Does anyone else think the dungeons are far too big? I was given 25 days to kill some guy by the DB, it took me about three and a half hours to even find him, and another half to find my way out again, and that's not an exaggeration, my brother watched Crank, then Game of Death 2, when Crank started, I started in the dungeon! Game of Death 2 was on its final fight before I got through! I'm just hoping that all the rest until I heal time isn't counted because if it is, the DB will not like my tardiness.

Is there any sort of quest marker I can use? I'm an assassin so I can't even use Mark and Recall.

This experience is not uncommon. 3-and-a-half hours is actually on the low side for me--I usually spend several days before I actually find the stupid quest object.

Also, no quest marker--just try some systematic way of searching the dungeon, such as "always turn right" or perhaps "explore every part of one node of a dungeon before moving one"

The method that seems to work best for me is "stick to the right wall." You'll eventually get a feel for which dungeon blocks spawn the quest object/creature. The dungeons are ridiculously big, but every so often you'll get lucky and find your objective relatively quickly. A few weeks ago, I beat two Knights of the Rose quests (both in very large dungeons) within an hour. It's a rarity and might just come with playing the game obsessively, but it does happen.

As for the Mark/Recall spell, what you could do is create a training spell to jack up your Mysticism skill. It would take awhile before you could cast Teleport though, and you'd have to raise your INT which may not be worth it unless you have other skills that rely on that attribute.

The size of the dungeons doesn't annoy me so much as the lack of interesting blocks and landmarks for orienting yourself do. In Main Quest dungeons, you get all kinds of large, intricately designed rooms and special things like gates/banners that signify your progress. In regular dungeons, it's just a sprawling expanse of hallways.

Yes, they are far too big. From a game-world stance it makes no sense for every cave and castle to be a massive labyrinth. That's one of the reasons I never got too involved with Daggerfall.

I got mysticism to 30 or so with my assassin, and even then Recall cost around 64 spell points.

The default assassin isn't so great, unfortunately. What I did was take INT for spell points as an advantage and then darkness-powered magery (lower magic ability in daylight) as a disadvantage at character creation. This doesn't hinder you as much as you'd think since roughly 80% of daggerfall takes place in one dark dungeon or another, plus it fits the role of the class well. Think if it as kind of a "Nightblade-lite" with better HP/combat skills. The moment you can make an improved invisibility spell at the spellmaker is when it becomes so, SO worth it.

Leaves the question as to what the purpose of this colossal underground labyrinth that sprawls out beneath all of High Rock and Hammerfell used to be used for. Dwemer?

But yes, it is kind of absurd when you enter a castle only to realize there's one room of the castle and the rest of the dungeon is underground.

Also funny when you get a quest that you have to kill like a weak spriggan because it is harassing people, yet the dungeon is crawling with daedra lords.

Every time the economy has a downturn, all the extra peasants are assigned a shovel. There isn't really more of a plan than that, so the dungeons they dig just didn't have a lot of rhyme or reason to them.

Maybe the Iliac Bay required an incredible mining economy to justify all the ore needed to build those massive city walls.

I thought that Mark/Recall were spells of the Thaumaturgy school.

The Recall/Teleport spell are Mysticism magics.

I actually enjoy the massive dungeons from Arena and Daggerfall far more than the smaller dungeons that Morrowind and Oblivion had. Since you can't use Mark/Recall, then I would just use lights and opened doors as landmarks and try to find your way out by going through doors you've already been through.

Corpses and treasure piles work nicely too. Sometimes I make a point of dancing around to kill a monster in a specific place because it aids navigation.

Daggerfall's dungeons aren't really too large by the standards of maps in lots of old games with non-linear levels. Doom has loads of massive maps, especially now. The thing that helps with those is they tend to be more varied, and even with modern ports the maps are far less 3D, making the automap more useful.

Thinking of the dungeons in blocks represented by texture changes, as some here have suggested, works quite well for me.

