Its been a while since ive played heavily what with Morrowind not playing well with my new PC, but you're right that they were very small. Not so sure about linear, but then the difference between the three games dungeon design is so tiny in my eyes that I think there's anywhere near that world of difference that a lot of people tend to say about anything Morrowind related.

Dungeon design wouldn't be anywhere near my list of mistakes Skyrim made, but we all know what opinions are like....

In any event, I'm pretty sure the FO4 "dungeons" were finalized months before they even announced at E3, so asking for anything to change from what's done is pointless.

The exception is not the rule.

That goes for pretty much everything in Skyrim.

It had some good characters, but the exception is not the rule.

It had some good quests, but the exception is not the rule.

It had some good writing, but the exception is not the rule.

Most dungeons in Skyrim were completely repetitive and linear. Blackreach is one of the few exceptions. But it is not the rule of which dungeons were designed in general.

Blackreach was awesome. It was also one of a kind.

I agree that most Skyrim dungeons were quite linear, but they never felt repetitive to me. Each had a unique layout with a compliment of enemies that made sense for the location. Yes, they were often Drugar heavy, but most of them WERE ancient crypts and tombs, so it made sense. I certainly felt the Dwemer ruins were always well done and certainly unique in both layout and design.

Technically, Blackreach wasn't a dungeon at all but a series of highly modified external cells.

Oblivion's dungeons not only felt repetitive but were highly copied and pasted from a very limited layout selection, so I certainly don't consider them better. There was some branching paths that Skyrim lacked, but that was usually more frustrating than exciting.

OT on Blackreach: I just found out last night that you could get into it without doing the Lexicon quest...found one of the other entrances and the stairs opened up with the orb thingy (I did have that in my inventory already). I have over 1200 hours and still find out new things.

I should think F4's dungeons will be based on metro and access tunnels that are fairly true to real life.
Though I hope we also see some early american Underground Railroad tunnels and perhaps even some bootlegger tunnels.

The purpose for them, and therefore the design of them should be much different than Skyrim's. So I am not sure Skyrim is a good barometer on what F4's dungeons will be like.

I always found Morrowind's dungeons to be about as repetitive as Oblivion's or Skyrim's. I mean how many times are you gonna have that Dwemer ruin with the room that has two floors and a square hole in the floor between the two levels? And most of the caves were the same blandness across all three games. Skyrim did at least try to put in the occasional quest you'd stumble upon in a dungeon.

As for linearity, well i don't really care. Daggerfall had impressive dungeons, and the scale is nice, which is repeated across a few of Skyrim's dungeons, albeit more linearly. I'd rather see interesting design than mazes. Like that one in Skyrim with the Dwemer ruin hit by an earthquake and all the rooms are lopsided. Or that Oblivion one where the castle ghosts are constantly replaying their last few moments until you fix it for them.

See this is the problem people dont get with BGS games. If you look at individual pieces of the BGS puzzle they are mediocher.

But if you look at the whole picture it is heard to believe.

No need to worry. Look up....the game is called "Fallout" and all video evidence strongly points to the fact that it is indeed Fallout. Chances of Skyrim shenanigans are exactly zero.

I would love to see Rune, UUW, or Unreal styled level design in dungeons nowadays, but to attempt to replicate that in an open world would mean a decade in order to complete as modern games are no longer based on 2D sprites and bitmaps that consist of the bulk of the level design used back in those days...(And also why I never released any of my own maps as they were too over ambitious in size to even approach completion)

That's because of the nooks and crannies it was more remenicent of UUW and the early tomb raider series, of which is rare to see in games nowadays.

That old Norse-mythology themed game? The levels were quite linear from what I can remember.

im sorry Skyrim didnt have some good quest, it have alot.

and Dungeons on Skyrim are linear but unique, most of the the dungeons are unique, since each represent something different or a different tomb. If u compare Oblivion with Skryim Oblivion is full of reuse roons, while Skyrim isnt as much.

Yeah, with Skyrim they made a deliberate attempt to avoid having dungeons that used the same tileset feel the same. They're all bandit camps that use the same "green cave" tileset, but Lost Knife Hideout, Robber's Gorge, Embershard Mine, and Broken Oar Grotto are all distinctly different, and there are different stories and environmental storytelling going on inside each of them. And this is true for most of Skyrim's dungeons, too; it's the rule, not the exception.

Incidentally, it's true for most of the locations in Fallout 3 too.

I wouldn't say that dungeon linearity was a problem in Skyrim. The kindergarten-esque puzzles to progress through the dungeons were the problem. There's only so many Snake/Hawk/Whale puzzles you can solve before they get repetitive.

The only puzzles that remotely required any thinking was Yngol Barrow and the one with the Bear/Snake/Wolf/Fox riddle. Please try harder BGS.

