Why magic users are often boring to play...

Looks cool, plays a little boringly...

With the release of the teasers for Diablo IV in full flow in the games media I've been reminded of a recurring problem within games: balancing the gameplay for magic users.

This all started when I was listening to the Game Informer coverage of the Sorcererss' gameplay from their few hours of playing the game across the three available classes. The recurring theme throughout the 10 minute video was "this just isn't as fun to play as the other two classes". In fact, the Barbarian gameplay was 24 minutes long and I wonder how long the comparable Druid gameplay video will be - especially since the reporters were mostly talking about the Druid playthrough in this video and practically anything else they could... they event skipped parts of the gameplay.

So, what's the problem and how do we (potentially) fix it?

So what's the problem?

Character classes that involve physical attacks can be easily choreographed through reference to real-world combat scenarios, they can be made to feel visceral because there's a shared knowledge between all humans as to what it's like to be hit by something - a weapon has weight.

Contrast this with magic - magic is, essentially, made-up: it doesn't exist in the real world. Therefore magic can be whatever we want it to be and can interact however we want it to. Unfortunately, there is also one further element that magic must have that physical attacks don't - magic must do things that cannot be done in real life. Frequently, this can be something as simple as making the mundane irrelevant (see Disney's Fantasia) or, more often, it can be something as complicated and awe-inspiring as world-changing and reality bending events (Harry Potter / Doctor Strange). 

Magic doesn't need to be performed near the target of the spell, or even within the same period of time. The effects of a spell can be instantaneous or can last thousands of years, be so weak as to be undetectable or so powerful that it literally floors or sickens other magic users half a galaxy away. A spell can be anything and can be "expensive" or "cheap" to cast depending on what the writer wishes to express. There's no reason raising a person from the dead is any more difficult than conjuring a fireball, only that we humans will more easily place an emotional cost on the former and so expect it to be more difficult.

The point is, introducing magic into a game involving combat is tricky because, by its very nature, magic can very quickly spiral out of control into the realms of ultimate power, overshadowing all the physical attack users in the game. This problem of implementation usually makes game designers play things safely... and this is exactly why most games do not have magic user gameplay that's as interesting as that found for the characters that use physical attacks.

Dungeon Siege has a system whereby skills are levelled up through use. This effectively reinforced whichever style of play you happened to choose at the beginning of the game, unless you took the time to grind through an under-developed skill...

I should clarify here that I'm mostly speaking of action games, where play is instantaneous and directly feeds back to the player. Games where this is not the case (turn-based RPGs, party-based RPGs, and RTSes) do not normally suffer this problem because spellcasting can cost time and or resources without compromising the player's time or expectation. The player doesn't mind that it takes two turns for a mage to cast a powerful fireball spell in a turn-based party RPG because the player is encountering a foe that they have decided requires the use of this powerful spell. Secondly, the player must also manage the rest of the party in order to defend the mage so that the spell can be completed and/or run interference with the enemy/enemies that must be engaged. Similarly, in an RTS, the magic users are usually functionally equivalent to artillery in a classic sense.

In action-orientated games, players are in direct control of the character and are often playing on their own.... they need not only interesting feedback through gameplay but also have no protection from harm. Thus combat needs to be interesting and they need to retain mobility and survivability.

One of the common tropes of magic users is that they are "squishy" - they cannot wear armour and they have fewer hitpoints or lower constitution. I believe that this is a concept that was popularised by Dungeons and Dragons but it is something that has permeated through culture so pervasively and permanently, it seems that relatively few people are willing to write or design stories and games where this is not the case.

It's a comment on how one form of power requires that you cannot also attain another form of power. In a roleplaying game such as Dungeons and Dragons that makes perfect sense because every class must have a role to fill and therefore must have limitations - otherwise all characters would become magic users. In that scenario, it is used to balance the game. In a way, this sort of experience is reflected in the Elder Scrolls games since Morrowind: where players are able to be a jack-of-all-trades character with little to no consequence.

