Why is magic so lame in video games today? Why isn’t it actually scary like actual superstition? Accusations of hocus pocus stemmed from fear of the unknown, much like how religion was made in confrontation with the unknown grandeur of nature.
If magic is too effective it’s boring. Magic is arbitrarily powerful, and for the sake of the game, it is arbitrarily enforced.
>>728916541Woah cool it with the antisemitism
>>728916541Cause that's gay. Superstition should come from cryptid sightings.
>>728916541Because everything has to be explained so some autist can categorize it on a wiki. Soft magic is absolutely abhorred as people want to understand everything.
I just want to cast ice/fire/lightning to varying degrees of effectiveness. Fuck off with your wiccan bullshit "Lilith"
>>728916541I'll give an effortpost answerMagic has been all but thoroughly demystified in the internet age, and honestly in a large part due to videogames with systemized depictions of magic. Scary magic does exist in videogames, but it's hard to find unless you know where to look. I would guess to most people who don't bother to try to understand, there are a few different pop culture conceptions of magic. There's the videogame wizard (which has its roots in Dungeons and Dragons) who maybe reads from a spell book, waves a staff, or drinks a potion and casts fireballs or buff or debuff spells, etc. etc. This has all become very routine in videogames. In videogame logic, this kind of magic is extremely commonplace.There's stuff like Shin Megami Tensei, Cthulu mythos inspired videogames, or occasionally Low Fantasy genre stuff where magic has a harder edge, ritual sacrifices, creepy cults, binding and controlling lower order beings, interacting with deep chaosforms, etc. etc., but even those sorts of things, if not depicted carefully, or maybe even merely by being depicted in a videogame at all, become less scary. 1/2
Most people don't actually know the history of magic and the occult, it's a philsophy that has more in common with information, memes, art and propaganda than summoning a demon or casting a fireball. Just look at old sayings like "Speak of the devil, and he shall appear", the idea of magic is grounded in how our thoughts shape reality around us.
>>728917436We’re waiting anon.
>>728917675They got him, he was getting too close to the truth
building up a dark gritty atmosphere and serious or cool elements, cool being like, in the sense of a tiger being cool, a fearful but respected animal, is sucked out of all media and video games because it promotes "toxic masculinity" in the psycheinstead, you get harmless spells, a story you dont care about, bright or bland colors. all of this stuff subconsciously affects you and it part of SJW programming
Tacticool wizard game with bayonet mounted wands when?
>>728916541Fear comes from the unknown. Games need rules, and rules can be understood. Randomization doesn't help because "roll 1d100 twice on this table" is only slightly more complicated than "if X do Y".
>>728917285The problem with the "soft magic" is that it's difficult to implement in a video game which is, by its nature, logical and formulaic.
>>7289174362/2It is possible to avhe scary magick in videogames, and I find that the scariest games tend to be aware of the medium of games, reference the game itself and the playr, and the potentail role/use of games for magick.It's interesting too, I've noticed people there are a lot of people who aren't quite aware enough of what they're seeing to be scared. It's like videogame reality tunnels become so second nature, that people just see certain kinds of things as videogame enemies or game mechanics.
>>728916541This looks amazing, prompt/site?
