Hello,

While looking around some old posts here, I came through one which argued that some dungeon critter patterns can be predicted, namely by the text you get above the screen when you reach them, and their names.

What I can say, is that's it's true! And I can vouch for some of them:

1 - If a message appears that there's "you stumble on an open grave", it's probably filled with undead.
2 - If it says there's a "rune scratched on the dirt", be prepared for Daedra.

Same thing with names, aka in the Alikr Desert there are a lot of "Hermitages" (guess the developers thought it was a good idea to hold your own death cult there in nifty isolation). Every time I was sent to one of these places, they were crawling with monks, and the occasional undead and daedra too. Similarly, a dungeon you might be sent all too often in Lailyn is named a "Prison", and it's filled with human enemies.

Very true! The DF Chronicles even has a table of Dungeon Type vs Enemies, although it unfortunately doesn't list the flavor text. Dungeon type can often be guessed from the title of the dungeon, as you mention. Words like fort, prison, coven, pit, etc.

There are also ones like "you smell orcs, definitely orcs" or mentioning spider webs, scattered feathers (harpies), and other stuff. Sometimes the flavor text disappears too quickly, which is too bad, because it's a small thing that really adds to the atmosphere. It's funny how cool a little message describing the little things your character notices can be. And smells! Smell is a sense that you can rarely get in a game, so just a little line of you "smelling the stench of ___" is surprisingly neat.

Agreed!
It is a nice subtle touch that I love about the dungeons. Imagine if such messages would show inside the dungeons as well...

Sometimes the messages are a bit messed up though. I often got the "You smell Orcs...definitely Orcs" message and, when I got inside, I fought bats/rats/spriggans or other woodland/natural creatures.

This is an old trick used often in roguelikes. Textual descriptions for mood and feelings that give game hints. I wish Bethesda wouldn't try to be so "modern" and use ambient music and textual descriptions more often for something like this.

Indeed, Daggerfall's descriptive messages upon arriving near dungeons really added to the atmosphere in some day, probably because you're left to interpret it with your own imagination - providing levels of believability you wouldn't get by just staring at, say, an incredibly high polygon 2048x2048 brick wall and not processing it any further. I wouldn't mind a return to these to some extent, and seeing how Morrowind used them in dream sequences, I don't think the narrative technique is that outdated.

Have to agree with these posts. It would be great if these descriptive messages were used again in future games. They added a lot of atmosphere to the dungeons that actually made them feel like dungeons and were pretty useful predicting what enemies I would encounter. If I didn't feel like fighting Orcs and a message popped up saying there were traces of them, I would just leave and come back later.

Take a look http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=27145 then.. :hubbahubba:

I love it! I am so trying this over the weekend.

Here's something funny. There's a dungeon where I went, and the message said more or less this: "You Stumble Upon a Sign that Says: 'No Trespassing'".

Well anyway, what kind of monsters do you expect to find when it says, "You smell orcs. Definitely orcs." ?

Definitely going to try it out. Thanks.