Video Games Deserve Better Magic Systems
Spells should feel like wrestling with reality and breaking rules, not just choosing what flavor of DPS you’d like spew at an enemy.
Video games have attempted to tackle the idea of magic in a number of different genres over the years, with each genre containing multiple different takes within itself. We’ve seen turn based RPGs, action RPGs, first person shooters, strategy games of the turn based and real-time varieties, and more, each with their own approach to discerning the transmundane. These efforts have been (for the most part) well-intentioned and often creative, but for every successful incarnation of gamified magic there are at least three that feel unsatisfyingly flat. Aside from the obvious (“magic isn’t real, dumbass, what do you expect developers to base things on”), the reasons for this disappointing ratio can be hard to pin down, but I’m going to try and explore why I think it happens.
The Criteria
I think a satisfying magic system must fulfill a set of criteria to be both engaging and entertaining beyond the surface level. Obviously, this is a subjective process, but I feel that if a given criterion is specific enough to be targeted, but not so specific as to be made niche, it’ll maintain its utility for the sake of this discussion. With the disclaimer out of the way, here is my criteria for a successful magic system in a video game:
- Breadth of Application [Breadth]: Engaging with magic is mechanically rewarding in two or more aspects of the game’s design space.
- Depth of Application [Depth]: Engaging with magic is mechanically multifaceted, allowing for meaningful choices and player expression.
- Lore/Narrative Integration [Lore]: Engaging with magic encourages, rewards, and/or requires engaging with the lore/narrative of the game’s setting, or the game’s core conceit.
- Visceral Satisfaction [Satisfaction]: Engaging with magic is fun and satisfying as part of the gameplay loop via dramatic visuals, sound effects, and other feedback.
If a given video game’s magic system fulfills three of those four categories, I consider it a success. Very few games fulfill all four; many rely almost entirely on exceeding in one or two — and that’s largely okay. A game can have a shallow or disappointing magic system and still be fun.
So why these four criteria?
If something is magical, it is beyond what is real or plausible, and if someone is practicing magic they are wrestling with that unreality. What makes this possible? Or, on the other hand, what does the magic tell us about the wielder? What insights can be found in the arcane? Those questions are why I care about lore and setting. Magic breaks the rules, and any attempt to gamify magic should provide unique mechanical value that goes beyond a single aspect of the game. How are the standard rules broken, and what are the constraints? That is why I demand depth and breadth. As for visceral satisfaction, that’s simple: games should be fun, damn it.
With the criteria set and briefly explained, I want to explore some examples and discuss where they succeed and where they fall short. I’ll discuss two successful examples and two disappointing examples, and .
There will be spoilers ahead!
The Good: Engaging and Thought-Provoking
Tyranny (2016) — The Secrets of Sigils
Tyranny (2016), developed by Obsidian Entertainment, is a wonderful CRPG title on many levels, and may be the subject of its own dedicated article in the future. It’s also one of the few games I’ve played that arguably fulfills all four of my criteria, and makes up one-third of the games that inspired this discussion in the first place (the other two will be discussed in later sections). So lets talk Sigils.
Sigils are runes or symbols used to cast magic during the game’s real-time-with-pause combat encounters, and have four components: the base sigil, the expression sigil, the accent sigil(s), and enhancement sigil. The base determines the type of spell being cast from a list of eleven. These base sigils range from Fire, Frost, and Lightning, to more ephemeral categories like Life, Emotion, and Atrophy, each supported by a relevant character skill (Control Fire, Control Atrophy, etc.) and the character’s Lore skill. These combine with one of nine expression sigils to determine how the power or category of the base sigil is expressed. This leads to over 60 unique spells that can be learned, created, and cast over the course of a playthrough of Tyranny, each useful in varying game encounters. So what about the accent and enhancement sigils? Accent sigils modify the stats of the crafted spell, allowing for increased area of effect, reduced cooldown, stronger effects, and so on. Enhancement sigils add secondary effects like a chance to stun, the ability to fuel the spell with blood magic, or merge frost and fire effects, among others. Sigils are a mechanically deep system that rewards experimentation and personalization for each given playthrough and party composition, and generate effects that cannot be replicated by other systems.