>>728917779A year agohttps://store.steampowered.com/app/1043810/Tactical_Breach_Wizards/
nu-Marathon has been getting a lot of justified flak for Bungie's studio bullshit, but frankly they've still got it when it comes to bad vibeshttps://youtu.be/-WDRvs-IApc?si=DXVdyLdI_d_JTON6
>>728916541>kike symbolOY VEY
>>728916541The fear of magic has more to do than just the unknown. It's about the costs of magic. What the power does to your mind. The lives or innocences it might demand you to take depending on the setting. Games on the other hand are largely about avoiding giving players costs. And when those costs are demanding they're expected to be fair or it's bad design. To wish for a game to emulate this unknown and strike fear into you you would need to design a game that would make you feel fear to even play and engage with its systems because it could ruin you. To get a similar not save scummy result you would need for the game to be focused on narrative and such so there's critical components keeping players from unplugging. Then you have to expect them not to reload their save and that your game will never crash. About the only game I've ever seen pull this shit off is undertale
>>728918627>>728916754Mathlets
Bonus >>728917875Some odd gamesDrowned God: Conspiracy of the Ages has a pretty horrible aura. Especially with its creator's murder. There is a version for sale now on Steam and Epic Games Store, but somehow I imagine that version's been sanitized, despite claims to the contrary. Cookie's Bustle is a game that's been aggressively censored from the internet by a mysterious copyright troll, who apparently doesn't own the rights to the game and isn't affiliated with the creation of the game at all. Somehow this person (it seems to be a single person) has incredible leverage though. Cookie's Bustle is a Japanese childrens PC adventure game. Here is a music video featured about midway into the game for some understanding on the subject https://files.catbox.moe/z8i6h6.mp4On a mundane level, sure the copyright troll situation is odd. Maybe it's some guy who wants to ensure physical copies of the game are valuable, and so is trying to crack down on pirated copies. This is long past the point where piracy would affect the original developers or publisher, and the game isn't sold digitally, but even so it's not out of reason that someone would want to increase the values of physical copies by cracking down on people passing this game around digitally. Odd, but maybe there are mundane reasons for it all. What few people know though, even among those who are aware of this odd controversy, is that the game's plot follows the titular bear Cookie, or rather (as in the song's lyrics), a little girl who believes she is a bear, encountering aliens, who banish her from reality. The game ends with her in a spirit realm, singing a song of love she hopes people on Earth will hear. To me this is somewhat uncanny, as it's reflected in the situation with the copyright troll trying to keep this game off the net. 1/3
>>728916541Real magic is the hand around the bandsaw, the thrown spark in the powder keg, the dimension-warp linking you straight into the heart of a star, the flaming sword that burns all the way down to the pommel. Sooner juggle torches in a tar pit than mess with real magic. Sooner lie down in front of a thousand elephants.
>>728916541How do you design game mechanics using abstract concepts like changing the weather or cursing somebody?Throwing fireballs and lightning is a thing because that's a tangible power simple enough to wield.
Jews are wizards.
>>7289193812/4Final Fantasy XV was originally going to be a game called Final Fantasy Versus XIIIBoth Final Fantasy XIII and Final Fantasy Versus XIII are (or were, in Versus XIII's case) quite esoteric, and Versus XIII seems to have rubbed some people the wrong way. Possibly the Yakuza. Possibly something else. Versus XIII had started its development before 2012, and was rebooted/rebranded as Final Fantasy XV a few years later. I mention 2012, because of the Mayan apocalypse meme. Not that there was a literal apocalypse (there was), but in some sense there was a memetic apocalypse. It's quite a strange thing actually, there were several games, including Bungie's game Destiny, Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, Hideo Kojima's P.T. - Silent Hills project, and a handful of others, including ambitious indie projects ... lots of these games that had great ambitions in terms of ideas, themes, and in some cases esoteric intentions, which, after 2012, were strangely gutted and rebooted. Destiny had it's lead writer and several key employees fired, and its story stripped down to nothing. P.T. never remained anything more than a Playable Teaser that's been somewhat unsettlngly stripped from its official download source (again, unsettling not just because of the fact of its being removed, but its contents contextualizing its removal as an unnerving thing). The Phantom Pain has its mythical missing chapter 3 - and The Phantom Pain is an interesting case where the game itself is about the sensation of something being missing on an overt thematic level, while seeming very much to have something important missing.
>>7289201923/5 Apparently some of Final Fantasy Versus XIII's original esoteric ideas survived in Yoko Taro's NieR: Automata. There is a sequence where the Machine race have set up a kind of religious kingdom, and the player is tasked with acting as an envoy to open peace negotiations. These go south. This sequence is apparently a recreation of an idea that was originally central to Final Fantasy Versus XIII's storyhttps://youtu.be/MPeCei_qfnQ?si=HYVI0t1_BgAMEGjg
>>7289202314/5
>>728920267Did u die
>>728917285>>728917824Makes me wonder why soft magic worshiping George r r Martin wrote for magic spamming game writer Miyazaki.
