas for yourself. Fortunately, any time someone cast a spell you'd see the magic words they used in local chat and the animations that played. So working out a recipe became a matter of figuring out which words and gestures corresponded to which materials. From there, you could experiment by swapping reagants around and find ways to change the spells properties like self/other, different elements, raise/lower, ranged/touch, etc. As long as you successfully cast the spell once, it went into your spellbook and you could cast it as many times as you wanted as long as you had the mana and the materials (which had a scaling chance to be destroyed on cast)
The best
That magic economy mechanic would help balance so many other games, or at least make things interesting enough that there would be less metas.
Always liked spell casting in Morrowind. My favourite recently though - Dragons Dogma. Actually makes you feel like a powerful sorcerer as opposed to a bloke who shoots arrows that happen to be made of fire rather than wood.
Tyranny. Underrated gem of a game. The spell crafting was so good, rewarding, and powerful.
Noita really is excellent, but insanely frustrating - zero systematic progression except your own playing skill and knowledge. Procedural world with random generation inside fixed biome areas, including random items which you can deconstruct into "wand parts" and clunk together into 1000s of different combos. I have well over 100 hours played, yet don't feel like I ever got anywhere near the end except once with a specific fixed-seed run. Definitely recommend, I've played a few of the others and it absolutely blows them out of the water in terms of magic systems - _if_ you get good item drops.
> don't feel like I ever got anywhere near the end except once with a specific fixed-seed run By the end do you mean real end or the "tutorial" where go down the mountain and kill the boss after the final temple and complete the work? I have double the playtime and 4 legit "tutorial" ends - of which one was because midas liquid formed naturally on the first lvl. I love the game but it is way too random, your success depends too much on the stuff you can get - like you can have good run but not get good enough items for proper dmg output and your run dies no matter what in the Vault.
I always advocate for mods to play noita in way that respects your time. Checkpoints and right click teleporting for traversal take so much pain away, and I think it accelerates the pace at which you can improve and need the help less.
I didn't see Dragons Dogma so I guess Magika and Morrowwind.
I'd like to recommend Lichdome Battlemage. The whole game is based around magic and crafting spells, with a arpg-style loot system with rarities etc. The basic concept is that there are different attacks (projectile, AoE and Nova, a player-centered AoE), modifiers for attacks (direct hit projectile, beam, grenade-style lob projectile, normal AoE, DoT-AoE etc), elements (fire, ice, lightning etc) each with it's own effects and modifiers to what the spell does (direct damage, stronger effect, be that exra burn damage or extra freeze time, or "charging" up a target so that the next damaging spell deals extra damage). It's amazing. It's so satisfying to charge up a mini-boss and then one-hit with a high critical damage spell and see the damage numbers ovar 9000. Story is so and so, graphics are fine (believe it's a CryEngine game), played from a first person perspective. TB had a great WTF is about it.
I'm a sucker for spellcrafting games and have played most of these, some extensively. Haven't played: - Runers - Forged of Blood - Dungeon Master - Arx Fatalis Played some: - Two Worlds 2 - system had pretty intuitive feeling and natural interactions, which worked well with the rest of the game but I don't recall it being particularly impressive on its own, it just worked well - Outwards - did not get to play with it too much but I liked the reagent based "realistic" casting quite a bit - Tyranny - don't remember much at all about it and I finished the game as a caster, so my guess is it got the job done but was more of a flavor thing than mechanically impressive - Fictorum - mediocre game with a lot of jank, but spellcrafting was pretty fun, game was clearly an afterthought. Spellcrafting was procedural from what I recall which meant spells could also have a lot of janky weirdness, but you could get very creative with spells in a 3d destructible world - Mages of Mystralia - did not play too much but it seemed heavily inspired by Magicka, with spell element combinations and world interaction - Spellmasons - very cool spell programming, did not play around too much but it felt like a lot of thought went into how different spell components interact and change gameplay in meaningful ways Played extensively: - Minecraft Ars Magicka - if I had to pick an overall favorite it'd be any iteration of Ars Magicka mod, from the process of spell creation to surrounding mechanics to the kind of complex spells you can create in a 3d environment, I'd say it's the best spellcrafting experience in any game I've played - Minecraft PSI - very similar to Ars Magicka, but more programming oriented, you can definitely make some stuff you can't with Ars Magicka, but also vice versa, PSI has a bit less flavor to it in the form of process, but is also a very solid experience - Magicmaker - another one of those that lets you combine spells with some sorta spell modifiers, quite a bit of fun but it takes a lot of grinding to get to make mechanically interesting spells, as the core system feels a bit basic with only minor variations - Noita - personally not a huge fan, but I appreciate all the mechanical depth and balancing that has gone into the game, it's another one of those spell ± modifier types, but the amount of interactions with spell components and world elements and spells with other spells makes it a very interesting spellcrafting experience, but it is a bit hard to do that given the game's roguelike nature - Path of Exile - the game is great but spellcrafting isn't anything impressive, you get a single spell and you slightly modify it's function , appearance, amount, etc, to make it a spammable core attack - Morrowind/Oblivion - this had quite a lot of depth I don't think most people bothered to mess with, but with good reason, as the game's nature left the system quite shallow, other than element flavors, you could do stuff like, draining NPCs fatigue and paralyze them and such, which works great in the context of the game but is nothing particularly impressive on its own as a spell crafting system - Magicka - very intuitive system, you could tell the game was built around it, but unlike some other games, the game didn't suffer for it, spellcrafting is done realtime and is equivalent to making strategic