My personal favorite is Detect Life. In Morrowind, this effect placed icons on the minimap indicating where creatures or characters could be found. It was a nice effect but not workable for Oblivion, so now when Detect Life is cast, a magical cloud, which is visible even when the creature is not, will envelop each nearby creature. You can watch these clouds to track potential targets, and usually you can even identify which creature you are looking at by the specific shape and movement of its cloud.

The Chameleon spell, for instance, uses our awesome refraction special effect to render targets nearly invisible, like a block of clear walking ice or a cloaked Predator.

But we know that just tweaking our spells isn’t enough for you guys, so there is one brand new, very special magic effect that we hope will give modders a great deal of creative freedom. It’s called Script Effect, and using it in conjunction with the scripting system, modders will be able to expand the magic system and create spells that do things we at Bethesda haven’t even thought of yet.