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[LoSboccacc]

Just look at what glaciers do to mountains

[Matz05]

Yeah, but the monoelemental attacks is what he is angry about.
Stabbing someone with an icicle should be mostly physical (stabbing) damage, with a side effect of cold damage.
Not negated because cold temperatures don't phase the enemy!

[sambojin]

Yeah. Stabbing stuff in the chest with an icicle should still hurt plenty. I guess it depends on the meta-modelling of resistances. Is it because it's cold, and the creature isn't fazed by the cold bit of it? Or does the creature resistance actually turn away things that are cold? And does this mean that a basic sword attack should be worse, or even impossible, against this monster on a snowy day in winter?

Resistances are usually the dumbed down bloater of games, but it does add a bit of rock/scissors/paper to games, and the necessity of different forms of attack in your spellbook. Even if they're essentially, magic missile, ice missile, fire missile, physical missile, etc, it just forces you to broaden your spell inventory to make sure you don't run into problems against specific examples.

It's not a good thing, it's a bloaty thing, but it's sort of essential so you don't have a spell that kills everything. You'd never need anything else. That would kill half the idea of many rpgs, which is kill stuff, level up and buy things so you can repeat the process.

[Frumple]

Elemental damages are fine when they're more than just another few points of damage. Meaningful environmental interactions, status effects, major combat flow changes due to elemental effects... stuff like that is golden.

Most don't do that, or only do it to a certain degree -- ToME4's an example of the latter, in which there's a sort of tier system to elemental damage, a first tier that's just extra damage, and a second in which varying status debuffs or personal buffs are linked with the element. It's fairly graceful, as such things go, especially since the last weapon enchant rework further differentiated the tiers "niches" to a somewhat greater degree.

[Neonivek]

The issue is more that this is sort of Skyrim where it tries to immerse you in a living environment to a certain extent. Having Arbitary resistances would fly in lets say a Final Fantasy game where it is often questionable if random encounters even happen (though it is mostly by stopping magic itself not ice itself so it even makes sense in game), but not Skyrim.

Yeah. Stabbing stuff in the chest with an icicle should still hurt plenty. I guess it depends on the meta-modelling of resistances. Is it because it's cold, and the creature isn't fazed by the cold bit of it?

Even enemies made of fire itself are harmed by ice in Skyrim. The basic premise for ice immune enemies are that they do not have vital organs that would be harmed by freezing over... or rather that they do not suffer from hyperthermia. Ones with resistance are ones who are insulated or have naturally low body temperatures.

Also no, none of the enemies immune to ice are immune to any other element for the same reasons. In fact I think Ghosts are still vulnerable to fire and lightning and physical.

[Lord Snow]

Yes.

The sheer amount of useless spells in DnD PC games is staggering, and can really screw you over if you don't know what you're doing/what you will be facing.

[Aptus]

I don't want less clutter, I want MORE spells, more more more more. I am so tired of magic boiling down to [insert element here]ball, shield etc. It is supposed to be magic. I adore it when magic is actually magical and can do all kinds of fantastic stuff.

[Vel]

Personally I like having a variety of spells, but systems like Morrowind and Oblivion where they literally have spells that are just there as filler and have no practical function sort annoy me. I prefer simplified systems over systems with a bunch of options that don't really do anything... I think of that as simply the illusion of variety.

Though of course, I absolutely love games with a bunch of different spells that all have uses that can be applied in various user-defined situations, like I'm sure everyone else does. But it's so hard to find such things.

[Gamerlord]

I miss that icarian flight thingy from morrowind. Managed to harness it to get SO far away from the mainland.

[Trapezohedron]

Fun spells should be added, no matter how useless they get in the long run.

However, Fireball +2s and Frozen Popsicle +5 spells shouldn't really be included. I want to use the spells for other purposes, such as freezing platforms, etc.

[alexandertnt]

Fun spells should be added, no matter how useless they get in the long run.

However, Fireball +2s and Frozen Popsicle +5 spells shouldn't really be included. I want to use the spells for other purposes, such as freezing platforms, etc.

Freezing platforms, Teleportation, Polymorphism, Some sort of trap-the-enemy spell, set-them-on-fire spell (complete with "oh crap im on fire" animations), make-them-attack-themselves spell etc.
 
