Don't troll me.
Oblivion had a lot of dungeons, and that was great...but eventually fighting in a dark repetition of the same thing got boring. Once you reached the 100th hour you really started to ignore the dungeon icons popping up on the screen, and would start to search for other things to fight in the beautiful outdoors. So everyone was happy when they heard that Skyrim had over 120 dungeons!....but just think. This inevitably means that we'll be spending a lot of time in the dark dungeons that are hand crafted and unique, but the bottom line is that they'll still be dungeons and from the pics in the PS Mag and other dungeon pics and videos it seems that while the dungeons in Skyrim are more outgoing and unique-they're still the same thing: dark dungeons that get repetitive.
On the other side there's fighting in the wilderness. Each fight is fresh, each fight is beautiful, each fight actually feels new. In Oblivion there was very little fighting outdoors, and if you did that then you'd eventually run out of things to fight excluding guards and the rare generic creature.

Don't get me wrong, I'm someone who hates to criticize TES series, but don't you think that by the time you get to your 3rd or 4th playthrough you'll get tired of the dungeons?

Once again, don't troll.

A team is working on Skyrim's dungeons, as opposed to one man in Oblivion. We'll see more variety.

They aren't all the same, we have been assured that there is a lot more manpower going into the dungeons this time around and they are putting in a lot of work to make sure they are all as distinct as possible.
And if dungeon diving isn't your thing then you don't have to do it.

Oblivion's dungeons were crafted by 1 person IIRC. Not bad considering

Skyrim's dungeons are being crafted by 8 people. You can guarantee that there will be diversity amongst them. Some of them range from 10 min hit and runs to 2 hour epic delvers

I really hope the dungeons aren't just 120 holes in the ground that look the same. Once you had been in one cave in Oblivion you had seen them all, same goes for the forts and all the ruins. I don't think I've been in more than 30 just because it's such boring a thing to enter.

I wish there were more interesting "outdoor" equivalents to dungeons, such as gauntlet-type regions and ruins/camps. Morrowind's Daedric ruins were quite nice in this respect as they almost acted as tiny labyrinths, with the player never knowing when an enemy was lurking behind the next wall. Some more sprawling yet "structured" exterior areas could work quite nicely. Morrowind ruins for reference:

http://i.imgur.com/u92b9.jpg

It would also be great if more dungeons had multiple entrances and exits. If we had, say, an abandoned castle or mansion as a "dungeon", it'd be great if the crafty player could make their way up onto the ramparts and then work their way down instead of barging through the same hole in the ground everybody else seems to use.

There is no way one can make 120 dungeons and not reuse parts. Of course they get repetitive, but this is normal for a huge game world. I'd rather have 120 repetitive dungeons (let's say there are 7-8 patterns with a little variation) than 20 completely unique designed inch by inch. Repetition is just one of the downsides of bringing to life a world this big. I need huge map and hundreds of places of interest to feel svcked in the world, even at the cost of repetition.

For one, there are more people working on it. For two, they've said that the size of the dungeons will vary, there will be Morrowind sized, smaller and bigger ones too...
Thirdly, there will be a reason to go into these dungeons. My main problem with Oblivion dungeons were that it haven't contained anything special, but in Skyrim even if there won't be unique loot, there will be word walls!

In Oblivion I agree they did become boring after a while, although I stll managed too explore all of them I think (might have missed one). However this time round there will be 8 designers instead of just 1 so there is no way they will all be the same. I think Bethesda will have learnt from Oblivion as it was one of the standout negatives of the game

um nope i love dungeons one of the reason i love RPG games ,if you hate them go play the sims.

i am still disappointed we getting less dungeon than oblivion as long as they have different layout i am happy, i dont care it they have the same tile set..

I totally agree, didn't find it very entertaining to go into a dungeon I had seen 40 times before to only find a hard to open chest with calipers in it :/

as long as they fit some simple criteria i think they will be fine. first off they obviously have to be vastly different from each other and within each system there should be some variety. sort of like the tribunal dwemer ruins that led to a daedric shrine.

traps need to be very well hidden and only easily spotted by people with high security skill and they need to be deadly as in one hit your dead. none of this "oh noes.....i just lost ten percent of my overall health, what am i to do?" :rolleyes:

enemies and loot must fit the theme of the dungeon. they have already stated that necromancers will drop different loot from bandits so i think they have this figured out already.

npcs must use torches in dark areas. this may sound tiny but a simple mod that equipped npcs in oblivion with torches made a world of difference.

i think they said there will be unique loot so getting junk in every container isnt a problem anymore.

lots of hidden unmarked side corridors or caves or whatever you wanna call them. not used by any quest and not pointed out by the stupid quest compass. this will reward people who actually explore and punish people who just blindly follow their map like sheep. this is assuming of course that they didnt make any changes to the quest arrow. someone could clarify if they still have it in or not.

with 8 people instead of just one i much less worried about it and they are going out of their way to say its not like oblivion.

I love dungeons and I am looking forward to the dungeons in Skyrim. However, i think I remember reading somewhere that they are going to make the outdoors more alive as well with more stuff going on in the wilderness like random little camps that actually had stories.

It's a fantasy game. Dungeons are de rigeur. If you dont' like them, they can often be avoided except for specific quest related ones. Single player open world game. Go where you want, do what you want.

I for one am greatly looking forward to exploring the Skyrim dungeons and ruins. I enjoyed it in MW and Oblivion as well.