Every combination of the four types of sigil creates a spell with unique traits as dictated by the player’s exploration, character build, and desire. You learn new sigils by engaging with research facilities at one of the game’s Spires, by purchasing them from merchants (who usually only sell weak or early-game accents and expressions), or by developing your party’s Lore skill and exploring the various ruins and locations of the world. Additionally, the skills that govern the efficacy of those spells (Control [X]) can be used to clear some of the point-and-click obstacles in the game, such as putting out a fire with Control Frost instead of needing a bucket of water. These two aspects of the Sigil system — the exploration integration and the broader relevance of attached Skills — create a mechanically broad system that rewards investment.
Every core sigil is a symbol that draws upon the aspects of a given Archon, legendary figures replete with innate magical power. In that sense, you are engaging with the lore whenever you cast a spell already, but two things deepen this connection. Firstly, an Archon is a figure of power that gains that power based on their deeds, the way they express and enforce their will over the world and other people (which brings the game’s title into mind), and the legend that grows around them. You are invoking people whenever you engage with the sigil system, and can intuit things about them as you do so if you wish. Secondly, the Fatebinder, your player character, becomes an Archon via your own deeds as your play through the game, and encounter several other Archons on the journey (one of which, Sirin, the Archon of Song, joins your party and is the source for your Sigil of Emotions). Blending the game’s themes of power and reputation with the Sigil system links the mechanics of the magic system to the game’s setting and lore, enriching both in the process.
These all combine to create powerful spells that can combo together in combat for devastating effect. Single-handedly neutering a squad of enemy armored troops with a combination of spells that coats the ground in ice, douses everyone in acid rain, and then purges them in a hail of frostfire will never not be viscerally satisfying. When I load up Tyranny, I’m looking forward to exploring, unlocking new sigil combinations, reaching new Lore skill benchmarks that allow me to craft even more powerful spells, all while thinking about the nature of the Archons and the themes of the overall game.
Tyranny also serves as a good example to illustrate something I specifically left off my list of criteria: exclusivity. You can engage with the sigil system in Tyranny as a staff-wielding mage type character, sure. You can also do it while charging headfirst into the enemy with a broadsword and heavy armor! You’re not punished for it — far from it, some spells are best used while utterly surrounded and neck deep in violence! And because even low level spells (spells crafted with a low Lore requirement) can be effective, you’re not punished for being a mere dabbler. The game rewards the exploration of magic at every level of investment, which only makes me want to dive deeper and push the limits of my spells further.
While Tyranny isn’t without flaws (I’d love to be able to use specific sigils in non-combat situations more, for example), it has become the standard I hold other RPGs — especially CRPGs — to for the development of a magic system. It’s important to consider the criteria within the bounds of the game and genre the magic system is being developed for. Applying the principles of Tyranny’s Sigils to a first person shooter, for example, would likely not suit the fast paced expectations of the genre. But Tyranny’s Sigils are a sterling example of what a well crafted magic system can look like, and thus is our first example.
Dishonored (2012–2017)— Supernatural Sensibilities
The Dishonored franchise, consisting of Dishonored (2012), Dishonored 2 (2016), and Dishonored: Death of the Outsider (2017) are all lauded single-player action-adventure stealth games where you play as one of a few flavors of (potentially) magical assassin. As a first-person action game, the rules and expectations of gameplay in Dishonored are very different from a real-time-with-pause CRPG like Tyranny — which is exactly why it’s my second example. A complicated web of spell crafting and design is not the best fit for every genre, and is not a necessary prerequisite for success.
