I always thought they were an awesome challenge. Obviously not everyone agrees, which is why I think they should be present yet optional for Skyrim; the main and primary quests should be handcrafted.

I liked FO NV dungeons... but make them a bit larger than those.

Here here! That's true that after finding your objective (and sometimes it would take me a week in real time), you really felt like you accomplished something, definitely. It actually felt like a real dungeon crawl.

Oblivion dungeons where LAME, the original ones... to shorts and copy pasted.
More than once i was on a diferent location just to think, not this crap again, there will be a turn left than a big room then....

Daggerfall had enormous dungeons it was scary and very fun, but they dont really need to be that big, 1 or 2 that size would be awesome.
In Morrowind the bigger dungeons where user created and guess what, those where the most succefull ones, most downloaded and played.
Dungean crawling is part of the essence of medieval FANTASY, all legends have big scary dark places.

And last point, no dungeons doesnt NEED to be hand made. Just the important ones as long as Beth is able to make a random dungeon generator, and many "doors".

A dungeons with multiple entrance leading to a huge dungeon would be awesome.

I was giving examples of possible names provided to the unnamed caves by the player. If I went into a random cave and saw a dozen high level enemies, I would want to mark the cave with a name that says "Never go here (until lvl 25)".


Sounds like you really miss those dungeons. I'm sure that they would have much more organic caves and intelligently built castles in Skyrim. As you said, Daggerfall's tech is very outdated.


And what are some drawbacks of random generation?

Random dungeons have the potential to stay fresh on multiple playthroughs... doing the same set dungeon does not. Part of the fun for me doing dungeons is not knowing what to expect.

I'd love some nice and huge dungeons, but I'm completely against randomly generating them. For a huge dungeon to be interesting it has to have plenty of unique features. Maybe some puzzles would be fun in these dungeons too? Hand placed enemies, loot and dungeons always beat randomly generated ones, so the more of that they make the better for me. I liked Morrowind's dungeons best, mainly because most were unique in some way. The layouts were always interesting and there was a lot of clever use of tilesets and interesting pieces, unlike Oblivion's which quickly decended into samey winding corridors and rooms. Stuff like the thin bits of rock you could walk across helped to make Morrowind's dungeons much more interesting.

Umm you will say that Diablo 1 was boring ?
DUngeon crawl FTW. Getting lost if the better random or not.
I m all for important dungeons/parts handmade and the rest randomic.

FUN ! You know that world, right ?
If you don t like them, don t do them simple lean and clean.

There s also replayability...that a bit more complicated concept that should be mandatory in any game, but is less and less taken in account these days.

Two words: http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind:Luminous_Russula. If you could harvest those little glowing mushrooms and drop them as phosphorescent breadcrumbs, cave/dungeon navigation would be a cinch.

A bit off-topic, but one thing that I'd like to have the experience a couple of times at least would be 'timed dungeons'. Specifically, you are enter, say The Ancient Mines of Moria and have to do whatever before the Mines totally colapse. Little by little, you get rocks falling on you, and if you do not finish on time, you fail quest / cannot retrieve the GOlden Goose of Domination etc.... Something aside from the usual go-take ur time-get-return-pillage, etc.... Obviously, for a few meaningful dungeons....

i couldnt get very far in daggerfall (graphics), were the huge dungeons difficult to navigate because they were that big or were they difficult because of the same exact textures being used over and over and over again? with modern games as long as they arent copy pasting everything you can usually tell where you are or have been in a dungeon based on the surroundings. most of oblivions caves had some distinction between the areas and i didnt have a problem navigating them. if this is the case then i really would love to have a huge dungeon like daggerfalls where you can lose yourself in for a few hours.

They were difficult because they were giant mazes.

I would like to see above ground dungeons with some interior exploration an old castle should be mapped like an old castle ruined cities should be just that a ruined city I feel the dungeons need alot of work so it does not get repititive...

No real option there for me, i prefer all quest related dungeons to be hand-crafted huge ones while the rest to be random medium to small sized ones.

