I’ve never understood why everyone seems to hate on the idea of magic. Cataclysm is the game I’ve always tried to explain to my friends as “every end of the world at once”. A zombie plague, a robot uprising, an extradimension incursion, meteors (judging by those craters). It’s all in there. Why is it so hard to extend our suspension of disbelief to include the idea that there is magic?
It doesn’t have to be fireballs and psychic powers. I think it would actually feel more in flavor if it was in the vein of evil books and ancient rituals. More drawn out procedures for mid- and end-game effects, but not for combat. Summoning guards, warding buildings, asking questions about NPCs or areas of the map for long-range research, that sort of thing seems like the sort of stuff that would be kind of cool to have in the game.
I wouldn’t want anyone to feel like the game is ‘unrealistic’, but come on guys. It’s a goo-based zombie scenario, alongside the robots and shoggots, I think we abandoned realism a long ways back. Instead of bitching at each other about what should and should not be in the game, how about we just try to find ways to flavor and balance everything that we think is cool in ways that fit together as a single whole, instead of just trying to force the game to be one single thing?