Some actual riddles would be nice....but considering what most devolpers think about their customers=Total retards they wouldn't do that.

The Boiler puzzle in Dragonborn was a good attempt. I had to actually use a little math on it! The horror!


Alas, yes. Which is why the quote on my signature.
I don't expect that to change though, i just do my best to emulate the "I can't play this game! My keyboard doesn't have an "any" key!" intelligence level

No joke. That was a nightmare in Daggerfall.

I think the main problem with those is that Bethesda never intended them to be puzzles in the first place, but then everybody took them as puzzles and felt their intelligence insulted. They definitely heard that complaint when they went into the level design for Dragonborn. I don't think Bethesda will ever leave us utterly stumped, and I don't even want that (I'm thinking back to the Sentinel Castle dungeon in Daggerfall, or those godawful http://www.imperial-library.info/content/elder-scrolls-riddles from Arena), but I think Bethesda will start to incorporate more dungeon scenarios where we have to pause and think things through for a moment, instead of enemy gauntlets that have cleverly hidden loot. That was definitely what I got from the level design in Dragonborn (which is honestly some of the most solid in the series).

And I think it's ridiculous to assume that Bethesda thinks their audience is completely stupid. Elitist nonsense, they're just not interested in filling their games with brutally challenging puzzles.

Skyrim's biggest problem: no rewards worth the bother.

I find it amusing that some people claim that Oblivion's dungeons were "copy and paste" and all the same when in fact they were very different from each other. The "copy and paste" aspect as far as basic assets is something that ALL BGS games have due to the sheer size. Actually, extend that to all open world or semi-open world games. There was a very good post on Gamasutra by one of Bethesda's developers about how the assets are created and used. It's very much like putting a puzzle together but putting different puzzles together in different ways to make the different interiors. Certainly not the same, though.

With Fallout, as was mentioned, most interiors will be of human construction, so you cannot be quite so meandering.

Also, I always found it amusing that some people complained vociferously about the metros in FO3 because (apparently) they could not follow a map that was provided quite frequently and use it to find their way, just as people did pre-war. In fact, it could be those vocal complainers who caused Skyrim's dungeons to be so linear.

No.. not really Morrowind had a fantastic plot, great quest lines. - Remember the unique clans of vampires? Having quest lines dedicated to them? Having a spell system that allowed you to do some fun stunts? The great houses quests?

Oblivion, had an o.k. main plot, but some memorable guild quests and the great expansion Shivering isle...

Skyrim, you really have to pick at some of the side quests to find anything that stands out.

Fallout 3.. main quest wasn't exactly ground breaking. But I cared about the characters. Side quests tended to be fun. Paradise falls was a fun unique place to visit.

Not really, the biggest reason being that they were almost entirely devoid of clutter items to make the copy-pasted rooms stand out from each other.

The ruined forts and ayleid ruins in Oblivion were almost entirely bare of furniture in most cases, leaving all of them nothing but empty cavernous rooms. Morrowind suffered a lot from this as well.

Skyrim on the other hand had clutter all of the damn place, making the copy-pasted rooms far more unique, and less obviously copy pasted.

No it didn't, because Morrowind didn't have quest LINES.

None of the guild/faction quests were assorted into any sort of complete narrative outside of the tacked on at the last mintue thieves guild/Fighters guild war thing, which lasted all of about 4 of the 40 missions they offered.

Funny, that gamasutra article you're talking about actually makes the exact same complaint about Oblivion's level design, and tells people it's justified. The exact quote (and a http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/JoelBurgess/20130501/191514/Skyrims_Modular_Approach_to_Level_Design.php, it's a good read for anyone interested): "These warehouses contained fully lit and cluttered rooms to copy, paste, and then arrange to create "new" dungeons. While efficient, this method left much to be desired, and many players rightfully called Oblivion dungeons out as being “cookie-cutter”."

There's a difference between reusing tilesets across different locations, and reusing entire rooms and layouts.

That's actually something I really enjoyed about Morrowind. The fact that most guilds didn't really have story lines made it all the more awesome. I hate how nowadays every damn guild has to have some larger than life problem and that only YOU the player can solve them. I liked good'ol Morrowind days of just being the new guy going out and doing basic jobs until you slowly earned the trust of the higher ranking members so they actually give you more important jobs.

I do understand that feeling, and I can agree with it... but most of Morrowind's faction quests (and most of the quests in general, honestly) were really basic and uninteresting. Collect flowers, collect mushrooms, collect guild fees, speech check an ex-Telvanni Wizard, collect various dwemer artifacts, etc. There weren't really any quests in Morrowind as involved or complex as like, Diplomatic Immunity or some of the Mages Guild Recommendation quests.

Excellent! I live in hope that my character can go subterranean.