>>728920192>>728920231>>728920267tldr people in the west generally do not understand how big freemasonry is in Japan. For some reason freemason fags can't help but constantly put their shit everywhere. This drivel in jap games is completely normal. >>728920721Becuase no matter what you think about GRRM, he's an actual serious writer who wants to write about people and not about mAgIc SySteMs
>>728916541There's no difference between vidya magic users and the fucking X-Men superhero comics. Human Torch and a fire mage are basically the same thing. All magic is is fantasy superheroes.
>>728920951It’s easy to see why magic is easily conflated with superpowers. Like power, magic is relative (“when everyone is super—no one is super”). Magic used to be seen as esoteric knowledge (“I know something you don’t know”) which often translated into having certain abilities (“I can do something you can’t do”). This changes over time. Someone from the future would be a wizard to someone from the past. What’s occult in history is no longer occult now.
>>728917285Nah.
>>728917285The issue isn’t that people want to understand everything. It’s that they refuse to acknowledge the ever present essence of mystery. No matter how much we understand, there’s always going to be a further frontier. We still don’t even know how gravity works. An alien UFO is magic to us, not the alien pilot. Magic is at the edges of understanding. It’s all a matter of exposure logic. Familiarity.
https://youtu.be/mjY6awCr2_c?si=cgBLUAvb6jHD_6PV
>>728921417Okay?
>>728921632dw about it Just a little latin
>>728921336The problem there is that there's only so many gods of the gaps that can be created before the remaining realm of possibility becomes more petty than enticing
>>728920951For superheroes the power is innate and individual, which makes it different from magic that can be learnt and is an external power.
>>728916541The only reason you are presenting it in a detatched way is because the spread of atheist superstition telling you that a soul doesnt exist allows you to dismiss anything positing a soul as primitive retardation. Magic openly existing with people casting spells and shooting fireballs means a soul exists. Thus it isnt scary because you have softlocked it in your mind as inherently retarded nonsense for simpletons who cant know better because they havent reached that level of "progress" and its impossible for them to "progress" due to their time period. So you want a fictional world where magic is scary and everyone is stunned at the "unkown" which you simultaneously claim to be known and ineffective irl. This is the contradiction that answers your same question. You have created an atheist reality for yourself and want to be amused at petty primitive thinking you think you are above, it doesnt make any sense really.
>>728922265this is not inherently true for superheroes or magic
>>728922331Sure, that's just the average. Deviating from that is more often than not a twist.
>>728920192I wouldnt lean hard on 2012 stuff, our modern calendar is two years or so off the mayan calendar on purpose so unless im misremembering it most of the stuff from that would fall on 2010.
I think bro short circuited >>728922321
>>728922436not at all reread it as many times as you need to. Anons itt are discussing the same topic above me.
>>728922321>Magic openly existing with people casting spells and shooting fireballs means a soul exists.How?
>>728916541>Why isn’t it actually scary like actual superstition?Because you need to be able to press a button so a fireball can come out. Imagine if you had to gather a bunch of rare in-game items to perform an elaborate ritual, and if you mess up and displease the spirit you're summoning he corrupts your save file. Might be cool in an artsy indie game, but could never work in a game meant to have mainstream appeal.
>>728922389For the sake of fun, I'll write this. It doesn't exactly matter from the perspective of a certain occult philosophy. Yea all that technicality can be used to "disprove" the idea of a 2012 apocalypse, and obviously the world didn't actually end (in an obvious way), but memetically, the idea was on everyone's mind. And even if it didn't end in a literal sense (to most people), the world has dramatically changed since then. So the technicality doesn't matter as much as the way it feels. Like a David Lynch film.Personally I find Halo 3's E3 2006 trailer interesting. It announces the end of the world coming in 2007, which, as oldfags like to point out, was the year of the Iphone, Facebook, and a ton of other shitty developments.https://youtu.be/T9Ezd2FqxAU?si=5MEKZV42QsOimFoI
>>728922458No bro, you're just retarded
>>728922489The irony with anon's post is that atheist director Stanley Kubrick (who was also comically both jewish and deeply antisemitic) said something like that about The Shining. Quoted as saying something along the lines of "Ghost stories are ultimately optimistic at their core, because they imply an afterlife." He did not believe in an afterlife. But anon seems to be a seething christfag who is assuming OP is an atheist, because talking about "scary magic" is only something a non-christian would do, and to him all non-christians are atheists.