The "More of the same" in your title is misleading, don't you think? You have no idea if they will all be the same. Or the same as Oblivion,

The tile sets for the dungeons are generally fine (especially for use in the modding tools IMO) just because it wouldn't really make much sense for there to be such a massive variation in the types or dungeons and the way they're constructed: if people were living there its pretty likely they're going to have built the dungeons using a similar schematic... Where the variation needs to come from is the story of each dungeon, more varied syntax of the dungeon (just the way the tiles are used to create unique levels) and the creatures and loot within.

But honestly I didn't even get bored of the dungeons in Oblivion, so if more variation is what they're promising things can only get better for me...

I would like to see unique locations and hand made dungeons, I agree that Oblivions dungeons after a while was repetitive and boring. I think in Skyrim with their bigger team focusing on dungeons we will have much variety.

Dungeons are fun if there's variety. Variety is the spice of life, as they say, and with Dungeons I think it's extra important. I love the dungeons, especially in Morrowind, but you have a small point in saying that after you've seen a few you'd basically seen them all (at least with Oblivion). Like I said though, I love Dungeons, and it really wouldn't be a fantasy game to me without them.

If they're designed reasonably well? Not really.

"Open world" combat, unless it's in a defined area (effectively a "dungeon", just one without a roof), doesn't tend to be very organized and scripted. It's hard to control the player's movement from one area to the next, without walls or other blockages funneling them in certain directions. So the usual open world encounter is just some random encounter. Because it could be approached from any direction.

(Like I mentioned - an above ground area that's enclosed and defined... like a fort, with walls / gates / courtyards / etc; or a series of canyons.... that's not really different than a dungeon. It just doesn't have a roof over it. Spots in Oblivion I can think of include the place you find the frozen Tears, or the cave that leads to the "open world" area & fort where you're tracking down the Ayleid artifact for the one Countess.)

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Given how interesting the "dungeons" were in Fallout 3, I'm looking forward to how the ones in Skyrim end up.... yeah, they won't be able to have stuff like the terminals & other devices, since it's fantasy, but they certainly did more interesting things with architecture, clutter, and encounters in FO3 - that could carry over well to Skyrim.

Play Fallout 3. Their dungeon-making skills have advanced much even in that short time between Oblivion and FO3. The entire DC ruins in FO3 could be considered one giant super-dungeon with a loose enough definition of "dungeon".

I think I remember reading that people who were art designers did the dungeon building in Oblivion, where they had actual level designers for FO3.

Well, what the hell els am I guna do in my spare, non questing time?

I have to agree with what everyone else has said. They learned that they shouldnt neglect dungeons like they did in Oblivion. Everything will be fine, just chill

Dungeons are so great because they have an easy excuse for being large. You enter a house and if it′s far larger, or far smaller on the outside, then you will notice. If you design outside areas that are closed off so you can′t easily escape once you′ve made your way in, then they will either take too much space or be too small, we can′t have 50% of the landscape being labyrinths, that would just be silly. But dungeons, they go into mountains and underground, to places we can′t calculate the size with just a glance and they can take up as much space as they want to without lagging the main game-world and without taking most of the space making it looks unrealistic.

So dungeons are here to stay and I doubt anyone here can find a better way to design areas that server the same purpose as dungeons that...

A) Don′t take up space in the main game-world
B) Don′t create loading screens at weird places (like in the middle of nowhere where there is no entrance) in the main game world
C) Have a realistic explanation for their existence
D) Won′t look weird when it comes to the scale of the place when looked at from the outside

I suppose something that could possibly fit the bill would be a large tower or a castle going many floors up, but having a ton of those would seem weird too.

In Oblivion if you'd seen one you'd seen them all. And while an entire team may be working on them they'd have to be REALLY different to serve their purpose. Somehow I have a gut instinct they won't be. I have a great feeling about everything about the game except dungeons where I have a tiny bit of doubt.

As has been said, the dungeons in Skyrim will be more unique, but the dungeons in OB never bothered me. It's what's inside that makes the dungeon interesting not if you have seen the same stalagmite formation two dungeons ago.

And I don't really see how fighting in the wilderness automatically makes it "fresh" or feel "new". After fighting your 1,000th wolf or 500th mammoth you might find that as repetitive as the 1,000th mudcrab or 500th rat in OB.

My personal hope, and while I may be dissapointed I think it is at least plausible that I will not entirely be so, is that, with 8 dungeon designers vs. the 1 that worked on Oblivion, there will be a vast variety in both the interior details of dungeons, AND in the type of dungeons we encounter.

Hopefully the dungeon types will better reflect what one would expect based on lore and geography, I.E. Nord forts/ruins being most prominent, especially throughout central Skyrim, rare Daedric Ruins appearing in the mountains along the Skyrim border near Morrowind, a scattering of Imperial Forts along the borders of Skyrim and Cyrodil, rare Falmer ruins in the Far North of Skyrim, or buried beneath Nord Fortresses in central Skyrim, maybe even the odd "easter egg (but not really)" Aylied ruin along the Cyrodillic border.

I know some people will say, "No, that was Morrowind, No that was Cyrodil/Oblivion, no, no, naaaaaa wah wah wah." But, logically, some of these differing ruin types WOULD exist in parts of Skyrim along its borders with the neighbouring provinces etc. Their existence in the game would be both logically/historically sound, thus adding to verisimilitude, AND, of course, it would add greatly to dungeon variety and the avoidance of things growing stale via the "not another damned Nordic fort/ Dwemer ruin! Didn't anybody else ever build ANY other kind of fortress or temple in this entire countryside?!"

P.S. Mes2370, love your old Dungeons and Dragons cartoon icon.