Dishonored’s gameplay loop can be largely split into three pillars: combat, stealth, and traversal. Anyone that’s played the games is well aware of how much fun all three of these are; it’s satisfying to carve through a squad of soldiers after teleporting from rooftop to rooftop and carefully sneaking past knife-armed automatons. It’s not less satisfying using these abilities to carefully evade the guards and make it to your objective like a ghost. The supernatural powers given to the player in the game by the mysterious pseudo-deity known as the Outsider are core to the mystic assassin power fantasy in the games, and these powers excel at delivering the promise of their design space.
As the majority of my experience with the series lies in the second title, Dishonored 2, I’ll be using it as my primary focus. The other reason for doing so is due to the twin protagonists of the game, and how different their supernatural abilities are. Corvo Attano, the grizzled Royal Protector and protagonist of the first game, and Emily Kaldwin, the true Empress in exile (if you play as her) have two distinct power sets — and the distinction between these power sets gives insight into the character’s personality and lived experiences. For example, Corvo’s Possession stems from his desire to fit in with Dunwall society and his common upbringing, and Emily’s Shadow Walk is an embodiment of the terror and uncertainty she felt while hiding in the first game as a child. These traits encourage you to engage with the setting and the characters, and to a lesser extent encourage you as a player to consider what your powers would be if given the Mark of the Outsider. Unfortunately, that’s about as deep as it gets — the Outsider and the Void he represents are Lovecraftian entities/spaces that are beyond most understanding, no matter how many runes or bone charms we collect. Instead, the powers are windows into the characters using them and tools used to navigate the themes and levels of the game.
So how do these powers function mechanically? How broad and deep is this system?
In Dishonored 2, each of the protagonists has 5 unique powers and one shared power (Dark Vision), and a handful of common passive skills. These powers can pretty safely be categorized as either stealth-focused (Possession, Shadow Walk), combat-focused (Windblast, Rat Swarm), or traversal-focused (Blink, Far Reach). Each supernatural power has a small upgrade tree powered by runes, small stone slabs you find exploring each level of the game. The trees for each power are small, but the upgrades tend to offer unique new functionality rather than just a buff to the power’s base function. This is still relatively shallow at first, even for this genre of game, but there is another aspect of the game that adds unique, if inconsistent, depth to the powers: bonecharms.
Bonecharms are unique items that can be found in each level of the game, generated each time from a short list. Once found, they can be equipped to add unique effects and bonuses to different gameplay functions — including your powers. A favorite combo of mine was to pair an upgraded version of Corvo’s Possession ability (the upgrade is Chain Hosts) that allows me to jump from host to host, and a bonecharm called Separation Trauma, which renders a host unconscious when their possession ends. This enabled me to safely, and relatively stealthily, knock entire rooms unconscious without ever stepping foot in it initially. It was a unique playstyle I abused for most of my playthrough, rewarding my broad exploration with mechanical depth.
So what do we have then? We have a limited selection of powers for each protagonist, each with a limited upgrade tree that expands the power’s functionality in some way. This limitation is actually a strength of the game — it prevents bloated mechanics and cognitive overload of the player in the early stages. As you progress through each level, however, you can find bonecharms and runes, which directly feed back into your supernatural powers and “build” as you develop your own playstyle organically through play. The powers both encourage the player to develop certain playstyles, and reward them for doing so across all aspects of the game. You are rewarded for exploring by the very powers that make exploration and traversal easier (and more interesting). The powers enable unique approaches to both stealth and bloodshed directly, and are a powerful enough presence in the game that the game is bold enough to allow you to choose to ditch them entirely. If you do so, you’ll get a wholly different gameplay experience — but you’ll find yourself thinking about ‘what could have been’ the entire time.
Dishonored 2’s supernatural powers prove themselves through gameplay, whether they’re present in your save game or not, and I’d say that’s a powerful bit of design work.
The Bad: Disconnected and Frustrating
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (2011) — Magic in General
I love playing mages and spellcasters in every game where I’m given the option. I love playing the fireball-slinging nuke of a wizard, the trickster figure casting illusions and enchantments, the calculating conjurer deploying arcane pawns and summons to do my bidding, all of it. I love the fantasy of doing the impossible and wondrous in a given setting. It’s what makes Fantasy fantastical, god damn it.