If it's not clear >>728923296The irony of this >>728922321 is that anon's attitude is the very "materialist atheist" idea he decries without his realizing it. Anon is a christfag who believes he's "progressed" "above" a belief in magic to "superior christian beliefs" He wants to pretend he believes in magic, but to him it's only real in the sense that it's something, scary, unholy, and to be avoided. So, as Nietzsche pointed out, the christian invented science to protect himself from magic. This christfag can be "above it all" because he has the "superior beliefs", even though he's effectively and functionally a materialist atheist himself. He undoubtedly prefers the scientific consensus and the comfort of religion to any sort of scary occult ideas. He believes in magic, but believes it's all inferior to a belief in jesus, thus handing away the key to his wand cage.
>>728923296>>728923704This kind of strikes at the core of OP's question doesn't it. The Christian West tends to pathologically deny anything "scary". The only thing that's allowed to be scary is an angry totalitarian asshole in the sky with a taste for foreskins. Anything else that scares you is first banished with holy water and crucifixes, then you're told it wasn't scientific for you to believe it existed in the first place.
>>728924447Huh. I finally understand this painting.
This thread made me realize why Pokemon is considered satanic by some. You make contracts with monsters, which mirrors the goals of goetic magic. Pokedex is a grimoire.
>>728916541DOS2 had the best magic experience in a game. I really did feel like an evil bastard sorcerer, terrorizing the populace by summoning thunderstorms and exploding corpses. would highly recommend
Magic can be scary but it doesn't lend itself to gameplay unless it's fear and hunger style where your limbs get chopped off and you can get permanently blinded by an acid attack. If you can recover easily the game is no longer scary. Insta-kills are also not scary because you can just reload.
>>728916541Is there anything else between mp casting and vancian?
>>728924783Cooldowns
>>728924726There are plenty of games with multiple skill trees. It was a popular design choice between 2002 and roughly 2015.
>>728924906Right. Feels inherently mmo, but could be argued as subset of either, namely regenerating mp/slots.
>>728924663It's maybe funnier/more embarassing when you realize the lesser key is a pokedex
>>728925075Yeah I thought about that. Publishing a cutesy Pokemon themed version of Lemegeton sounds funny in a multiple ways.
>>728924783Ritual casting that consumes various regents and ingredients, almost on par with ammunition.
>>728925001I guess I forgot to mention that elemental ground effects play a big part in immersion. Stunning people with electrified water or creating a frozen puddle for foes to slip on brings a tangibility to your spells that just a different flavor of damage doesn’t fully replicate.
>>728925045It’s a tricky conundrum because you want some sense of resource management for balance purposes, but I feel like many don’t use mp/slots to its fullest extent and it just feels tacked on, especially systems where recovering MP is trivial. I have a distaste for spell slots, but I liked the use of MP in the Persona games, where time management and pulling off efficient expeditions was part of the gameplay loop. Very generic answer I know, but it depends on the game.
>>728925163Not exactly what I mean. And that kind of thing probably wouldn't be very funny to do. It's just that there's an angle where that kind of magic is about as mature to pursue as Pokemon. And produces about the same level of unbridled autism if done badly.
>>728925189Arguably a subset of the two as well, needing reagents to activate slot/mp.I do feel magic should have reagents. They could be used to customize spells further. Missed opportunity.>>728925258Boring, as they shouldn't've focused on surfaces alone. Magic a followed by magic b should have its own effect c. Like casting freezing water and windy cyclibe after that should aadd ice crystals as shrapnels aso. The general idea of combining effects is awesome, but it's spells that should've been compatible, not just some effects.
