Personally I like hard magic and dislike the idea of magic taking a long time to cast and using a ton of energy. Also hate when magic is “a rare feat” or something similar.
It depends on the story. The difficulty with hard magic is that it makes the story harder to right around. “Why didn’t they just do X?”
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What is soft and hard magic?
Hard magic as in stuff like fireballs, flying, turning people into sheep. WoW stuff basically.
Soft I assume would be like Game of Thrones or Lord of the Rings. It’s there, it’s just not bombastic and all over the place.
I prefer whatever aids in the suspension of disbelief, and honestly, characters suddenly changing trajectory is far more immersion-breaking than in universe systems (usually).
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I prefer soft magic to be honest, hard magic often ends up having mages be the most OP. And that’s pretty much true in the case of wow, Medivh, Jaina,Aegwynn ect ect are all some of the most powerful people in the “mortal” class.
Eh, whatever it is, it has to be well written. You could have characters that fly (float), wield planet destroying power, never get tired, and never take damage… And also be terribly boring.
On the other hand I’ve read an excellent story where the most powerful character was a young girl that could cast poor illusions.
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The thing with magic is too often you don’t know the limitations or it is too common and so writers just use it to fix anything.
Reason why I enjoyed the first seasons of GOT is that it wasn’t full of nonsenses and most characters were vulnerable.
Oh boy did that go out the window in the last 2-3 seasons eh
Yea I believe a story like the last air bender had a good example of hard magic. There was limitations but it still had people flinging “magic” all around
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No real preference, I like both. I’d probably lean more to hard magic. Assuming I’m understanding the meaning of “soft and hard” right (I’m probably not).
But I like when magic has more set rules and origins and limitations. It’s interesting knowing how it works than just “magic being magic,” not that I dislike that other side. It also better sets up character capabilities too because now there’s a framework to work inside and consequences if they go wrong.
And the crazy effects are fun too. Who doesn’t like a ball of magical death blowing something up? 
I guess I would say soft magic. At least in terms of story. Just using WoW as an example I hate how magic often turns into a deus ex machina only to never been seen again in a totally similar or relevant situation.
They don’t have to be magic wielders to be op either.
They can just one punch, man.
I like the way magic is portrayed in the Dragonlance series (my fav fantasy series).
Everyone knows it exists but most fear it, to use it you need a lot of dedication and practice unless you’re a magical creature that can use it as naturally as a regular mortal can breath.
I like how the human magi have to re-learn the spells again every time they use and how it drains them, making magic extremely powerful but at a cost as to not make it overpowered to the point that magic can be used to deal with everything.
I do not know how it would fit into games in a way that it wouldn’t be inconvenient, idk if it’s good for that, it’s great for books though.
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I like both, they each have their own worth depending on the type of story being told. However, Hard systems need to be well-explained or at least explain and enforce the limitations of the system. Otherwise, the causes and solutions to all situations begin to boil down to “because magic”, and that’s just boring and lazy storytelling.
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If you research lore around magic/wizards/mages etc etc.
Those things that you don’t like are very common.
Every spell isn’t a wiggle of your whiskers unless you are Gandalf of course.
But a few spells I think BLizzard went a little overboard on.
Soft magic is boring as hell in this genre.
Well, Dragonlance was a D&D Campaign, and the mechanics of magic is how Wizards typically work in D&D. So, for a video game it’d probably work by having a Wizard character select which spells they’ll take into a battle. In an MMO, I imagine it’d be a bit like Diablo 3 where you only have so many hotkey slots for spells, and you can pick and choose them.
They’d probably either have to forgo the forgetting part, or add charges to the spells so you only can use it so many times before you cannot use it again.
What do you mean? Jaina deus exing on a floating ship, freezing a square mile of blight, teleporting into the throne room, and then teleporting everyone out of danger is totally good writing. What are you talking about?
/s
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Magic without enough rules/restrictions can quickly make a story lame.
A lot of modern day writers are struggling with this atm. Think of The Force (it’s magic now for our purposes) now it used to have a lot of rules about what it could or couldn’t do and required tons of training and specialization… now new powers just pop out of nowhere and just vanish mysteriously when they would have made a plot point trivial… it’s no fun.
WoW is a little trickier because it needs to work for us gameplay wise first, so a lot of the lore/magic weirdness I feel is just more so we can have fun, yet in the story mages need a lot of recharging time it seems.