Oh, come on now. Have we really sunk so low that we're going to pretend that Morrowind's 3 dungeon tilesets (cave, Velothi, and Dwemer) are really more varied than Oblivion's 3 dungeon tilesets (cave, Imperial, and Ayleid)? Or that they were any less samey and repetitive than Oblivion's? No, I refuse. I refuse to play this game. Tear off your rose colored glasses, people, you'll be better off for it.

In my opinion, all of the series's dungeons suffer from the same problem-- that they're boring, boring, boring. I haven't played Arena or Daggerfall, but I hate randomly generated content on principle because by its very nature, it's all going to be very samey. It doesn't matter whether you've personally experienced one layout or another, it will feel just like every other version of it. That's fine for a loot grind like Diablo, but it doesn't cut it in a modern-day, first-person RPG that prides itself on immersion. Morrowind and Oblivion suffer from the same problem, but for a different reason. Because the dungeons are made out of a limited array of set pieces, there's only so much the developers can do. They have to have hallways, branching paths, multiple levels, and loot/enemies to populate it all, so of course they're going to feel pretty similar to each other. And that is true of Morrowind AND Oblivion. Don't pretend that one was better than the other, because at that point you're literally just pulling stuff out of your ass to try to bash Oblivion, and it shows. If anything, the only Bethesda game to do this fairly well is Fallout 3, which isn't even an Elder Scrolls game.

??

From my viewpoint i was merely talking about layout, The quest dungeon being made to fell like your really exploring someplace while the rest being random tile that fit being slung together without thought. I never said anything bout the actually tilesets. Dunno who post you are actually refering to b.t.w

Yah I didnt understand his argument about the very nature of random dungeons being bad... there was no why.

I voted for the small/medium hand made dungeons because in all honestly I don't want to be lost for hours in a dungeon...in terms of size I though OB was good, however I do want dungeons to be more unique instead of looking all the same, therefore the handmade, something where OB failed. As for the HUUUGE dungeons, I wouldn't mind if there was one or two, maybe quest related, but I don't want all to be so big.

I'm not surprised that Daggerfell had huge dungeons I mean the world map itself is 2X large then the UK. I liked how it was done in Oblivion but I wouldn't mind having a couple unique dungeons that are huge that would take you an hour or more to complete including the final dungeon in the main quest.

concerning dungeon sizes i think they got it right with oblivion. some of the ayleid ruins were big enough to almost get lost in. and almost lost is good, cause i hate actually getting lost.

Agreed...I understand the immersion factor of getting lost, but in real life being lost is a pain.

Didnt they have dungeon maps in Oblivion showing entrance/exit?

So what about daedric ruins, the 3 different styles of cave and dunmer strongholds? And the many many more tile peices like rock bridges, paths over doorways, and the many uses of them in Morrowind's caves. And they were just the tilesets. For example the dynamics of caves were deply different between normal caves and eggmines, and velothi towers felt very different to ancestral tombs. If you're going to claim that a large portoin of this forum are completely wrong and suffering from rose tinted vision you could at least get your facts straight.

Randomly generated dungeons are bad because they force the design of the dungeon to be very generic. Every piece needs to be able to connect seamlessly with every piece, and you get a lot of sharp right angles and and boxes because it all essentially has to fit onto a big grid, and then those pieces are thrown together on the fly by a program with no consideration for whether pieces make sense next to each other, whether the result looks natural, or whether it's even fun to play in. And with random generation, you can't get unique dungeons like Sideways Cave in Oblivion. Which isn't to say that Morrowind and Oblivion, with their hand-crafted dungeons, don't suffer from some of these, but when you design it by hand, you're more easily able to make places unique and interesting than if they're all handled by a computer.

EDIT: @The Greatness-- My bad. Morrowind and Oblivion both had a Daedric tileset as well. And I briefly considered the different caves, but they're literally just texture swaps, so I didn't really think they counted. Making the cave blue instead of brown doesn't really make it "unique", in my opinion. And if we're going to count tombs and Velothi towers as two separate tilesets, then we get to count Oblivion's caves and mines as being separate as well. So the total is 6/5, because I'll concede the strongholds. That still isn't anywhere near as big a discrepancy as people are trying to argue.