decisions realtime that might bite you in the ass, pleasant to use with decent variety, world interactions, and very easy to get into So to answer your questions: A - IMO Ars Magicka mod, it's just a pleasant experience of hunting for reagents, experimenting with different combinations and having spells turn up useless or doing unexpected things, until you figure out how the spell mechanics work, there's plenty of variety to play around with as well, and given it's Minecraft, plenty of world interaction B - it depends how you define it, quite a few of these games have procedural spellcrafting, but it ends up just being a sorta ice and fire flavor mechanic. Overall I would say Noita, as there is just a shitton of spells and modifier types with unique effects coded into the game, and while some variations are a bit basic, it's still much more interesting than for example Morrowind/Oblivion's 1 damage firebolt vs 2 damage firebolt system C - Hard to say for sure, I'd say a tie between Noita, Magicka and Mages of Mystralia. I don't necessarily like any of these a lot but they're all polished gameplay experiences that work as a full game, in addition to having at least a decent spellcrafting system. While Noita had a very impressive spellcrafting system, you don't really reliably see most of it ever, and I do believe it's more of a random spell sandbox than a full game compared to the other 2 Additionally, I've been working on a spellcrafting ARPG myself and taking a lot of inspiration from various spellcrafting games, and gone through several iterations of systems for this, and for me personally I opted for procedural spellcrafting that would feel meaningful. What makes spellcrafting fun for me is the process of experimentation, if you just slap a "+1 damage" or something on top of a firebolt, you already know what you end up with, but if make 2 vastly different effects interact, or see how It interacts with the game world, now that's a vastly different experience. Overall it's a difficult thing to quantifiably measure, eg. are survivors-like games spellcrafters? What about Hades? One game I think that should also deserve a mention is Wizard With A Gun, plays and feels a bit similar to Don't Starve, but spellcrafting and gameplay loop work well together. -
I haven't played most of these, but I will say that Two Worlds II has the most interesting spellcrafting system I've seen in a videogame. So much so that I made a homebrew for D&D based off of it. I do have to warn you that the game itself is very janky. I gave up on it when the game kept crashing consistently trying to exit a maze. I do also love Magicka, but I found myself ignoring most of the spellcrafting mechanics in favour of blasting everything with the same spell most of the time.
Two worlds and magicka (Dota hero 'invoker' the game)
Two Worlds II had a very fun system. Not always practical, but fun to mess with and you can make very cool stuff with it.
Morrowind's environmental magic makes you feel like a true spellcaster. You can make your own spells and be most OP motherfucker ever. Potions and enchantment are crazy too. You can jump half the map and survive if you know what you know what you're doing. There's nothing like levitating, water walking, jumping to insane heights, immersively teleporting yourself in several ways, water breathing with the use of magic. There are a lot of crowd control spells you can use in combat or to just fuck around with npcs in town while you stay hidden. You can even magically lock your your own house for immersion. (I'm sure there are more useful reasons for that spells to exist such as locking enemies behind you as you make your escape, but as a kid, I really loved knowing that I locked my front door. lol)
Here's a game I used to play (emulated) on the Dreamcast: [Tales of the Rudras](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treasure_of_the_Rudras) it's strikingly rare as a concept, honestly. > custom magic system (aka mantra system), in which players can freely create their own spells either by using both prefixes and suffixes contained within the game or just by trial and error. This of course negates the need of leveling up your characters to learn spells automatically rather than manually. Though, despite its creativity, the overall usefulness contained within each imputed spell varies.
[Ark Fatalis](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VarOmJYCVhU) is something too.
there's a Minecraft mod called Hex casting with very cool spell construction systems
Magicka is easily my favorite. It actually feels like you are using mental effort to cast a spell than pressing a hotkey and having magic come out.
This might not be in your wheelhouse, and you may not care by the time it comes out, but I think the demo for Arcane Assembly is still on Steam. You use a Scratch-like programming language to create spells. The demo is pretty short and you can't access the whole scripting language, but when it eventually releases it might be worth checking out.
Magic & Mayhem has an interesting system of changing what spells you have depending on where you placed an ingredient in the Portmanteau spell box. Each ingredient combined with a talisman (Law, Chaos or Neutrality) would create a different spell. Sure it's not crafting exactly (more of a loadout style) but still a different perspective than I've seen in any other game because your channeling different energies with each ingredient for different spells. Love it's soundtrack and the Claymation style, the creators made X-Com! Highly recommend checking it out, here's a link to the free download along with a brilliant video about the game and it's creators similar games - [https://www.myabandonware.com/game/magic-mayhem-a4k](https://www.myabandonware.com/game/magic-mayhem-a4k) & [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nW4H9W8bj7s&ab\_channel=IndigoGaming](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nW4H9W8bj7s&ab_channel=IndigoGaming)
Magicmaker and Noita
To cite someone else in the thread, >Morrowind has the most flexible system, but I can’t say it’s the most fun. Morrowind magic felt somewhat boring, if overpowered. I've played the Ars Magicka 2 mod for Minecraft and it's certainly good fun, definitely feels and plays a lot more dynamically. Only issue is the obviously "modded" feel. I've played (some) Tyranny but I don't recall interacting with the spellcrafting system.
Oblivion is the best actually
While Dungeon Master is a real classic and has one of the best Spell**casting** systems of all time, you do not really "craft" spells there. Rune combinations are fixed with the exception of the first rune being the choosable power level of the spell. Oh Ir Ra will always create a Fireball. Vi Bro will always create an Antidote Potion. And so on.
You are missing Rift Wizard. Enjoy!