The Game Dev’s Guide to Magic Systems
Great Magic System Checklist
This article includes:
Common use of magic in games
Games with great magic system
What makes a good magic system
Great Magic System Checklist
The Game Dev’s Guide to Magic Systems
In books or movies, being a mage means devoting your whole life to magic, spending your life reading, researching and practicing spellcraft. That’s why wizards are usually portrayed as old guys with gray beards.
However, implementing this to games is challenging. That’s why wizards in games are usually born with an innate power to cast powerful spells. Finding a book, levelling up, buying scrolls are common ways to gain new magical abilities.
Magic systems are a big part of many games, especially RPGs. But the number of games with a truly original and enjoyable magic system is very few. It has two uses in many games: damaging enemies and/or healing oneself. And you can usually do these simply by pressing a single button.
That’s disappointing when you think about the potential but also understandable since creating a magic system that is creative both in idea and in gameplay is difficult. But the potential is there, and some games manage to pull this off.
Now that I’m working on my game’s magic system, I started playing games with good magic system and researching what makes these systems good. I’m here to share my findings. This will be a little longer than usual, so buckle up.
Common Uses of Magic in Games
Elemental Magic: This is probably the most common magic system in games. Freezing enemies with ice, blowing them with wind, burning them with fire, or shocking them with electricity are things we do in almost every game that involves magic. It’s not bad, but it’s over-used. It's been used so much that shooting lightning at enemies has become a little less interesting.
Skill-based Magic: The most common way of acquiring magic is unlocking them from a skill tree. In these systems, skills work as spells you can cast for certain durations.
Divine Magic: You draw your magical abilities from deities. Your choice of deity defines the spells you get to use. Choose a chaotic evil deity, and your spells will let you cast morally-gray effects. Choose a lawful good deity, and your spells will let you support others.
Summoning and Necromancy: These ones are more fun to play since they usually allow building interesting characters. Summoning an army of rats to kill an enemy or a number of flying magic swords that can keep monsters busy while you are preparing for another spell can be more engaging compared to the other types.
Weapon Enchantment: This one includes powering up your weapons to deal more damage or a different type of damage. I find this one fun if it comes with a crafting system that allows you combine different runes with different weapons to achieve certain effects.
Buff/debuff: Another common use of magic is to increase your certain attributes or decrease enemies’ to gain advantage during combat.
Magic Shooters: My least favorite of all is games where you shoot magic instead of bullets. Examples include Immortals of Aveum and Forspoken.
There are many more varieties, but these are the most commonly used. The good thing about these systems is that they are mostly easy to implement, and all players are familiar with them.
There are games that create unique systems using this familiarity. For example, Genshin Impact. As Joriam Ramos explains in his video, even though Genshin Impact uses the elemental magic system, it manages to employ system-related clichés creatively (like everyone using magic for the same purpose, personality and power matchups, and how elementals interact with each other).
Games with great magic system
1. Outward
Outward uses a “ritualistic” magic system, which means to cast a spell, you need to do a ritual. Spells do not work alone. You need to combine them or cast them under right circumstances to work. For example, combine spark spell with sigil of fire, and you have a firebolt. Or Cast your runes in correct order to summon a magic sword.
What makes this system great is that it requires work. It requires experiment and discovery. Experimenting and learning which spell works under what conditions and which combinations are useful in different situations makes this system feel so much rewarding.
2. Gothic
To cast a spell in Gothic, you need a scroll or a rune. Runes require training in magic circles. Each circle enables you to access better runes, and better runes enables you to cast stronger spells.
What makes Gothic’s magic system stand out is that it has different uses outside of combat. For example, you can turn yourself into a fly to travel faster or into a bug to sneak pass enemies. Use telekinesis to get items out of reach. Summon, or sleep orcs to avoid a fight, etc. This enables us to create different solutions to achieve our goal.
3. Baldur’s Gate 3 & Divinity Original Sin 2
What makes Larian Studious’ magic systems unique is environmental interaction. You can alter the environment to create a desired effect, deal more damage, and gain advantage over your enemies by using your surroundings.
And just like Gothic, magic has many uses outside of combat: Summon a mage hand to distract enemies or reach distant objects, make yourself smaller to fit in small places, speak to animals or corpses, disguise yourself, etc.