So when I say the magic system in Skyrim drives me mad, it’s because I’ve spent hundreds upon hundreds of hours working with, and more often against, the tools the game gives me as a mage. This boils down to a couple specific issues, but let’s talk about what the game’s magic does well first.
Skyrim as a game is incredibly broad, with a large world map and many different ways to approach it, and it’s magic mirrors that breadth. The game’s magic is broken up across 6 skill trees (Illusion, Alteration, Destruction, Restoration, Conjuration, Enchantment). Of the skill trees, all save Enchantment have a list of spells dedicated to them that the skill tree augments as you play. This results in over 150 spells learnable in the game, each split across the schools of magic and divided into five tiers (Novice, Apprentice, Adept, Expert, Master). There’s a couple dozen enchantments you can put on armor and weapons at enchantment tables, which are learned by breaking down enchanted items found while exploring the world. If you own the Dragonborn DLC, you can even craft magic staves for your use, instead of relying on a what you get from quests or buy in stores. On the surface, that sounds like a lot of options for a potential mage in Skyrim — and it is! Skyrim’s magic, like everything else the game offers, is undeniably broad, offering many different tools and playstyles to experiment with and enjoy.
So what about depth? This is where Skyrim’s magic begins to stumble. Let’s work in reverse.
Staves in an unmodded Skyrim save are, frankly, terrible. There’s little to no interaction between magic staves and your skill trees, and the leveled item lists of Skyrim means that even supposedly legendary staves will rapidly fall into uselessness, making magic staves little more than supplementary stat sticks for the first few levels of play (which will almost never have a staff to begin with). If the game’s magicka system, the slowly recharging blue mana bar that fuels and limits spellcasting, was more restrictive, then staves would have more value. None of your skill trees enhance or encourage the use of magic staves whatsoever — the only benefit to a destruction master using a fireball staff is that a high Destruction skill makes each cast of the staff cost less of its innate charge. No increase to damage or any other trait. So one piece of that broad puzzle is largely useless to a mage player, while only being passably useful for a non-mage. Using a staff actively punishes a mage player by both taking up valuable carry weight, but also slows your leveling because of how the game approaches skill development and leveling. You are punished for fully engaging with the mage fantasy.
Enchantments and enchanting are largely functional, but many of them are either unexciting (add flat fire damage to your sword swings) or seem catered more toward non-mage playstyles (Fortify etc.). The exception to this rule is that at high levels of Enchantment it’s possible to create a set of equipment that reduces the magicka costs of your spells to zero, functionally unlocking the maximum amount of spell spam. This is rewarding and exciting, and being able to also enchant gear for a companion (even though some enchantments just flatly don’t work on companions!) is fun. Enchantment is fine, and I’d not be doing my due diligence if I didn’t at least give it a nod.
Actual spellcasting inevitably lets me down by the midpoint of almost every non-modded mage playthrough. This is a threefold problem: Skills, spell progression, and game design.
The skill trees for magic in Skyrim are, for the most part, fine in a vacuum, but there’s a critical problem that you notice as you play — especially if you’re playing a destruction mage. The difference between a Flames spell cast by a novice mage with 20 Destruction, and a Flames spell cast by a master mage with 100 destruction, is: nothing! The master can spew flames longer than the novice, but this supposed master of destructive magic will do exactly the same amount of damage (or marginally more if he chose to specialize with the specific elemental perks). It’s neither intuitive nor satisfying. This is, of course, to encourage the player to use the higher tiered spells — Firebolt and Fireball instead of Flames — but that’s where the actual spell progression also fails.