A few of the dungeons in Oblivion were really huge. They were still easier to navigate. They also tended to be separated into separate cells, which ended up working a bit like the blocks in Daggerfall.

Oblivion's interior cells were far too fragmented, if you ask me. In Morrowind, an entire mansion could be one or two interior cells. In Oblivion, you often had a separate cell for every floor. :rolleyes:

Thank you Xbox. :rolleyes:

Also almost every house cell consisted of one single house static... So making an unique house without creating new meshes completely wasn't possible either!

Without Recall in your Spellbook, another mentally crippling event may occur...you find the item...Congratulations. Now you have to find your way back. Kudos, and Akatosh be with you.

For one instance...
"My little cousin was kidnapped by Orcs and have taken her to (yeah, I can never remember the names of those places)!"
"Lady! Orcs my Breton Rear! There was nothing in there but Tigers and Bears! They ATE her!"

You know whats funny? When MW was released peple complained that MW dungeons were too small it must have been shocking to enter that smugglers cave near Seyda Neen and only find 4 bandits and a few rooms, opposed to what it would be like in DQ.

To me, Morrowind had the most interesting dungeons in the series, followed by Daggerfall. All of Oblivion's dungeons really did look the same, with the exception of the later oblivion gates. At least Daggerfall had some variety, as opposed to Oblivion's "room with traps, hallway with traps, hallway with no traps, big room with diamonds" formula.

Actually, I'd go so far as to say Arena's dungeons were more interesting than Oblivion's, but maybe I just really don't like Oblivion's dungeons.

I'm okay with the dungeons for the most part.I just had one that was almost nothing but a giant interconnecting hallway for 3 levels that drove me up a wall trying to navigate without constantlly going over the same old ground as before.

The one i'm in now also has me grinding my teeth a bit.I spent hours fighting through hordes of skeletons with a level 2 rogue and a sword,because their mace skill is pretty bad since i just started.Up-down-back and forth,through hidden sections,up and down elevators..and you know what i find when i hit the bottom level without finding the person i'm looking for?

There is at least one other level below me and its completely flooded..GAH!

Now don't get me wrong i'm not complaining...but those dungeons are frikkin HUGE with a capital frikkin and so far i seem to have run into a roadblock in every single one i've gone into.Either it is something like the above submerged level or there is an enemy,or three,that i can't beat or run by to continue on. I guess that what i'm saying is i can understand that coupled with design and difficulty i can see how people would be put off by those big dungeons.

I guess its also a good thing i keep a seperate save for before i begin quests or else my reputation would be in the crapper with pretty much everybody i've done a quest for.

I liked the Daggerfall dungeons when I started to play the game. But then after a lot of dungeon crawling, I eventually wished for smaller and more realistic dungeons. And nowdays I find them almost unbearable and use the "dungeon quest location teleport" cheat fairly often cause I cannot bother with it anymore

Generally speaking, I think the Oblivion dungeons were better than the Morrowind dungeons, because they were larger, had more to explore and some neat traps and stuff. But there weren't really any large epic dungeons like a few main quest dungeons in Morrowind (and Tukushapal), and that's a shame.

I'd agree there were several really well done dungeons in Morrowind.The dungeon in the main quest where you have to recover a bow for the ashlanders is one that springs to mind.The one where an alcoholic Nord offers a tale about an ancient Nord King and his burial site for a jug of sujumma(?) is a bit simpler but also really creates a nice atmosphere.

One other neat thing was that sometimes you could click on walls and get a popup like"It would take a very strong person to move these rocks" in one smugglers dungeon or in a certain daedric ruin something to the effect"There has been a cave in here"..I can't remember the rest but it was sort of a tease that there may be more beyond the blocked passage but there wasn't.

I love Arena's dungeons. They're pretty labyrinthine, but the fact each floor is a separate map helps get rid of any Z-axis abuse (like Daggerfall's dungeons, which made too much usage of the new engine and its ability to have floors on top of each other).

It's most jarring when you arrive at "Castle of (whatever)" and the entrance is a mound...... :confused: