User blog:Madman97/You know what really grinds my Wabbajacks? Magic in Skyrim.

Hello everyone, Madman97 here, and I can say that I am mad. But before we get to that, I have an announcment. Since I find it enjoyable to rant on certain things on this here blog page, and I find that I actually sway people to my argument, so I have decided to make it an annual thing, so expect ranting topics every few times I feel like writing one. Kind of like a Peter Griffin off of Family Guy, "You know what grinds my gears?" This is purely for entertainment, to have good laugh, and to have fun. Enjoy.

Now, to business. Particilurly, this Business with the Magic in Skyrim. Now, I am an unusual Nord in Skyrim. I'm big and brawny as the rest of them, where the huge hulking armor, actually I go around in the ebony mail you get from Boethia and the Masque of Clavicus Vile, (Seriously, it looks awesome on anyone, play the Black Ice album from AC/DC and walk in slow motion while looking at your character from the front while a fire wall is blazing behind you.) I do all that Nord stuff, like joining that guy Ulfric Douchecloak in the fight against those faithless Imperials, sorry to any Imperials out there, and all that. But the unusual thing about my guy is that he is a Mage, a master in Destruction magic, and Archmage of the College of Winterhold. I do use a sword on occasion, but magic is my strength. Don't get me wrong. Once you get those master spells in Destruction...Dude, yes. But I see a problem.

A MAGICALLY BIG PROBLEM.

While Playing Oblivion, which I really enjoy by the way, who doesn't, I was walking around the Mages University, and I couldn't help but feel dwarfed by its presence and variety. In Skyrim, the faction quests are sort of hit and miss. I do like Skyrim's thieves guild quest more than I liked the Gray Fox quest, and I do like the mages college quest in Skyrim than the University.

But the thing is, there is something wrong in this. Now here me.

The Mages guild in Oblivion was so big and important in scope, and the variety of things you could do abounded, with the final reward, the Archmages quarters, left a little to be desired. Transition to Skyrim, and it's the opposite. The college of Winterhold is small and unimpressive, with very little things to do except for the quests you can do with your fellow students, but after that, nothing to do. The final reward in the Mages guild storyline, the archmages quarters and robes, are an improvment from the last game. I have all my gold, most of my fortune, stashed in the sae in there, I have at least 100 ultimate potions sitting in baskets and on the floor around the alchemy station, and I have my own garden, hwo cool is that? But, even a cool pad like this does not save the Magic factor in Skyrim. My problem isn't with the Guild storyline or anything. I find that eye of Magnus thing very interesting, and that Staff of Magnus is pretty awesome too, but there is nothing to do! There is no variety to the maguc in general.

Yes, you have different sections of magic like Restoration, Destruction, Illusion, Alteration, and Conjuration, but you have a fixed set of spells that I hardly use anyway, and that is it. Now, I like blasting the crap out of draugrs with Fire and Ice at the same time as much as any adventourous mage, but it gets boring. There is no new discoveries of magic to be made. The Dawnguard DLC only provided two  new spells that I thought were really cool, and was dissapointed you didn't get a whole new arsenal of magical sun abilities, excluding the Auriel's Bow, but when te Dragonborn DLC came out, it improved upon the magical abilities you could do, like ash spawns and poison runes, stuff like that. You could summon seekers, and that Frost Giant thing that took me six tries to kill, summoning Daedra after daedra to distract while I blasted it with fire. That is all very well and good. I am glad they did that.....but it just ends there.

Granted, the new magical abilites and powers you can gain from those nature stones were a nice change of pace, and a fun thing to explore a little around in, and I think Solstheim is all around just a fun place to explore...until it suffers from the same problem that the Magic in this game does. It just ends with no new oppurtunities. Back in mainland Skyrim, there is always something to do...Well, if you've put in as many hours as me, you will find that there is absolutly nothing else to do. I'm down to just rearranging trophies I have collected on my adventures in my house to make it look cool. Skyrim, essentially, has ended for me, but I go back often to see if I will get sucked in again by this vast open world, and often, I keep playing for more than five minutes I have turned the game on. Skyrim has near infinite replayability. But Im getting off track here. Back to magic.

My entire point is, Bethesda needs to bring back all that stuff you could do in Oblivion. You had so many choices of different spells it nearly impossible for me to choose which one. And where is creating your own spells?! I want to see that again. I made this spell that expanded upon the Taste of Death Spell and named it Kick@$$ spell, and it owns everything and kills anythng almost instantly. It's like the Avada Kadavra of Tamriel. But, you had so many options to choose from and here, it is only a set choice of spells. Once you get all of them, that's it. Nothing new, and with the announcment that Bethesda is moving on from Skyrim and there will be no more DLC's, there is no hope for gaining something that is fresh and new. I've invested too much time in this game to just simply move away from it already. Why not go the Fallout New Vegas route and create a whole slew of DLC's? Create a whole world away from your already established world? And the magic in this world is what interests me more than anything else. It's so immersed into the lore of this story we play, and it shoud be delved into instead of just having a set of spells that you are free to use at your sidposal yes, but there is never a sense you can become more powerful after you have hit the set limit. There are no magical things to explore, to experience, and that;s why I buy games like this. The immersive and exploration experience. I bought Skyrim first because my friend told me about it when it was coming out, and before then I have never heard of the Elder Scrolls series, Sad I know, especially since I was already familiar with the Fallout series, and I was delighted to find it was made by the same guys, but again, that's offtrack, but anyway, I had no idea what to feel about this game when I bought it, but when I stepped into this world, I was blown away by the amount of things to do, and the magic from the beginning was something I strived to achieve full mastery of it and gain even more knowledge about it. I picked up Oblivion mostly because of all I read about the Shivering Isles quest, and I played the Sheogorath quest in Skyrim before that, and I was fascinated by the concept, and it did not dissappint, but when you gained magical abilities in Oblivion, you feel like you have real power.

Yeah, Lightning Storm, Fire Blast, all that crap is awesome. It's visually impressive, you look awesome while doing it, but that's really the extent of your mastery of magic. You see all these people doing all these very cool magical things in game but you are never actually able to do them yourself, like that one quest when you have to excavate that tomb in Solstheim and provide funding to that guy and you find out he's evil and you see him absorbing that red stuff. I wish I could do that stuff.

Yeah, I am fond of the spells in Skyrim, but they are getting old. We need to be able to experiment with this and learn new things about it as we go on. For something that is so important to how this world functions, essentially the world is built on Magic, you know Magnus, architect of Nirn and god of Magic, and im not asking for the secrets of eternal life or anything, though it would be cool, but I want to feel like im in control of this huge thing that can change the world around you, and that is where Oblivion succeeds. The manipluate weather spell in the Shivering Isles DLC is an example. I mean, you control the freaking weather! How cool would that look on Skyrim's engine? They need to bring back the create spells option and the variety of spells, like drain skills spells, or pick lock spells, or the variety of summoning spells that yield different creatures.

So bottom line, exploration needs to the Magic in this game.