In single player games such as the Elder Scrolls which focus on a pure player power fantasy, this is not an issue because the game is designed to be unequal in balance (in the player's favour) - it's part of the fun. You can't do this in other types of games, and especially not games where players will interact with each other in a PvE (Player versus Environment) and/or PvP (Player versus Player) manner and this is where the problems really begin...

So... slower rate of fire, no better damage than when I'm buffing my weapon with fire damage AND it has a shorter range than my bow?

Magic users cannot be too powerful, they must have limitations on their damage output and range of engagemnt. If a magic user has very powerful attacks or abilities, any other non-magic players would find themselves searching for enemies to kill as the mage floats around the battlefield decimating the ranks of the enemy with one-shot deaths at the range of the edge of the screen. Thus the limitations imposed upon the magic user usually place them in a comparable light with the characters that can physically attack.

However, that doesn't scale with level; it can't! A level 1 warrior can hit with 2 damage and a level 20 warrior can hit with 200 damage and still mow through level-appropriate enemies in approximately the same time frame whereas a mage will typically be limited by whatever level spell (and synergistic bonuses) they use. Worse still, in the majority of games, magic is govered by a separate resource (usually called "mana" or "energy") which, once depleted, renders the mage almost useless. While a warrior usually has some form of resource management in the same manner, these costs tend to be much lower and the physical attack of a warrior will always do a guaranteed high amount of damage, without requiring any "energy" to make the attack - it's essentially free to perform.

The reason for this is not just down to character skills but weapons as well - a warrior will not only potentially be able to increase damage output through weapon specialisation skills and attribute increases but also through acquiring better weapons. A mage cannot scale in this manner because mages have limitations enforced on their skills where increases in level do not usually correlate with damage output of all skills - for some reason successive designers have decided to lock increased damage potential behind spending further skill points for these character classes. 

This usually causes a problem because in the early game, mages are equivalent to the other classes in terms of damage output and function, then there comes a point in the mid-game where mages fall behind in their damage potential, catching up in the latter parts of the game near the characters reach their level limit and where their power is accented by higher tier items which, hopefully, have been dropped by enemies.

In Diablo 2, skill points purchased not only the abiltiy to use a skill but to also improve its damage output with almost zero synergy with equipped weapons.

This can be seen in the wiki "tips" for some of these lower tier spells/skills where the accepted advice is to not use them.... that's two out of the three primary offensive spells available to the class!!

"Using this spell at all is not recommended." "Fire Bolt's damage is very low and has only a one-monster range, making it mostly only suitable for low-level Sorceresses." "Frost Nova is a somewhat handy skill for Sorceresses of the lower levels (and occasionally of higher levels and skill)." 

Although synergistic bonuses were applied between certain skills in Diablo 2, those were relatively minor and felt like a booby prize for investing in a skill wouldn't be utilised later in the game. Worse still, if a player planned their build ahead of time and held their skill points in reserve in order to improve later skills more quickly, then the mage would undoubtedly be underpowered whilst waiting for those skills to unlock.

Diablo 3 made changes to its damage calculation for this very reason - though the change makes no logical sense (player damage is based on the weapon held, whether it is used in the attack or not) - though skills were linked to the mana pool as in previous games. Further to this, some skills were placed on cooldown timers, limiting their application - though only some of these were tied to the mana pool.

This was a complicated system which managed to balance out the power curve between all the different classes than prior games might have achieved but Diablo 3 had another design decision which caused a hiccup with this balance - mobs of enemies. In order to balance the ability of all classes to engage with and defeat enemies without feeling useless, all classes effectively became close range engagers. In fact, you can see that the camera was pulled into the action in the game in comparison with other games in the genre.

However, magic users are also stereotypically physically weak characters which means that they lack survivability in close encounters with enemies which meant that, as a consequence, magic users were also given more survivability through increased equipment stats. In comparison with the decision to tie damage output to the equipped weapon, defence was also very much tied to items. In my opinion, this made it so that the different classes in Diablo 3 played much more similarly (not in skill type but in terms of engagement style) than they had in other games, with Wizards running into the middle of mobs of enemies without any more fear than a Barbarian.

