Seriously... if you want to test your real TES mettle try delving the depths of Daggerfalls castle Wayrest.... chances are if you go in ill-prepared, you wont get back out. THAT is how you do a dungeon dive in TES... Its a shame Skyrims are mere A-B affairs (with an 'exit' door at the end!) I would love to see a return to the sprawling, multi-layered labrynths that mere fetch quests in DF sent you to.

It's more difficult to make sprawlings dungeons in modern games when there's so much more detailed required. That's probably why Skyrim only has one Daggerfall-esque sized dungeon (Blackreach).

Even with Bethesda limiting themselves to just one super-sized dungeon, once I got over the initial "wow" factor, there really wasn't much to see or do there....

Yep, Daggerfall had the best dungeons ever. Mere fetch quests you say? You go into a Daggerfall dungeon it is highly possible you won't come out alive. I made it a good practice to cast mark at the entrance because some of the dungeons were so big they resembled an ant farm.

Daggerfall, if the monsters don't getcha the bugs will.

Once you got a real handle of things and learned to cast the Anchor spell at the beginning of every dungeon (How was I supposed to know?), things became fun, yes. But I feel modern gamers would be driven away by such complexity.

Dungeons in Daggerfall were meh, but I grew up on games like the ID Software classics Wolfenstein 3D, Doom and Quake, and those games were almost entirely exercises in level design. Daggerfall's meandering and senseless dungeons pale in comparison to those, so I never saw their "Size" as really a good thing.

What's weird is how well a game like Doom actually holds up, I had been playing it only about a year and a half ago on XBLA and it's still more fun than most Modern (hint hint) shooters out there.

Daggerfall never really feels like that, probably because the dungeons are procedurally generated, so they come off unintuitive, like the rest of Daggerfall.

Honestly? I am of favourable disposition towards the "quick exit" at the end of the dungeon design, in healthy doses. I don't really consider trekking back through long dungeons that I've just cleared an enjoyable experience, though a few here and there are fine. Skyrim does abuse the "quick exit" a little too much though, I agree. But that particular design, in of itself, isn't necessarily a bad thing.

In Daggerfall, I anchored at the start of a dungeon then recalled when I was done. Same again in Morrowind with Mark and Recall spells.

Meh... mark/recall/anchor spells were for wimps. Getting in and out on foot was a much more rewarding experience imo.

If I remember correctly only certain dungeon maps were locked most layouts change with every new game. That is how I remember it.

Nah. They were all randomly generated when the game was created, and that is it. Every dungeon will always have the same layout for every person in every game you start. The main quest dungeons were made by hand, while the optional dungeons were randomly generated from the scraps of the MQ dungeons. This also results in some dungeons being impossible to complete due to the quest objectives spawning in impossible to reach areas.