>>728925381>mp/slots to its fullest extent and it just feels tacked onExactly my point. More int = more spellslots, lol.>magic system you thought off but haven't seen anywhereI go first. Like I said before, not combing effects, but spells for unique spells/effects.
>>728925392>It's just that there's an angle where that kind of magic is about as mature to pursue as Pokemon.I inferred that from your post alright. What I meant is that doing so would offend both people who treat goetic tradition with respect and soccer moms, which is a quite stupid intersection.
>>728925459the original design was to have a layered web of environmental effects but playtesters found it too confusing. They switched to just basic elements with blessed and cursed variations. While they could have gone further like I said it provided a layer of immersion and interaction that I don’t see in other magic systems. I think taking inspiration from Magicka (the game) would be good, I think that has a bit of what you were talking about. And I would be interested if someone took Noita’s wand crafting system and put it into an actual RPG framework.
>>728925538It still would be a bad idea to publish something like that for the public. But that would be funny.
>>728925527Spells made from sacrifice. Souls you’ve captured acting as ammunition. Though you can argue it’s similar to an anon’s earlier proposal.
>>728925647>playtesters found it too confusingPlaytesters seem to be a bane on good videogames being made.
>>728925647>layered web of environmentalIs that available somewhere?>playtestersFound the problem>magickaIs it an old game?Noitas wand crafting system? I'll take a look
>>728925665>It still would be a bad idea to publish something like that for the public.Not that anon but I genuinely don't think so. There are cutesy Tarot decs, multiple versions of Necronomicon and many, many pop-magic books published. Nobody would give a shit unless you've tried to market it as children's book instead of a novelty gift.
>>728925810>Is that available somewhere?I am too lazy to get the source, if I remember correctly it was a GDC talk by a systems/gameplay designer>Is it an old game?yes, 2011, and unfortunately in the modern day it’s very unstable and prone to crashing
>>728925803Sounds like Soul Reaver combined with Bloodlines.
>>728925846Yea sure, crack cocaine is safe and presents little danger as an addictive substance if managed in a controlled situation, like a medicinal use. But you shouldn't just distribute it to people.
>>728925920I always felt you could do more with the Souls part of Dark Souls. Like these are people’s life essences, surely you could do some crazy things with them. Combine that with the elder scrolls idea of different ‘tiers’ of souls…you use random monster souls for filler spells but save boss souls for when you need greater power.This also makes me think of another idea, as in the Souls games it acts as a currency, so basically a magic system where you spend ‘money’ to cast spells. There was a similar mod to Pathfinder WOTR that replaces material spell components with its equivalent gold cost.
>>728925990Jesus isn't going to fuck you. You don't have to go to larp this hard.
>>728926045Your materialist disbelief is just as idiotic as christianity.
>>728925990Crack cocaine actually works and cannot be downloaded from the internet by every person with a smartphone.
>>728926173I didn't say I was a materialist, I said Jesus wasn't going to fuck you.
>>728925665It'd still be the same far more traditional magic despite the wrapping. Ad fontes is a big thing to consider for people who care.t. that anon
>>728926204And that's your cross to bear, weird faggot
>>728926247naw I know a dude pretty good at carrying that for me, he's got a free schedule from all the time he's not spending answering your phone calls
>>728926281Have you tried being funny or coherent recently?
>>728916541Any magic in a video game needs to work on specific pre-made rules. And if the player is to use it, then the rules need to be pretty intuitive. I think magic can still be mysterious and esoteric in the lore, or in the way it's used by third parties in the story, but it's near impossible if not completely impossible to make a mystical magic system at a mechanical level.
>>728926229Oops, meant for >>728925846
>>728926357You could add some probablitiy based debuffs and side effects to the magic to make it unpredictable.
>>728926357>>728926589For it to be fun the player must be able to play around with it in some sense. Instead of just debuffing or hurting the player here’s my idea: high magic use brings the attentions of demons or the equivalent on you. They might try and bargain, steal your soul, offer you power, or fight you. Selling your soul to certain demons could modify/enhance your spells in a unique way. I feel like lots of designers are afraid of magic feeling powerful because it won’t be balanced. This adds another wrinkle for the player to play with while making magic feel dangerous and mystical in the game world.