Spell progression in Destruction is largely intuitive, with the damaging spells growing larger and more powerful. . . until you’re killing your own companion while you try and kill a dragon, forcing you to use lower leveled spells that are more precise, but also don’t scale damage with skill level. The spell progression for other schools runs into similar problems, where higher level spells are merely the same as the lower, but with more power and sometimes more of an Area of Effect. The main exception to this is the Conjuration skill tree, but the summons run into the same scaling issue as the other trees. You rarely feel like you’re breaking the rules with magic in Skyrim as a result of the limited design space (though modders have done some wonderful things to remedy this, if you’re curious), which results in a magic system that feels like it lacks mechanical depth.
The final issue, one of design, affects the other criteria for a good magic system. With the exception of Shouts, which are themselves a little under-baked, magic in Skyrim does little to encourage me to or reward me for diving into the lore of the setting or the nature of magic itself, and it doesn’t give me many opportunities to use magic outside of combat. Every spell in the game, save maybe Telekinesis (which is disappointingly bad), is solely used for combat with little utility outside of it. Sure, you can get creative with Illusion (and I have, it’s my favorite playstyle), but even those options are limited. This is a consequence of the neomedieval gameworld and the frontier myth that permeates the game and puts a “strength first” perspective over the entirety (read Being Dragonborn: Critical Essays on The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim for more), but that doesn’t make it less disappointing. I’m not going it even get into how spells like “Transmute” merely existing in the game breaks the economy and introduces an unplanned incoherence to the setting.
I can go on, but I’ll cut short here. Skyrim’s magic is extremely broad, yes, but it promises depth that it doesn’t deliver and becomes less and less satisfying once you’re past the midgame for most magic trees. Its systems leave every vanilla mage playthrough short and ultimately disappointing.
Dark Souls (2011) — Spell Ammo
I love Dark Souls — I love the entire franchise. But if I were to claim that magic in the first Dark Souls game was good, I’d be lying through my teeth. Let’s keep it short and sweet and go over Dark Souls’ magic point by point.
Every spell, be it a Sorcery, a Miracle, or a Pyromancy spell, has a specific, limited number of charges that can only be increased by attuning (equipping) additional copies of the spell, and have no avenue for customization and only a limited amount of depth for mechanical skill expression. This hurts the game in two ways: firstly, no matter how big the spear of blue crystal energy is, no matter how many digits the damage number has, the satisfaction of casting will always be tempered by the shockingly small number of casts you have (as few as 2 or 3 for powerful spells) between bonfire rests; secondly, the spells most players will use for 85% of the game are largely interchangeable orbs/spears/darts of damage with little other mechanical impact.
There are counterarguments, of course. To the first point, Dark Souls is a game where resource management and careful planning (or recklessness paired with high skill and game knowledge) is a key point of engagement and friction between the game and the player. I’ll concede that point — for Dark Souls 3 and Elden Ring, where limited casts were replaced with a much more fluid, but still appropriately restricted, Focus Point resource bar that can be refilled by flasks like your HP (and required additional decision-making because you had to choose how to split your total flask allotment! Risk and reward!). In those games, casting spells feels like weighing your options for what spell to cast in moment-to-moment play based on the fluid resource you have, and not deploying consumable grenades and self-buff stims like casting in Dark Souls and Dark Souls 2 does. As it is, magic in Dark Souls feels unintuitively restrictive, negatively impacting its depth and satisfaction.
To the second point, an array of utility and support spells exists across all the spellcasting disciplines in all of the SoulsBorneRing (you get the point) games. That remains true in Dark Souls — but only on paper. The majority of these utility spells are either outright useless for most playthroughs (Repair, Acid Surge, Seek Guidance), are incredibly niche (Resist Curse, Flash Sweat, Aural Decoy,), or only really function in the admittedly important online PvP (Hidden Weapon, Tranquil Walk of Peace). There is an array of useful supportive spells — Undead Rapport, Hidden Body, etc. — but they are the minority in the first Dark Souls game by far. They’re also not the most accessible spells on the whole, which blends to create a magic experience that isn’t as broad as it tries to be. To the series’ benefit, though, they do begin to deliver on this more as soon as Dark Souls 2.
