Having come across videos of that new Dragon Age game and its (by the look of it) cool looking combat I’ve gotten the urge for something similar. Action RPG of some kind, being able to rock on as a wizard and blast spells all day. Some tactical element to spell slinging and comboing would be nice.
Love me some recommendations!
Magicka comes to mind but it was utterly unplayable single player. Maybe the sequel is better.
It feels very wizard like because you don’t have a static list of spells. You have 8 elements you.can combine into spells. (It does have unlockable spells but those are sort of secondary.) So using the fire and shield elements makes a wall of flame, for example.
Heretic and Lichdom: Battlemage
I’ll go a different route. Control.
Control has been really good so far, but the pacing of the difficulty is really wonky. Everything is a breeze, right up until something is damn near impossible. So I keep starting and stopping it.
noita is insane and has absolutely zero handholding. it’s truly hardcore and kinda souls-like in difficulty/lore, but truly excellent!
magicraft is the king in casual spell crafting, very good game to play a bit after work, can call it quits anytime and pick it back up again. just had it’s full launch as well and might still be -20% (about 12€)
fictorum is fairly unique, because it’s first-/third-person and 3D, and also very good with an intuitive spell system and a little bit of indie game jank
Yeah lots of recommendations here but let me give you some that I think answer your request more specifically.
Wizard Of Legend is a top down roguelite where you play a wizard that can equip different spells and upgrades. The combat and strategy is very focused on spells and how good you are at slinging them between dodging enemy attacks.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/445980/?snr=1_5_9__412
Margoq’s Lair is a top down roguelike where spells are cast by composing them from elements, for example fire + shield casts the spell fireshield. It makes for a much more satisfying experience than pressing a button to cast a spell.
You should try Oblivion
This one is completely different from your typical ARPG, but I’m going to recommend Noita.
It’s a 2d game where you play as a wizard off spelunking. The magic system is rad as heck, you find wands with spell slots in them, and spells that you can put in the wands. You can rearrange and combine spells to get some truly bizarre effects
I’ve killed myself in a dozen hilarious ways trying to make the perfect wand. It never gets old
I advice people to not install invincible mods right away. But the game is full with content and you often die instantly. I personally had to use a respawn mod to see all of its content. The game is really hard, probably the most difficult game I’ve ever played. Souls games are a cakewalk in comparison.
Read the title of this post and immediately thought Noita. It’s such a fantastic game both stock and modded and even after 100 hours in it, I’m far from an expert.
You definitely will feel like a badass wizard.
Also, there’s actually an egregious amount of content in Noita. There’s so much to explore
Terraria has some really fun mage gameplay.
The Excellent YouTube channel TheStellarJay has a small series (3-4 Videos, ~10min each) about the state of wizard games.
This is part 1: https://youtu.be/quPKQIVEX5A
I’m sure you’ll find something that piques your interest
Badass wizard eh? Try Magicka! 😁
Fair warning that when I played it with a friend (two-ish years ago), it was broken and abandoned. Couldn‘t play in co-op for more than 30 minutes without a disconnect, some DLCs didn‘t even start, singleplayer you had to downgrade to an older version or else it crashes every so often. Every loading screen had me praying the game doesn‘t poop the bed. It was probably fun at some point, but it needs engineering attention and hadn‘t gotten that in years when I last tried it.
Oh man, that’s really sad :(
I‘m probably even downplaying it, my friend ragequit from the frequency of crashes lol
Maybe Magicka 2 is the better starting point, but I wouldn‘t know since after my experience with Magicka, I didn‘t wanna touch it
It was fun when it worked though!
This was going to be my recommendation. Probably not what OP wants, but definitely what they asked for!
Is it good solo? I don’t have a lot of time for games but this looks like it might be able to scratch my (MMO)RPG itch a bit without being too much of a time sink.
In my opinion, no, it was too hard.
I enjoyed it solo, though it did become impossibly hard at one point. I don’t know if you need to have friends to help or if I just needed to be better at the game!
What’s important is the combos. There are very powerful combos that render the game very easy.
What are your combos of choice? I remember having a few good ones committed to memory at the time.
I definitely completed it solo. Finding spell books definitely helps, but just crafting spells with the given elements can be more than enough to muddle through.
You can give yourself armor to assist in your normal squishy wizard self that definitely helps with the tougher bits.
I loved wizard wars before it went down. RIP in peice
Btw, have you played something like Hades? You’re not technically a wizard, but close enough. And there’s other hades-like games which might be more “wizard-like”.
Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind lets you fly around, jump over whole cities, and kill most NPCs with one high powered spell. It’s a very unique game, but if it clicks with you there’s nothing quite like it. Vibrant modding scene too.
The base game is certainly playable, but if you want modern resolutions and some vanilla-friendly bug fixes OpenMW is an open source recreation of the engine, there’s instructions on their website.
Morrowind is great and people should definitely play it, but god damn will it not meet the need of feeling badass. It makes you feel like a wooden chess piece and you just get used to it.
Those spells area very cool, though.
Morrowind was always my favorite Elder Scrolls game, but I’m probably biased since it was my first. The tech, while good for its time, was always the #1 thing holding it back for modern times. Hadn’t heard about OpenMW, but now I’ll have to check it out.
Check out Tamriel Rebuilt too! It’s a mod to add the mainland that, while incomplete, already has 100s of quests. Good quality control too.
I really struggled to get into modding with Morrowind. I’m so used to mod launchers that make it so easy and I was expecting the same with openmw but nah.
You can install mods directly into the OG game directory, why OpenMW doesnt tell you that I dont know. Only problem is that ya need to do trouble shooting the old fashioned way.
Skyrim has some mods that go really deep on magic and combat strats.
Honestly with the amount of mods built up over the years Skyrim has become the ultimate fantasy RPG.
I’m so thankful for every modder out there
If you are cool with CRPGs may I suggest Arcanum? Probably has one of the most weirdly in depth magics systems.
Kingdoms of Amalur has very fun, very flashy combat. The rest of the game is really ehhh, but if you just want to blast magic and have cool skills then it’s a great choice.
Agree on KoA. Playing a mage is super flashy with plenty of cool looking spells that make you feel like a badass wizard. The chakrams (one of the main wizard weapons) flying around look awesome, too.
Kingdoms of Amalur is a great example of a perfectly enjoyable, mid action RPG. It’s not going to like define a generation, but every time it comes up I think back on it fondly.
I would like another like it.
Recently released Wayfinder has been scratching that itch for me! It used to be a multiplayer live-service game, but during early access it got converted to a normal singleplayer/coop game with 0 microtransactions and it’s a lot of fun. My only issues are with performance, which isn’t great, and build variety, which doesn’t exist. There are 8 characters with limited customization (except visual, you can do a lot with all the dyes and trinkets) and you just gotta rotate between them to keep the playstyle fresh.
But the combat is fun, the graphics are great (they aren’t beautiful, but they have that timeless cartoonish high fantasy aesthetic, like early WoW), and there is a lot of stuff to do and reward chests to collect. It really is feeling like a new KoA to me - as you said, just a solid, mid-tier action RPG.
So considering that we’re in patientgamers… add to a wishlist and wait for a sale? :P
Added to the list! Thanks for the recco, it sounds like a good game to go in to if you’ve got reasonable expectations.
Divinity 2 Ego Draconis (not to be confused with Divinity Original Sin 2) had a quite similar feel to me.
They did a remaster a couple years ago. I love the ease of changing and variety of gameplay styles it affords.
Maybe less open environments to make it feel less like an MMO. But yes.
