There's an indie rogue like wizard game called Fictorum that I really enjoy. It can be a little indie jank but you really feel like some kind of badass wizard jumping around throwing meteors and completely blowing apart houses and enemy towers with physics.
There are a ton of different kinds of customizable spells like other games in this thread, but its unique point is that you can add runes that allow you to shape magic. When you cast and hold you can move the mouse in a direction to activate one of your runes, sometimes it might multiply your projectiles, or make them larger, or make them explosive. Being able to modify the spells on the fly in combat is something closer to Magicka's freedom of spell creation, though not quite as crazily variable.
Gonna throw one of my own in here, I recently played an indie title, Mages of Mystralia which allows you to customize spells by adding runes that modify the spells behavior, and can modify elements in the late game.
It has essentially what is a board to build your spells where you have to place and chain the modifying runes by their connection points, which serves as the balancing, and part of the limiting factor of what can be combined and in what order.
Very interesting concept, but unfortunately the game is rather short, so you have very little time to experiment with the spells before the game ends, and while a sequel was announced, it seems the studio may have gone under during COVID.
The spellmaking in oblivion was pretty great too, you could make multiple spells which applied weakness to magic and to specific elements in enemies, and since they were applied by different spells they would multiply each others' effects. Then you hit the enemy with a damaging spell and annihilate them.
I never saw it mentioned anywhere, but for me, hiring enemies with sufficiently powerful magic would ragdoll them, a bit like if you hit a corpse or a paralyzed enemy. So doing a 4-3-2-1 combo, 3 different spells that applied 100%weakness to magic and lightning, then hitting them with a lightning spell, would always send them flying. Sometimes it would be like they just vanished because the amount of damage applied by the spell threw them so forcefully.
The system of support gems + interlinked sockets in PoE. It's drawn new back to the game multiple times, and i would love to incorporate something similar into a game of my own making someday.
Noita. You can spend hours tweaking out and testing spell combinations. Make eggs summon more eggs that summon giant worms, turn a lighsaber into a bubbles held, disintegrate the moon. Feels like anything goes in that damn game
God, I wish Noita wasn't so impenetrable for me; from what I've played, it seems like the wackiest shit possible and I do love me some wack. Any recommendations on how to overcome the difficulty curve?
There's a mod that lets you modify your wands anywhere, and another that respawns you at the last 'holy mountain' area you got to when you die (the rest area between levels). Playing with those mods will get you used to the spells and enemies you encounter, and let you experiment.
The best part about Noita system is that it's not all about what effect the spell will have but also how that spell will behave. For instance if you have a "rock" spell then the effect is just that, it spawns a rock. But if you add a "homing" modifier to that rock you no longer have just a rock, you have a rock that seeks out and kills pretty much every common enemy you find. The effect stays the same (rock is spawned) but the behavior of the spell changes (now seeks out enemies).
For comparison Morrowind also had a pretty awesome spell creation system, but that system was almost entirely about effects with very little impact on how the effect behaves (self target vs touch vs projectile). The extra dimension of the Noita system IMO really sets it apart from most other magic systems in different games.
Because I'm a nerd and don't see it mentioned I'm gonna drop Psi, the Minecraft mod in here :D You get to create spells through a visual programming interface! Is a neat idea :3
So a bit of a deep cut here, but there was a game from almost ten years ago that - as far as I can tell - flopped abysmally. I've never seen anyone else talk about it online, since I heard about it from a random Reddit comment buried deep at the bottom of an unrelated post.
Lichdom: Battlemage
It's jank. It's not a great game. But the magic system and the depth there made the repetitive enemies and dull environments completely worth it - at least in brief sprints.
Magic is 'runes' - or items. They drop in the world with various properties, and you can pick them up and assemble them into spells - you get, like, four bound on the UI. Base type is runes that classify the element of the spell, each having very unique mechanics. Fire does either big swingy crits or DOTs, ice is consistent damage or stored combo damage, electric is fast casting and AOE, etc. Then you get the physical shape of the spell, sometimes it's a beam, or a bolt, or a mortar, or a pool on the ground, etc. Then last up you get some added runes that will manipulate the mechanics of the element and shape you've chosen.
From there, though, all of your spells can interact with each other.
So for example, ice will freeze on enemies and only do a small amount of base damage directly, but then will "store" damage. Hitting with another ice spell pops the stored damage and stores another charge. Hitting with a different element magnifies that hit relative to the stored damage - so hitting with ice, then popping it with fire, does far more damage than just hitting with a second ice because the fire has a larger base hit. But you can also modify fire to also store a damage multiplier on the enemy - so if you set up a pool of fire that stores multiplier, then hit them with cold to add more stored damage and lock them on top of the pool where multiplier continues accumulating, then finally follow up with a different very high-damage fire spell ... the stored damage and multi kick in and Big Numbers Go Boom.
That is probably the simplest elemental interaction in the game, that's the basic gameplay loop combo. There's like a time element that will put the enemies in timed stasis, and you can shoot them while in stasis but it won't do anything - then when stasis pops it'll repeat every instance of damage applied X times per second for Y seconds, based on the numbers on the skill, and if you also use another skill it'll do the same damage to every other enemy within a radius ...
The shit you could do was wild.
It's a pity that the level design and enemies weren't really on the same level, so there wasn't a ton of motivation to fully explore the depths of the magic system - and then separately, the game also gave you tons of reasons to go play a different game.
OK, hear me out. I suspect this isn't quite what you had in mind, but the NES classic Crystalis has interesting magic weapons and spells. The game is similar to Zelda as an action RPG. Your main weapons are collectable swords with different elemental infusions. Each one has three levels of power that you unlock by finding special items. Enemies throughout the game are often only susceptible to certain types of elemental damage. There are also map barriers that require you to destroy them using a specific elemental power, like knocking down a rock wall with wind, or creating an ice bridge.
Beyond the basic combat, you unlock lots of different magic spells. Some are familiar staples of the genre like Refresh which heals you and Paralysis that freezes enemies and puts NPCs to sleep. But it also has more unique spells like Telepathy that lets you get information from far away NPCs, and Change, which allows you to take the form of NPCs and enter areas and get different NPC interactions.
Plus, it is just a good game. I sank so many hours into it as a kid, and I recently finished the game (with cheats on this time, the game is Nintendo Hard™).
Morrowind was amazingly versatile. You could combine any effect, and they weren't any safety mechanisms. Want to jump 2000 ft in the air? Don't forget your feather fall spell. Hundreds of ways to kill or die amusingly. My old husk of a brain is having trouble remembering, but maybe some others have a fond memory of their best spell or enchanted item combos.
One of my faves was reflect 100% on self for 1-2 seconds. It acted as a low cost, timed parry and was mega fun to fight mages with.
You can do the same with sanctuary, but any % of sanctuary is useful, and people really sleep on it imo.
ETA: Just remembered another old fave, very low damage fire damage on target, enchanted on something. Because there's no cooldown for the animation of casting from an enchanted item, it was basically a little flamethrower. I liked to put it on my gauntlet and feel like Boba Fett.
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