But what about the lore? Well, we are still talking about Dark Souls. While the lore cards for each spell and catalyst/talisman/pyromancy flame do not themselves give the player a way to interface more deeply with the lore and story of the game, engaging with item descriptions and piecing together the lore of the games is one of the series’ twin hallmarks (with the other being, obviously, difficulty). As a result, the descriptions of each spell you acquire and cast can provide critical insights into the world. For example, the description of Chaos Fire Storm describes an act of desperate blasphemy that mirrors some actions taken by the final boss of the game and embodies one of the game’s core themes:
Art of the Flame of Chaos, which engulfed the Witch of Izalith and her daughters.
Erect localized chaos fire pillars which change strength depending on humanity.
The Witch of Izalith, in an ambitious attempt to copy the First Flame, created instead the Flame of Chaos, a twisted bed of life.
Or perhaps this example of how the spell descriptions (and in this case, behavior) elucidates aspects of the game’s narrative and metaphysical mechanics. From the Pursuers spell description:
Sorcery of Manus, Father of the Abyss. Grant a fleeting will to the Dark of humanity, and volley the result.
The will feels envy, or perhaps love, and despite the inevitable trite and tragic ending, the will sees no alternative, and is driven madly towards its target.
They are short, evocative, and intriguing. It’s almost as if Dark Souls and Demon Souls led the charge with this kind of scattered, discovery-oriented storytelling and lore delivery. I’d like there to be more ways to engage with it (like, for example, the consequences and implications of Dragon Communion in Elden Ring), but I cannot say the magic is disconnected from the game’s narrative and themes.
But what about [____] Game?
There are some games that you’d think would be obvious examples for an article such as this. Titles like the infamous Magicka, or the well-reviewed Wizard of Legend, or the explosive roguelike Fictorum. These are, in many respects, excellent wizard games — but they are built with that goal and purpose in mind from the ground up. Their magic systems are the game, not just a part of one playstyle among many. Because of that, their utility for this discussion is limited. Sure, I could compare every other game’s magic system’s mechanics to the one present in Magicka, correctly say that the compared game loses, and move on, but not every game’s design space is suited to the complex, fluid spellcasting system that defines the depth and breadth (and hilarity) of Magicka’s gameplay loop. Comparing games built entirely around the mage/wizard experience to games that merely include it is not a reasonable point of comparison, and so I omitted them from this overlong rant of an article.
So what now?
Magic represents both a new set of rules, and a mechanism for shattering the existing default rules of a game’s setting. It is equal parts glue and solvent for a game’s design space, and the best magic systems embrace that contradiction wholeheartedly. It’s by no means a requirement for a game with magic to have a robust system that adheres to my criteria (I do not have that power), but I’d like to live in a world where the games are able to fully deliver on the fantasy they promise to provide.
I also want to make it clear that while I critiqued aspects of the games discussed, by no means do I think they’re (A) bad games, or (B) made by lazy developers. Shortcomings in design are best and most often explained by either management issues during development, or an honest design experiment that simply didn’t work out. Experimentation (and failure) is a necessary part of development that builds up to success; you can just look at the development of magic from Dark Souls to Elden Ring.
Fantasy as a genre has seen a bit of popular resurgence lately across the media spectrum — between the thoughtful knockout anime hit, Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End, and the high-friction, high-satisfaction action gameplay of Dragon’s Dogma 2, there’s something for everyone — and magic is a key aspect of that genre space. Eventually, someday, we’ll be seeing the release of The Elder Scrolls VI, which has the opportunity to either repeat Skyrim’s wildfire success, or Starfield’s lackluster socio-cultural vanishing act. The mechanical depth and integration of the varying systems (not even just magic) will be a critical factor in determining what side the game falls on. I’m looking forward to the next epic fantasy title, and I hope it learns from its predecessors and its peers.
We have the knowledge and technology to do more than we have in the past; the means for delivering exceptional magic experiences in gaming is already in our grasp. We have most of the pieces we need for the perfect fantasy game, we just need to use them (and pay developers to make them).