In Divinity Original Sin 2, you can also combine spellbooks to create new spells. For instance, combine fire and necromancy spellbooks to create a new spell that explodes corpses.
4. Tyranny
Tyranny uses a spell-crafting system. Using your Lore skill and the sigils you collect, you assign the Core of the spell which defines the the school of magic, then you assign Expression of the spell which defines how the spell manifests, and finally you assign Accents which change the parameters like damage, intensity and duration.
In short, you create your own spells. This makes using them much more satisfying and encourages you to create more powerful spells by testing different combinations.
Other games that are praised for their magic systems but that I haven't had the opportunity to play: Magicka 1 & 2, Two Worlds 2, Morrowind, Dragon’s Dogma, Noita, Tales of Maj’Eyal, Wildermyth, Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura.
How to Create Great Magic Systems
A great magic system should align with the story and the atmosphere of the game. However, when it comes to creating magic systems for games, I think the best idea is to think about mechanics first, and then come up with a lore that is suitable with those mechanics.
Using 12 questions that you should ask yourself about your magic system posted by u/Bostasz, we can follow these 4 steps when creating our magic system:
Research & Inspiration: Start with researching similar games to your game and see how they handle magic. Think how you can tweak those systems to make them different and/or better.
Conceptualize: Think about the mechanics by answering these questions:
How do players access to magic? (What is the source of magic?)
What do players need to do to cast spells?
What can players do by using spells? (Damage, heal, enhance, create, etc)
What is the cost of magic? (Mana?)
How long does it take to execute? Does it require preparation beforehand? Or is it spontaneous?
How players scale and enhance their magical abilities? (Leveling up, finding items, etc)
How does magic appear visually?
What kind of consequences may player face for using magic?
How long does the created effects last?
What are the limitations?
Align: Adept your system to the story and game world by answering these questions:
How are other fields affected? How does this magic effects culture, technology, politics, history, economics, languages, art, etc?
How people working in other fields (engineers, scientist, gardeners, teachers) utilize magic?
Hos does it relate to the character, plot and theme of the game?
Who can use it?
How others react to it?
Why haven’t people with this power taken over the world?
Iterate: Once you complete the first three steps, go over the checklist below and see how many bullet points your system ticks. If it ticks only 1, iterate the first three steps.
Bonus tip: As Daniel Green suggests in his video about creating magic systems, think about the whole life cycle of a magic user. Think about how a magic user will be affected by magic in his/her different stages of life.
Great Magic System Checklist
It requires work: It’s not just about pressing a single button.
It’s useful in different situations: It has uses outside of combat.
It’s interactive: It interacts with your surroundings.
It’s experimental: It encourages experimenting and researching.
It has solid grounding: There are well-defined limitations to what you can do and what you can’t do with magic.
It’s aligned: The system is aligned with the theme and atmosphere of your game.
If your system ticks at least 2 of these, congratulations, you have great magic system. If your system ticks all of them, please contact me, I want to play your game.
Sources and Inspiration
Here are some links that might be helpful:
The Massive Guide on How to Build a Magic System
Top 24 Games with Awesome Magic Systems
For Wizard Fans: Best Magic Games Of All Time
18 Ways to Write Unique Magic Systems
It’s the limitations, costs, and weaknesses of the magic system that bring us its more fascinating elements alongside its best plot hooks. - Brandon Sanderson
Don’t Miss
Bundle: The Unreal Engine Space & Sci-fi Mastery Kit: “This bundle of stunning assets will help you implement all manner of awe-inspiring outer space phenomena into your project.”
Video: Game Lore
Article: 2023 Recap: The Most Important Tech Releases & Events of the Year
Me
Reading: The Practice: Shipping Creative Work by Seth Godin.
Watching: The Disastrous Life of Saiki K.
Playing: Baldur’s Gate 3.
Listening:
Thanks for reading!
And that’s it from today’s issue of GameDev’s Journey. I hope you enjoyed it and found it useful. If you did, please like and leave a comment. Reach out for suggestions, objections, questions, or just say hi.
But regardless, thank you so much for reading, and have a great game dev journey.
Challenge for game creators: make a magic system useless in combat :-)