The levels of Giants: Citizen Kabuto where you play a Sea Reaper. Leaping from hilltop to hilltop, raining flame walls, meteor showers, and tornadoes down upon your enemies, bwahaha.
Magic: The Gathering. Okay, hear me out. While recent Magic is a lot about attacking with creatures, and may not be hitting the feeling you’re looking for, there is a way to play Magic that does. Check out cube draft, this is a way of playing Magic where you draft decks from (typically) a pool containing one copy of each of the most powerful and broken cards from Magic’s 25 year history.
The feeling of on the fly, trying to put together a deck that does completely stupid things, with the risk of it not coming together feels like a wizard creating your own mad spell book. I highly recommend you find a cube to try to build some fruity combos.
So ideally you know someone or have a friend of a friend who has made their own cube and you can invite yourself over to draft (this is not an imposition, people who have gone to the effort and expense of putting together a cube are constantly looking to play it). If this isn’t going to be an option, Magic: The Gathering Online will have it’s Vintage cube running from December 20th until January 15th.
Falcon 3.0. Freeing up 621Kb of memory made me feel like I could work magic.
Skyrim with smart cast and forgotten magic is really good. The first person-ness of it makes it so much more immersive to me. Doing the mage college questline with those mods is about as wizard-y as it gets.
Not having sex into your 40s is the best wizard experience you can have!
RPGs cannot satisfy that need for me. I blame personal perspective of the genre (and scientific approach to magic). Morrowind or Baldur’s Gate, it’s the same in this regard. They are too much combat-focused (and predictible in effects, should I say?) and that’s not how I imagine (real) magic. Global enchantments from MoM, AoW or Dominions or magic from King of Dragon Pass would be much closer to the target, at least for me. What type of powerful ‘wizard’ cannot enchant a whole city or a land? Or the whole world, maybe?
Ars Magica, but it might not be the kind of game you’re looking for.
DCS world makes me feel like a wizard as i get to apply and master technology so far beyond my daily experience it might as well be magic and dragons lol.
Seriously, what about Sacrifice?
don’t seem to be too many newer games :(
Nine Parchments looks interesting, but I may wait for the xBox One version for XBL play… and it looks like elements of Magicka too!
I remember feeling pretty wizardly figuring out the rune casting system in the original Dungeon Master on my brother’s Amiga back in the day.
Hey, I also thought of Dungeon Master!
I haven’t played Two Worlds II but I hear it has a great magic system.
There’s a very small group of people who know what you’re talking about.
But yeah, playing Sacrifice is the only time I felt like a wizard.
Weren’t there some games in the 90s where you were a wizard going to school?
Any game in which I have over 1,000 hours playtime logged.
I found this for you guys:
Also, no one mentioned Black & White.
I love Black & White, but it’s emphasis is making me feeling like a fumbling deity, not a wizard. Though I did enjoy how you cast spells in that game, and effort to make an interface without a HUD.