Wha- that's it? You just point your staff?

While this change fixed the mechanical inequities for magic users, it didn't address how fun they felt to play in comparison with more physical attack focussed characters... Those character classes with physical attacks or with summons feel fun because there's an intimacy involved in getting in close and hitting an enemy, watching them stagger or be flung away as they are killed or feeling powerful in managing a managerie of pets or raised monsters that fight on your behalf whilst you sit back and enjoy the massacre.

Unfortunately, most games do not port this feeling of power over to magic users and especially not at low or mid-levels. For an example of what I mean, just look above at that gif. This is a level 19-20 Sorceress and the two primary attack animations are pointing a staff. Let's say that's out of 99 levels (as is historically the case for Diablo titles) that's 20% of the progression through the game where your attack animations are the most boring thing you can see. Even the other skills on show in this alpha build had very uninteresting and de-emphasize any sense of power - the opposite of what you want.

If I'm honest, this was a big gripe of mine in Diablo 3 as well. I just felt so disconnected from the action on the screen when playing the Wizard class. To be fair, this is a general gripe of mine for all magic style users across multiple games such as Dungeon Siege 1&2, TianQuest and Torchlight and Diablo. However, I will say that Dungeon Siege 3 had some really nice animations, but that really was much less of a looter than the other games I've spoken about here.

"Huff! Oomph! ..... GRAAA!"

So, how do we fix this?

I think the fix is incredibly simple, though obviously costs development resources to achieve - improve the animations. You only have to look through the spell animations of Diablo 1 and Diablo 2 for an example of this....it's literally the character just raising their arms and this carries through to Diablo 4 (at this point in time) as well. Diablo 3 had some variation with the beam and area spells (jumping) but mostly it was pointing the arms in a single direction (up, to the side, or forward) or throwing the arm forward.

Looking above at the barbarian skills and online at the druid's repertoire, these are all theatrical moves that have heft and weight and look cool. At the moment, and in the past, spellcasters have lacked these moments of gravitas.

Throughout history, magic has been displayed with mystery, theatrics and special effects. However, the theatrics are important. Just as we don't consider the barbarian weak for making it look like hitting someone takes considerable effort, it's not a slight on the power of a mage to make it look like they're calling on their immense powers to achieve a magical result. Doctor Strange still needed theatrics to hold back the water because it looks cool and it shows he's putting in some effort.

Let me give an example of a missed opportunity from Diablo 3: The black hole spell. What happens when the wizard casts black hole? They lift their arm and are then free to run away. The spell effect is cool but it was as if it took no effort. Wouldn't it have been cooler to have an animation where the wizard raises a clenched, shaking fist as the spell builds? You could even have the duration of the spell last longer the longer the player held the button. If you're worried about the vulnerability of the wizard in those moments, why not have the black hole suck in anything that came into reach surrounding the wizard?

We see it again with the sorceress in that gif above... Ice bolt? A particle affect as she holds out her staff. Fire ball? Same thing. You know what would be cool? In the character select, the sorcerer is conjuring the fireball with her bare hand. Why not have variations in casting style? The first animation is a straight levelling of the staff, the next animation is a lifting of the left arm and throwing the projectile at an enemy while the staff is lowered to their side, the third animation is a swinging of the staff (tip facing the ground), drawing magical energy along with it's tip as it's slung into the enemy.... maybe there's even a quick spin and release worked in there on the fourth consecutive attack. Maybe, they could even be mixed up so it's not repetitive...

I don't know, sometimes I feel like the designers and animators focus too much on the particle effects of magic instead of what the caster is doing.

One of the ways that spellcasters can be differentiated from the physical classes is by having them need time to cast spells. That doesn't work from an action standpoint but if you made the animations more theatrical and had more player input during those animations then it would increase the player's engagement with what's happening on the screen.