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[Neonivek]

To me the armagedon spell was a lot like a alternate ending spell that didn't outright end the game.

Also quest for Glory has two spells that would SEEM useful but not the way you would think. Peace and magic reflect you would think have a deep combat use but they both have shown themselves to have deeper non-combat use (mind you... peace in the third to escape stronger monsters)

[aeonmyst]

I'm replaying FF6. Gau(a bluemage-y character) is a prime offender of spell bloat. It takes me about 4 seconds of holding the down button to get to the end of the skill list! Some are very powerful, others are just weaker versions. There is no MP cost when using any skill.

I mean, an ability for every monster in the game? I'm all for diversity but squeenix should've at least separated them into categories for better spell selection. Or trimmed them via monster types.

[Trapezohedron]

One of the few things that irk me in some games is that one-use, plot-relevant only spells somehow don't throw themselves out of your inventory.

Take Skyrim for example, with the Summon Dremora and that other Illusion spell that only allowed you to view certain books.

Those are the types of spells that should remove themselves from the inventory after the quest.

[Fikes]

I hate it in a game when I have to search through a bunch of spells I never use to find the one I need. At very least there needs to be better spell organization.

Warlock:Master of the Arcane frustrated me with this also. There were 20 or so different buffs you could put on your troops, but keeping track of which buffs they had and remembering to add a new one each turn was a biotch.

I am fine with adding as much filler constant as people want so long as there is a way to blow past it. I don't want to see 3 lesser versions of fireball every time I want to blow something up.

All that noise aside, I think the games that let you come up with your own spells are more interesting. I have only ever played two of them, the first being Magika and the other being some random obscure Asian MMO. In the MMO you could change how much damage a fire spell did, if it was AOE or bolt, all kinds of stuff. I didn't get too far into it but it seemed like a decent idea.

[sambojin]

Yeah, those spells are annoying. It feels more like a point-and-click adventure, where you've used the correct item to get past that puzzle, then they've left it in your inventory to just hog up space.

Considering all the pointless things in Skyrim, as well as all the cool things, it doesn't bother me too much. But it wouldn't have taken much work to round it out story-wise though, or just remove it entirely from your spell inventory. Plot-wise or mechanic-wise. To tell you the truth, the whole Skyrim spell system ended up a bit underwhelming in my opinion. One handed fire for some fire, two handed fire for lots of fire. One hand fire, one hand lightning? No effect. Between spell levels and different combos they could have made that into such a cool mechanic.

Strangely, Ultima 4 had one of my favourite mechanics. It was pointless, annoying, and pretty much made you write down spell ingredient recipes and spell-words. But it was cool. Vex-lum-bollocks-whatever? Oh, that needs a pearl and some garlic....... I actually knew most of the spell list by the words and ingedients needed. Hell, I could even write in brittania's writing if I wanted to (just because I learnt it so I could read the map easily). So stupid, so pointless, but it made it feel so much more role-play'y.

[Satarus]

A few nigh useless spells are okay because you can have fun trying to find a use for them.  I also liked morrowinds answer to spell book bloat.  Want to have the effects so you can craft custom spells/enchants but don't want to deal with having soo many slots?  I made some custom "tome" spells that combined multiple effects into one 0 second, 0 power spell and then deleted the original spells that gave me their effect.  Like I had a tome with lock, feather, poison damage, and burden. 

[LeoLeonardoIII]

Spells, magic items, equipment, are all tools in a toolbox you use to interact with the world. If a tool does nothing but +1 damage, it's not letting you interact in a new way that could be fun and meaningful. Zelda games tend to be really good at giving you fun tools (in Wind Waker, for example, using your Heavy Boots to stand on a spring and compress it, then remove them to spring up, then use the Big Leaf like a glider to get across a thing).

Emergent gameplay is definitely where I want to see work being done on a game. Games that have "machinery" like Minecraft (although limited) open up enormous possibilities. Coding "social machinery" and "economic machinery" into the game, and quality AI, could have incredible emergent results. It could also just screw it up real good, but that's fun too.

So rather than Fire, Fira, Firaga (Final Fantasy), I want to see a fire spell and a water spell and if you combine them you get a steam spell that acts like a cloud and doesn't destroy the loot. I want a Detect spell that has as its material component the object to be detected (so you carry a key with you so that you can Detect Keys). I want the designer to make sure there are six ways to do anything, and create an environment where the players will probably think of six more that work too. How many ways would you go about stopping a leaky pipe IRL? How many would basically work but aren't the best practice? I want all of those, not just "go to the basement shutoff valve and press X, then get a pipe section, and go to the leaky pipe and press X, then to the valve and press X."

We are gonna see some really nice stuff happen with games when we get 1mm-scale voxels with an expansive gameworld. Blood flow through veins and arteries, damage to specific parts of the brain causing emergent AI malfunction, crafting sweet gadgets, etc. Heck, with 1cm-scale voxels you could have emergent weapons like guns and stuff, and arteries defined as part of some muscle or skin tissue, organ failure as a result of damage to organ voxels, etc.

And we've yet to really get into ecosystems and fluid flows on a big scale.

I think with that kind of computing power and programming work, it would be cool to play a spellcaster. Sit around all day mixing up shit and testing spells. "What's Jimmy09 doing in his tower?" "Oh just trying to figure out a tornado spell." Would be awesome.

[GlyphGryph]

Oddly enough, the only time spell bloat has ever bothered me is when talking about COMBAT spell bloat. You almost never need more than three combat damage spells in a game (direct damage, area of effect, delayed damage) and a couple of auxiliary spells (move enemy, disable enemy, buff, heal).

If you have more than 7 combat spells, it's just cruft - though being able to tweak them in various ways is appreciated.

