I thought the design of interior in Fallout 3 was pretty cool. You had some subways, you had some utility rooms, bunkers, office buildings, hotels, trainstation, supermarkets, musea, etc.

Infact i absolutely loved Fallout 3's interior or "dungeon" layouts. There was so much variety, it felt so atmospheric to be scrounging through a ruined office building, looking to find something usefull to loot or shoot. And that was part of the strength, the variety in the rooms themselves and always that itch to scratch. Even if a room wasn't part of the X to Y path, it managed to peak my curiosity to take a look around regardless. And my curiosity got rewarded from time to time with great little stories or fun/good rewards.

That was a game that came out after Oblivion and before Skyrim. I don't think Bethesda is going down TES route of "dungeons", they have a different formula for how they do interior zones in the Fallout universe.

I think you're misinterpreting what is meant by "copy and paste". Yes, Oblivions dungeons all had slightly different layouts, but the problem was that, unlike in FO3 and Skyrim, Bethesda did a horrible job at hiding the fact that they were reusing dungeon assets. The ruins, caves, and forts were especially bad because they had so little furniture, assets, and flavor that it was very easy to tell that the room you just walked into was the exact same room you'd been in 4 other times the past 5 hours while exploring. It was just the same room, with the same chair and torches, but in a slightly different position with a different hallway running in a different direction.

Reusing assets is a fact for every game made. The trick is how well you can hide that you're reusing them, which is something that Oblivion's dungeons did very poorly.

Fallout 3/NV has had its fair share of none linear dungeons though I think the pretty woeful mapping function on the pipboy gets me lost more often than tricky lairs!

I can't tell you how many times I coudnt find the exit in that [censored] rocket building where you send the ghouls to the sun

This is actually one reason im happy they chose Boston. For anyone who has lived/ visited there you know its full of real underground systems and old systems from back when the city was fairly young. its full of twists and tuyrns and is IMO one of the hardest places to navigate as it is... let alone after a nuclear blast lol.

It should make for some pretty fun and exciting exploration... I cant wait to dive in.

As long as we're not talking about the "Getting lost for six hours because the dungeon design is overly elaborate, all of the corridors look the same, the map is useless, and what I'm looking for has probably glitched through the floor" brand of non-linearity found in Daggerfall, I'm all for it.

I don't remember Oblivion's dungeons being particularly non-linear, though. I remember being railroaded down a very specific route, and having to flip levers, push buttons, stand on pressure plates, and pull chains to open doors to progress to the next part. Oblivion's dungeons gave a better illusion of openness than Skyrim's with their occasional larger rooms, and side rooms, but there was typically only one real way to progress through, and finish them.

Riddles are probably waste of time. They won't be "riddles" much past the first week or two after development. The answers will be plastered all over every wiki/blog/random forum associated with Fallout. It is pretty much a wasted effort on the developers part.

Riddles also a fairly stupid thing to put in dungeons in the first place. Especially when you consider most dungeons are just old forts, old ruined towns, or family crypts.

Who the hell is going to magically lock a big old fort with some magic riddle puzzle thing? It doesn't make sense. The few basic traps that are in even Skyrim's forts, and crypts, dont make much sense either, but its a vast improvement over the bull that was Oblivion's old forts and ruins.

I didn't have a problem with Skyrim's dungeons.

Daggerfall dungeons were annoying and Oblivions dungeons needed more clutter they just felt so much the same.

You can always get a map pack apparently those are supposed to take 10 minutes to build, so maybe you should build it yourself.

Apparently Boston had "America's first subway," so we will probably see a return of the below-grade dungeon.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_MBTA#Streetcar_subways_and_elevated_rail

Boston's mass transit system is huge and also includes the "Big Dig", a large scale underground, mutil-level highway system....assuming it was built in the Fallout Universe.

Take a gander:

http://www.mbta.com/schedules_and_maps/subway/

I really want a subway,

Its funny how there are people that hate the subway due to becoming lost or one way travel at times and then here we have a thread about how there should be dungeons that are not linear.

1.Depends on what sort of dungeon if it is something like Shalidors Mace shecking if the person is able to solve something witha bit of thinking might be logical.

2."family crypts.","ruined towns" =Again makes sense just as magical passwords would make sense,which could be solved like riddles or with hints.

3."Who the hell is going to magically lock a big old fort with some magic riddle puzzle thing? It doesn't make sense."

Considering the apparent inabilty of people in a world without internet to solve most riddles.?It's a nice way to remember your own password or checking that only the right people can get in without writiing down or telling the actual password.

4."The few basic traps that are in even Skyrim's forts, and crypts, dont make much sense either,

Oh pelase now it's just silly....against invaders,agasint grave robbers,against thiefs..,etc?

Of course that's more from a fantasy perspective.

So are quests....is writing quests also a waste of time for you?Not everyone goes and reads spoilers for everything.

Yea, it will be interesting to see if some version of the Big Dig is in there since the planning for it didn't start until the 1980's. If I understand correctly, the period between the 1950's and 2077 (in the Fallout universe) is a 1950's vision of the future, so it seems like a major infrastructure upgrade like the Big Dig could be a part of that.

On puzzles, I'm personally thinking less "you must answer the Gatekeeper's riddle in order to pass" and more "you have to re-route the water flow just right, without building up too much pressure" or things like that. The Dwemer ruins in Dragonborn were pretty solid examples - they made sense environmentally, they made you pause for thought, and they could be figured out through some trial-and-error if all else fails.