>>728926357Ok, so stay with me. Randomly generated magic system. Magic works a bit different every time you start a new game and you need to find out how it works yourself. Some time its cast from mana, some time there is no mana and you use your HP. Some times you can cast fireballs, some times only summoning magic is available. Some times you need spell reagents other times they just make spells stronger but aren't necessary.
>>728926589>>728926718Stuff like d&d wild magic exists already, you can have weird, unexpected randomized effects, but does wild magic actually feel more "magical" than normal spellcasting in d&d games? I feel like it's still very gamey and after enough casts it's inevitably going to be brought down to a player making a pretty simple choice while calculating the odds of success.
Traditional systemized videogame magic, ie. the Dungeons and Dragons lineage RPG type of magic, could be made scary without much effort. Just give it the right fictional context.
>>728926870I don’t really think so. That’s why in my post I tried to come up with something more in depth than just rolling on a table.I personally feel “magic is powerful but dangerous” is a more interesting idea than “magic is unpredictable”
>>728916541I think magic in general is boring in fantasy settings where it's already a well-established part of the world. It's cool in modern horror stuff because there it represents an intrusion into the modern worldview, something that breaks it and makes you question everything you thought you knew. That's why it's thrilling to see something supernatural happen in a horror movie and have the characters freak the fuck out, even if the magical effect is subtle.In fantasy though it's just a typical and boring part of the world, usually, at best some kind of DBZ power and at worst something that completely makes the worldbuilding fall apart if you think about the actual effect it would have on society for five minutes.Some settings do manage an interesting middle ground though, like in 40k magic or psychic power is known and common, at least from the player's perspective it often is, but the setting puts in a lot of work to ensure it's still viewed as forbidden, dangerous and occult, not just a thing anyone can pick up for no consequence.
>>728916541Magic always was lame in video gamesAnd moviesAnd booksYou have to choose between a macguffin, a setpiece, or a gun that makes fireballs but requires 10-20 years of learning how to pull the triggerIt falls apart if it's actually investigated as a *Thing* and stops being magic if it's codifiedBut it's equally dull when the author is using it to handwave and just make a spectacle happen, some people find it's really deep and interesting, but ultimately under examination the handwave just becomes obvious
To be fair, even d&d spells can have some really incredible and highly specialized effects, but those kinds of spells don't really translate to vidya that well. You can control weather, stop time, create a personal demi-plane, create glyphs and symbols with various activation conditions and various effects, create actual castles or magic towers, you can shift planes, you can create illusions of anything, you can enhance the taste of your food, increase the volume of your voice, create a clone of yourself, force someone to do something by putting a geas on them, and so on, and so on.But in vidya where combat is 80% of the gameplay, it's all brought down to damage and buffs/debuffs.
>>728916541>Why is magic so lame in video games today?Because the majority of developers are uncreative hacks, making games for the majority of gamers who are uncreative retards. So magic is basically just a damage number to toss at the enemy, or it inflicts some kind of condition that is also just expressed as a damage number when all is said and done. People jerk off the magic system in Elden Ring these days, which is just baffling considering the entire bloated list is just damage number manipulation.
>>728916541I think it's cool when the magic has been "lost" to time but is still being practiced by one or two dudes who are keeping the tradition alive
>>728927062>magic is powerful but dangerousReminds me of Noita. I think magic is handled in pretty cool way in that game with how it's knowledge based, it's unpredictable if you don't know what you're doing.
>>728927716I like how Noita plays, but it always felt more like weird guns rather than magic to me.
>>728925527Another idea. Magic changing based on the environment. Spells are modified, certain spells can only be cast in certain places, etc. Inspired by the common theme of mages drawing magic out from the land. And then you can build on that with the Discworld idea of the strongest mages generating magic from themselves.
>>728928054Outward does some stuff like that.
