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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.
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.
Heretic and Lichdom: Battlemage
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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
You should try Oblivion
Terraria has some really fun mage gameplay.
If you are cool with CRPGs may I suggest Arcanum? Probably has one of the most weirdly in depth magics systems.
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
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.
Divinity 2 Ego Draconis (not to be confused with Divinity Original Sin 2) had a quite similar feel to me.
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.
They did a remaster a couple years ago. I love the ease of changing and variety of gameplay styles it affords.
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".
It is mayor jank but Dragons Dogma was the closest to feeling like a mage I've ever experienced. There are no cool downs in the game but channeling spells takes some time and upholding a continuous spell drains your stamina. In this setting the art of a mage was reading the battle and estimating how much space you have to channel spells, several of which can easily break the encounter wide open.
Edited since neither my English nor my autocorrect were working as intended.
In this setting the art a the mage was reading the battle and estimating you much space you have to channel which spell
Am I just not awake yet or is this incomprehensible
ARPG: Path of Exile, Last Epoch, Grim Dawn.
Also consider the survivors/bullet hell kinds of games: Vampire Survivors, Soulstone Survivors, etc.
If you never played Magicka you should give it a shot.
Dark Souls. If you play a mage, you'll be on easy mode, which very much does feel badass in a game so full of terror.
Have you played Dragon Age Inquisition? I hadn’t until someone here recommended it, so I grabbed it for $3 and am deep into it. As a mage, it’s full-throated magical glory. You can use lightning, fire, and ice magic, get badass staffs, and have a good combination of AoE and normal spells. I definitely feel OP after crafting some custom armor and weapons. Lots of fun.
AND you have two other great mages to hang around with, so you can combo off each other real easy.
Its kinda different but maybe Two Worlds, I remember killing everything in the world and resurrecting literally everything so that every NPC was friendly to me. I killed the whole world and brought it back.
I’ll give a shout out to Fictorum, which is kinda janky but is a physics-heavy wizard simulator with on-the-fly spellshaping and some real wild spellslinging combos. Between the combat levels, there’s a travel/encounter-type rpg thing vaguely similar to FTL as you try to stay ahead of a wave of Bad Things^tm^