How would the motivation and execution of the Big Dig have changed, were it by a society that was zealously patriotic and terrified of Communist invasion? That's what I'm hoping for.

I was fine with Skyrim's dungeons. I liked that fact that each one told a story with their varied backgrounds of human sacrifices, mutilated animal caucus, etc.

Same here. I don't get the hate for FO3's subway system. It was pretty cool not knowing what was lurking around the corner, having exits at your disposal.

Agreed. The only way pipboy mapping would make sense for labyrinth, multi leveled dungeons, is if mapping was done floor by floor like in Zelda games. Otherwise exploration would be a chore to navigate. Perhaps the V.A.N.S. perk would prove most useful in these scenarios.

While Skyrim's dungeons weren't exactly the high standard of superb level design (e.g. conspicuously looping-back on themselves), I personally prefer them to Oblivion's dungeons. It may be true that they were less linear, but I don't think that necessarily makes them better. I understand people have different tastes when it comes to level design, but I found the dungeons in Oblivion to be very dull...fittingly.

The thing is, when I think back to Oblivion, I can't recall a single memorable dungeon in the entire game. Every single rocky cave looked exactly the same and had practically nothing in the way of environmental storytelling to make it stand out from the hundreds of others I'd trodden through before. In contrast, I thought (most of) Skyrim's dungeons each told their own little story that gave them a more interesting atmosphere even if they were more linear. A good example would be that mine where you discover a note talking of a failed search for gold, and a skeleton in the tunnels crushed under the weight of a massive gold deposit. I found that to be an interesting bit of visual storytelling and poetic irony (something the actual quests were rather lacking in compared with Oblivion).

Personally, I'd like to see Fallout 4's metro and/or caves to maintain that same attention-to-detail while allowing for a bit more exploration so the dead-ends and loopings aren't quite so contrived, but without resulting in something like the "Kidnap" mission in Thief II.

do you know the definitiono of insanity?!

It seems to me that dungeons should not have been all different from each other given that in Skyrim the Dungeons would have all been built in the same region.

Now if you were say to go to Hammerfell and those dungeons were just like the ones found in Skyrim then maybe the complaint would be a valid one.

The engineers that would have constructed those would not have deviated much from the pattern.

Yes I'm speaking of Realism, go complain how in Egypt all the Pyramids are so similar.

i do remember some rather small caves in morrowind, consisting of pretty much just one t intersection with a few rooms after the entrance.. there were always small caves and big ones... i honestly do not remember most of them because apart from story ones non of them were ever that big.

about the only one i can honestly remember was the one in skyrim that had you activate a trap that dropped you a crazy distance after a very loud grating noise finally stopped.... i guess you can call that one pretty straight forward too since you went in one real direction the entire trip, even exiting out a differant cave.

honestly i remember more about overworld exploration than and cave in any of these games... either Fallout or Elder Scrolls.

Replaying oblivion with OOO installed and holy mother of god are the dungeons worse than I remember.

I think there is a single noteworthy dungeon in the entire game, and I couldn't even tell you the name, just that it contains a bunch of ghost pirates and is north of Chorral.

They need to redo exactly what they did in skyrim, and then some. The biggest sleeper hit was the pacing they had.

For the most part, it wasn't a copy pasted slug fest like MW and OB, where you ran into a room, killed everything that moved, and repeated. We had tons of trap dodging, open rooms designed to give you a breather, and just a general feel that this was a dungeon, and not just a place for you to slaughter cattle.

In skyrim repetition was broken by giving you some form of eye bleach in the puzzles, quests, or visual story telling. Even the fights were more interesting with a few bosses having unique mechanics. (One draugr constantly creating 3 copies of himself springs to mind.)

We even got short cuts back to the beginning, and while that seems silly when done in every dungeon, gameplay >realism, and that point is driven home when you consider how long and winding some dungeons were. Would you honestly be happiest having to run through the dungeon a second time after having just completed it, except there being 0 action? I'm experiencing that in OB right now, and it got old after the 3rd or 4th fort.

I cannot stress enough how boring the dungeons are when you have to essentially run them a second time. There's no breath of fresh air after having finally killed a nether lich. I'm rewarded with having to run through the entire zone. Again. It's not collect a shiny piece of loot and continue the momentum. Every bit of it comes to a grinding halt, and that is awful game design.

One compromise I can think of to replace dungeon loopbacks might be, once a location is marked "Cleared", you're allowed to fast travel back to the entrance (or if it's not a clearable location like a settlement, always enable it). I honestly don't care about the loopbacks, though, and if they went with that they'd have to be more consistent with the Cleared state of dungeons.

it isn't that time after 1950s all takes on a vision of the future from the 50s, but that sometime after WW2 there is a time divergence, where things branched off, differently from our timeline. When exactly the split happened, we don't know. Some things that happened in our time didn't happen in the FO Universe, I would say this especially becomes the case post 1970, as I still think the Korean and Vietnam war took place, but I question if the cold war actually ended.

Divergence seems to have actually began to really take effect after the mid 60s.

We have several songs from the late 50's, and 1961, in the Fallout series, and both Fallout 3 and NV make mentions of the hippie movement, which began in the mid 1960's, showing that, for the most part at least, the world/culture stayed basically the same as it did IRL until at least until after the mid 60's.

If it ain't broke don't fix it