I would imagine that caves will remain indoor cells which need to be transitioned to.

But god I hope we don't have any more caves with a lovely mahogany door leading to it.

Even a dark/black tunnel leading into a distance that when you walk into transitions you would be so much better.

How best do you think Beth should tackle the cave issue?

Haha, that was always kind of funny that every random cave had a door installed.

I think Fallout: New Vegas did well. There was a small opening to slip through, and it was just darkness beyond that, and you had to click it to crawl through.

I never understood why they couldn't make the 'blackness' into the the clickable transition into the cave cell. It seems like the door was just a lazy programming way of doing it.

Yeah. Let's hope that they fix that for Skyrim. I like the idea of the "blackness".

Another nice touch was sometimes you got blasted with bright light and it got really dark once you entered the cave. It was like your eyes were adjusting to the darkness.

It did this a few times, maybe it was just specific to a certain cave quest in FONV.

being a new engine for all we know everything could be open and not have cells!
how epic would that be!

but i doubt it.... sigh....

Yeah definitely have the cave entrances like fallout new Vegas where is it just a black opening and when you go out it is like a crack in the rock and you can see the light from the outside.

I actually believe they've already said many things about the game still being in cells...

I think it should just be an auto transition when you walk into the cave. Procedural teleporters were never used as far as I remember in Oblivion by BGS. I've done it a few times in mods but it's not like it was a bad thing they didn't use procedural teleporters, it just would've been better if they had. I think they were probably trying to keep people from being able to accidentally glitch an entrance and find that the cave really wasn't a complete cave from outside.

Yes, I also hope not every cave has a door installed, even ones where only animals live in. :facepalm:

Even in Bloodmoon they had real cave entrances, and in Oblivion they were gone.

But altough NV isn't developed by Bethesda it makes me think it will be like that.

I want fireman's poles.

No cave doors can be done by having the first few sections of the cave in the main world space and adding an invisible trigger to load the cave interior. If BGS uses doors as in Oblivion, I see a mod in our future.

If I see a door, I expect there's a toll booth nearby.

If you look closely at http://images2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20101024210819/fallout/images/archive/8/83/20101210144110!Vault_22.png of the Vault 22 entrance in New Vegas you can see what appears to be the interior of the vault. However you cannot just walk in without changing from an exterior cell to an interior cell.

Perhaps this sort of approach might work for those cave entrances. I felt that Obsidian handled the entrance to that vault well.

If they could do it in New Vegas then they could do it in Skyrim for sure, I mean c'mon doors for a dark and scary cave?

Fallout New Vegas pretty much did it perfectly. I still would have liked the exit light be not so bright, and more accurately reflect the nighttime lighting at night. But, other then that, I loved Obsidian's method. Hopefully they will use it.

This

If it's a black "wall" then it has to be black where you enter in the dungeon as well. Else it wouldn't make any sense at all.

A few "cave doors" would be nice.
A few "black walls" too.

Keep a variety, I'd say.

Personally I find the transition through any doors in Oblivion is now a real immersion breaker. This really needs to be seemlessly loaded so that I can walk through a door without a loading sequence telling me that I am playing a game.

I loved what Oblivion acheived at the time but the bar has been raised since in believable environments. GTA 4 had an amazing city but shop fronts with interiors painted on the front wall didn't sit well with the shops you could actually see through the windows of and walk into. Mafia 2 handled this in a much better way by having shop fronts that were never painted on.

From the gameplay point of view of the stealthy thief, not being able to see through the windows, never mind climb though them, makes the buildings feel like solid cubes decorating the landscape, with the inhabitants being beamed in and out of them by magic.

And as for the dungeons and caves; some doors open as you would expect and some don't? Please, let's at least have some consistancy.

Never gonna happen, sadly. Cell seperation is still in, because of performance issues, obviously. Either Skyrim has so so many items that no engine could ever handle smoothly, or the Creation engine is worse than other engines out there.

If it becomes an auto transition I am willing to bet that the first unique weapon I see will go flying from the opponent who was holding its hands and past the point where I can reach it so every time I try to grab it I leave the cave instead.

For me, and my son, this was a bigger deal than the character animations and the unfortunate outbreak of Puffy Monkey Face.

If this is not going to happen, then I don't believe it is because it is an unsolvable problem. Just one that needed to be prioritised a bit higher.

Morrowind had a loading sequence when you moved between cells in the outside world. Oblivion improved on that by continually loading the world on the fly. I am only expecting the next logical step.

I agree, if the game can't have seamless cell transitions, then this is how caves should be handled, because every cave having a door, even if none of its inhabitants could conceivably make a door. New Vegas' approach felt far more natural. I wouldn't even mind if some ruins were entered through something like this, for that matter, like that Dwemer ruin in Tribunal which you entered through the hole where the fabricants broke out through, for that matter. And why aren't there any ruins where the main entrance has caved in, and you need to go in through a place where the wall or cieling collapsed, for that matter? Not only can we have more logical cave entrances, we can also have more creativity in other types of dungeons as well.

I suppose you could maybe justify the cave doors for caves inhabited by bandits, but even then, it's kind of odd when you think about it. I mean, giving your cave a door just seems like hanging a sign out front of it saying "There are people in here, come loot the place." Besides, even though for gameplay purposes, bandits don't migrate to other dungeons, I'd imagine that, in reality, caves or ruins aren't really permanent hideouts for them. They'd settle down in a likely looking place, but if it became no longer profitable or safe to use that place as a hideout, they'd want to be able to quickly move to another place, thus installing a door on the cave seems counter productive.

I'd like to see caves that start from an actual hole (ravine) in the ground that you drop down into and from there walk a few hundred feet back in glowing plantlife to find the door. You go in there and come out somewhere else.

I'm tired of seeing dungeons whose entrance in a hill and a door in it. Why can't we feel excited about a dungeon from the outside first?

Where is the jungle-ridden temple you walk through, or fight your way through, to reach the door going deep within?

Where is the broken Dragonwalls and doric columns of stone fallen over at angles against each other with volumetric lightrays peaking through and you have to lift or otherwise move a huge stone in order to find the entrance buried beneath?

Where is the ancient towers soaking in the ocean water beneath a sheer cliff face with the waves coming in that you must dive down into, swim beneath, to find the hidden cave that leads up to where the dungeon door begins?

Where is the dwarven temple with the huge Well whose bucket is so big you can crawl into it and lower yourself down, only to find a secret entrance hidden just above the waterline to an ancienty crypt?

Where are the magically-sealed portals to lost and buried locations, where you must go to the sand dunes, make your Dragonshout, and then blow your magic horn to call forth, up from the sands, the hidden doorway leading down into the underworld?

Where is that massive tree that you must first climb up to the middle of to find the bough where that tiny hole hides that you must coax open with a special potion so that you can wriggle inside to a secret staircase winding through the tree to the bottom where the dungeon awaits?

Come on, there are tons and tons of ways to start a dungeon that are cooler than some stupid door mounted in the dirt that, when you click on it, loads the dungeon in machine-like automated fashion!

Lots of good ideas there. Perhaps one day, developers will be bold enough to do things like this.