I don’t like spell-casting much in games. If I get the option between playing as a character who uses physical weapons and one who uses magic I will almost always choose the former – which is a bit odd when the existence of magic is one of the primary distinctive features of fantasy settings. If magic is meant to add so much flavor and character, why is it so often so boring? Some time back, I wrote about my general disappointment with how magic is conceived of and expressed, particularly in games, as being usually functionally equivalent to a fancy glowing blue gun – but that’s only half the reason these games leave me cold. The other half is that, quite simply, I don’t think I’ve ever played a game that made the action of using magic feel intuitive or enjoyable.
How is spell-casting usually handled in games? Usually you get a list of spells, you choose and equip some of them and then swap whichever one you want into the active slot and press a button to use it. There’s a few variations on this but, for real-time games, this is usually how it goes – effectively repeating the same point-and-click paradigm used for other weapons like guns into a mystical framing. This interface feels frankly terrible to me – though equipping and then triggering abilities is a reasonable way to keep the interface simple, mapping what are supposedly innate skills onto the “gear” paradigm feels both awkward and unnatural. Imagine if a platformer required you to press a button swapping to the double jump skill before you could double jump! Equipping skills feels bad! Moreover, this just means that any equipped skill needs to approach the immediate utility of whatever other gear you might have equipped – making your average spell behave even more like a gun. Most often, when I have a bunch of skills I’ll just pick the one I like best and keep it equipped and almost never use others simply because I hate the interface: For instance, I strenuously avoided acquiring any non-passive skills in Dishonored just because any time I spent without the teleport skill equipped was time where I couldn’t move properly, and any time I had to spend switching skills was either time spent focusing on things besides what I was immediately doing in-game or time spent opening a time-freezing menu and making things slower and more boring for myself.
Okay, but what’s my point? My point is that games need to reinvent how magic (and other special skills) are implemented in action games. Equipping spells like weapons is just going to result in more spells that are like weapons. The Magicka games were interesting experiments in this regard: Though most of the spells were, in the end, still basically guns of different elemental types, the player could construct these spells on the fly by combining a series of elemental orbs which would create a spell with different properties and utilities. What if we were to, then, combine traits of this system with the ability wheel used in Dishonored to equip abilities?
For instance, you could hold down a button to make the wheel appear: The wheel would have 3 elements which you could select by holding a direction, releasing the button would make a second wheel appear with 3 more elements, pressing it again would make a third wheel appear with three more elements, and releasing would cast the spell. That’s 27 possible spells which could be further tweaked by having the power of each stage change based on how long you held that stage. Useful formulas could be quickly memorized, but if one carefully maintained an intuitive relationship between element and ability theming a player might be able to remember and quickly improvise through their skill set. As an example, the three sets of spell elements might be [Fire, Ice, Lightning], [Heaven, Earth, Body], [Many, Single, Null]: One could expect that a combination of Fire/Heaven/Single would create a single fiery attack from above, while a combination of [Lightning, Earth, Null] would create some sort of magnetic or electric force field. This would also, crucially, feel like doing something cool and mystical, stacking a set of runes to create some crazy effect, with the character on-screen presumably performing equally cool accompanying gestures.
That’s just one example. Another possibility: What if spells were like rituals, and rather than selecting and using them at all they were properties that emerged based on your actions? A spell could just be a list of conditions: If there is ever at any point a salt circle with a pile of ashes and a drop of blood then a nearby demon will be made an ally; if there is a burnt offering sprinkled with blessed water with a specific chant being sung nearby a portal then no creatures can die during the duration of the ritual; if someone walks backwards and discards a shattered weapon while holding their breath a small mammal can be revived; whatever, it could be anything. This would work very well with some sort of a roguelike experience, where rituals could be randomized and discovered on scrolls on each separate run. Furthermore, the items used in each ritual would probably have other uses, so the act of spell-casting could emerge naturally from the other mechanics.
These are just a couple of ideas I scraped up because I don’t like to complain without also proposing solutions: Hopefully anyone interested in this problem has ideas of their own. Of course, there’s no reason you need any spell-casting system at all. To return to the example of the double-jump, this is a clearly nonsensical ability you get in a huge number of games – it is a blatantly magical act to perform a second jump in the air, a form of limited flight. In most cases, the most impressive thing a character can do isn’t any huge discrete action, any laser beam or fireball, but becoming something that can disregard the rules that bind the rest of us. The video game character’s ability to get shot hundreds of times before succumbing? That can be magic. Falling from any height, pushing massive objects around, breaking solid walls, healing instantly by picking up meat – these are all obviously ridiculous. The most satisfying forms of magic are frequently the ones your character just does. If you have one character who runs on the ground and another who floats a few inches off of it, even if they move at the same speed and are mechanically identical one of them is still a fucking wizard. In the end, magic is as it always was, mere sleight of hand – the imagination is what does the work.