But utility spells? God, I can never get enough of those things. Give me piles of non-combat spells to play with so I can have some fun figuring out what to do with them. Even if some of them are useless, as long as more of them SEEM useless but aren't you've created a fun exploration game in it's own right as you explore the potential of the magic system, and added quite a bit of depth and immersion into the world if done well.

[Singularity125]

Most everything I wanted to say on the subject has been covered by the posts already here. Even though I rarely play spellcasters in games that are flexible. Well, pardon. I generally play "x class with a healing spell tacked on", except for the elder scrolls games where I throw in some other utility spells. I love having the options open, though, and one of these days I'll go back and play a pure spellcaster.

I guess the big thing is that having a million spells is great as long as you provide an in-game way to deal with the inevitable clutter. For example, even though it was basically undocumented and should have been explained in the tutorial, you can delete spells in Morrowind. Like Saturas, I often deleted the spells I was sure I didn't need anymore. Now, without getting into a flame war over which game is better, I will say that Oblivion removed some of my favorite spells, like levitation, while at the same time removing the ability to delete spells. At least, if memory serves. And even with less spells around, if you played a mage in Oblivion you would inevitably run into the issue of having spells you never wanted to use again cluttering up your spell list. Of course, most games in general don't let you remove spells because you "learn" them, instead of buying them. And it wouldn't make much sense to "forget" them. But even then, being able to hide them would be a godsend.

[Neonivek]

Spell bloat really hurts when the game doesn't let you organise your spells somehow.

Skyrim's issue is that... well... magic is somewhat broken, in the sense that it doesn't work properly, so you cannot use favorites.

[Matz05]

Spells, magic items, equipment, are all tools in a toolbox you use to interact with the world. If a tool does nothing but +1 damage, it's not letting you interact in a new way that could be fun and meaningful. <snip>

Emergent gameplay is definitely where I want to see work being done on a game. Games that have "machinery" like Minecraft (although limited) open up enormous possibilities. Coding "social machinery" and "economic machinery" into the game, and quality AI, could have incredible emergent results. It could also just screw it up real good, but that's fun too.

<snip>

We are gonna see some really nice stuff happen with games when we get 1mm-scale voxels with an expansive gameworld. Blood flow through veins and arteries, damage to specific parts of the brain causing emergent AI malfunction, crafting sweet gadgets, etc. Heck, with 1cm-scale voxels you could have emergent weapons like guns and stuff, and arteries defined as part of some muscle or skin tissue, organ failure as a result of damage to organ voxels, etc.

And we've yet to really get into ecosystems and fluid flows on a big scale.

I think with that kind of computing power and programming work, it would be cool to play a spellcaster. Sit around all day mixing up shit and testing spells. "What's Jimmy09 doing in his tower?" "Oh just trying to figure out a tornado spell." Would be awesome.

Yeah. Even if you need a modern-day supercomputer (but what else would a PC have been 40 years ago?), Moore's Law means that soon those things will become commonplace (I hope!)

On emergence: I'm surprised there is so little today. It was an identified quality for a long time, and seems to lend itself well to the classes of games now popular, but so far developers seem content to hardcode everything.

On centimetre or better resolution voxels: you're making me drool! I would buy a game with that (and at least a little moddability?) in a heartbeat (if I could secure a computer that would run it) and spend all day in multiplayer designing my own... NPCs...
Big (E123-Omega/ED-209/etc. "mini-mecha"), possibly cyborg killbots that use weapons in all their myriad variety. Gas can be presurized, ionized  and/or heated? I give them flamethrowers/plasma cannons. Conductivity can be induced in air with energy beams? Electrolasers it is. Something have a very small critical mass? Micronuke grenades for you! We only have chemical explosives, basic electronics, etc.? Metal Storm arrays and heat-seekers! There a use for melee? Well, then. Heat a sharp outer tungsten frill on each arm white-hot with electricity, program it for wide backhand slashes and elbow stabs. Or make a hardened ceramic/plastic/whatever sabre, put depleted uranium plates on each side, sharpen well, hook both plates up to opposite sides of a high-voltage power supply! Too heavy for a human to lift, but for a bear-sized Terminator? Definitely doable!
MUAAHAAA! RELEASE THE ROBOTS!

Erm.
On the subject of magic, yeah. I would like the ability to go mad scientist in any genera! I can see myself doing exactly what you described!

[LoSboccacc]

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)

[Matz05]

True, but a game doesn't need to be story-based to be good.

As long as it's a multiplayer game based on deep invention it can keep my interest, and probably that of a lot of Bay12ers for a looooong time.

[Trapezohedron]

Also, combat spells needn't get so much elemental types, such as Dredmor's Asphyxiation, Existential and Putrefacting effects.

Having too much of those kinds of things, while they're only basically just 'hit x for bonus y damage' makes the game have too much spell bloat.

I mean, what's the use of resist magic if most spell effects aren't resisted?

[Neonivek]

Also, combat spells needn't get so much elemental types, such as Dredmor's Asphyxiation, Existential and Putrefacting effects.

Having too much of those kinds of things, while they're only basically just 'hit x for bonus y damage' makes the game have too much spell bloat.

I mean, what's the use of resist magic if most spell effects aren't resisted?

I honestly am starting to hate elemental in games.

I played Lands of Lore and for the most part the element mix ups are meant to make sense (how I was supposed to know a few of them is beyond me, why is the rock beast weak to frost?) but now they are done just for the sake of doing so.

the WORST, the absolute worst, offender is Skyrim. They don't justify Cold immunity to having yourself run through with ice in anyway except that "you did it with ice" (in otherwords... stupid RPG logic)

I cannot think of another game that did it worse.