There are all sorts of awesome spell's that developers could throw in the game rather than <element>ball +<level/tier>.

Also, that generic ice spell should be able to freeze water. And the fire one should melt it. And set trees on fire (even if its just an animation). Lightning should conduct through metal.

There are also all sorts of things you could do to the default spells too. Who cares if they are useless? Were DF players, we should take pride in our horribly hilarious deaths.

[LeoLeonardoIII]

About voxels: the smaller the voxel, the pricer the art become. Also ai and pathfinding is troiblesome once you break the block is a tile scale

About emergence: the problem is that you can generate endless interestig stories, but you'll get turd 99% of the time. Just look at how maximum emergency in the dwarf fortress worldgen spam the log with fishers tagging along fishing and cheesemakers eating their cheese.

The problem as of today is that nobody managed to put emergency on a nice package that could also be scripted to deliver a story.

There are plenty of open ended story driven games, each having their own kind of fail (too few choices, same endings, endings not correlated to the emergent story part but only to the scripted, etc)

Voxel size: this is where procedural generation comes in. Your art team codes how trees grow, rather than making tree models. Or, they make a few models and run them through a deconstruction program that creates the procgen code necessary to create those and similar trees.

Turds: This again is mostly the quality of the procgen I think. With more computing power you can define a successfully generated thing more narrowly, redoing it until you get something that fits the parameters. And of course people getting better at writing procgen and developing public procgen systems so you don't have to reinvent the wheel.

Boring Stuff: Yeah, nobody wants to hear about a fisherdwarf eating cheese. That's why you have filters. You still want fisherdwarves to eat cheese, but many players don't care and are fine with not getting an alert about it. Ideally the player experiences only a tiny slice of what goes on. As you walk down the street there should be dozens of fisherdwarves munching cheese behind closed doors and you only ever notice if you sneak up and peek in their windows or if you're a cheese seller and thus are intimate with their consumption habits.

I want to play a game where I slow down and really inspect something and am not disappointed. Today we're still getting games that are loose facades and you have immersion as long as you don't look too closely.

[Singularity125]

Ah, I forgot to mention another pet peeve of mine, which I could probably aptly sum up through TvTropes. Yes, you've been warned, it's a TvTropes link: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/UselessUsefulSpell

The big thing is that people like status spells. They're different, and different is good, but... 99.9% of bosses are plain immune to status ailments in most Final Fantasy games (and some other RPGs). And random encounters really don't need them... As far as how to fix this without making those spells totally broken? Who knows. You need resistances or immunities sometimes, or there's never a reason not to use them. *shrug*

[LeoLeonardoIII]

That's a problem with the boss fight mentality more than a problem with the magic system. Why is the toughest monster in the dungeon always immune to everything but damage? If there isn't some roleplaying reason, it's just to keep the boss from dying too easy. Some monster immunities make sense: Undead immune to mind-affecting and biological spells. Stone Golem is immune to a Stone spell because it's already made of stone.

I think there should be an in-game penalty for a win-button, rather than removing the win button. For example, if you Stone or Disintegrate the monster you lose its treasure too. I also think there isn't a problem with putting in a win button for each obstacle. Heck, if the player doesn't want to actually play the game he can save himself $60 and watch a Let's Play on Youtube. 

And it's fine for certain monsters to have some lower chance to be affected, which makes it riskier to do the spell against a boss. For example, a normal monster might be affected 75% of the time but a boss only 25%.

[Singularity125]

Yes, I agree Leo. I see no problem with an "I win" button. In fact I like so-called puzzle bosses, as long as they're not literally the only way to win. If they are there needs to be some ingame hints, because nobody likes getting stuck. Essentially I want to reward ingenuity in a boss fight, not just make it a bigger mob that takes longer to kill. In-character reasons for why things don't work are also good.

For instance, say you're playing some generic Final Fantasy game. You run into a boss that has respawning mooks. You use Stone on the boss, and surprisingly, it works... but then the mooks use a gold needle on him. Since they respawn and have infinite items, this is not a good way to kill the boss. But, used strategically, it could cause him to lose a turn, or at least, the mooks are too busy un-stoning him to attack you. So it becomes a plausible strategy without being an "I win" button.