I take it you dont like exploring in open world games based on exploration?

those are the kits. I remember it saying somewhere that he said that each kit has many different "styles"
it will be more diverse than oblivion.

If you exclude buggy, giant, incomprehensible, confusing, inconsistent dungeons with no hints of the whereabouts of the item you're supposed to find, then yes, I tend to enjoy them...

Does it count as exploring if you're going through the exact same boring thing you've been going through the whole time, only with bends at different points?

Common denominator is probably common to Oblivion and FO3. It's supposed to be about the same size as Oblivion so I'm going to guess the amount of content is similar, just graphically cooler/with better AI (dragons/people/etc). Oh and totally BA because it's Skyrim!

Either I didn't explained well or you didn't understood. By "common denominator", I meant system storage. And by minimum I meant the 7,8 Gb's 360 DVD's can offer (versus the 50 gb's that Blu-Ray (PS3-PC) can offer).

Being a game "graphically cool" usually means variety. And variety always means more disk space. There's a reason why the city of Sutch and a lor of voiceacting variety was cut down from Oblivion. And frankly I don't expect Skyrim's *optimized* compression system to do miracles.

Did Todd even mention the Dwemer ruins and Nord barrows in that interview? I don't think he did - he may have literally been referring to caves alone.

Oblivion's generic dungeons won't happen again.Bethesda knows that half their player base will commit seppuku.

He says specifically CAVE types, if he were referring to dungeons as a whole, I think he would say DUNGEON types, not cave types. If you actually read the quoted text, he seems to be refering specifically to caves, not dungeons as a whole, the only mention of ruins is a cave inside an Imperial fort, and that sounds to me like it means that in the fort, there is a hole in the wall leading into a cave, rather than actually refering to the fort as a "cave". Not everything that is underground is a cave, does "overgrown moss cave" or "ice cave" sound like a ruin to you? If there's that much variety just for caves, I don't see much reason to worry.

In any case, he was just refering to the individually distinct tilesets, even with the same tileset, with a creative designer, one can create a lot more variety than Oblivion succeeded in doing in different dungeons with the same tileset, provided the designer is given enough time. Considering that Skyrim has 8 designes instead of 1 and fewer dungeons than Oblivion, I think at least we can say that in terms of time, Skyrim has an advantage over Oblivion, as fewer dungeons and more dungeon designers means that more time can be spent on individual dungeons, therefore, even if there is the same amount of tilesets for dungeons, it means they can be put to better use. Whatever the case, right now, I'm leaning towards optimistic on Skyrim's dungeons.

Sorry but after the heavy heavy amount of flaws and dumbing down in Oblivion, I can't say I have the same blind faith.

What's worried me is.. Oblivion had about 200+ dungeons. They were all marked by the stupid magic compass, none were very interesting after you've done about 5 of them. They all scaled so you knew you'd be fairly safe going into any of them.

So, no sense of exploration, no sense of danger, no sense of finding awesome random loot. Oblivion dungeons were horrible.

Now, we have more dungeon designers, which hopefully solves the generic problem, but there are still going to be 150 dungeons in Skyrim. This means, we'll probably be tripping over them again. Less is more Bethesda

If you actually read the quoted text, he is referring specifically to a quote that was written in Norwegian. There is no word for dungeon in Norwegian. If you'd gone on to read the the thread, you'd have noticed that he mentioned the mistranslation.

In this sense, dungeon = cave = any interior location you can think of that is not a house.

Capisce?

In some interview, Todd mentioned being inside a glacier. I think we can assume Ice/Glacier to be a dungeon tile set. We've seen Dwemer ruins (someone may have confirmed them specifically, don't remember), and Nord barrows have been mentioned (there's plenty of concept art with them, at the very least).

I understood perfectly. You misunderstood me though. They've stated repeatedly there was more they could do with the hardware, and that they have. Sounds to me like we're getting a much improved elder scrolls on the same system with minimal increase in storage requirements. Sounds about right to me. Idk though maybe they're going to do a multi disc game. I'm not banking on that though.

Also it's not necessary to say either you didn't explain well or I didn't understand. It can be seen as insulting. As a native English speaking person I'm thinking your best bet is that you simply didn't explain yourself well enough, or that you didn't completely grasp my comment though. My understanding of concepts in English is above par, is yours?

If you see that "insulting", please review your personal meaning of what an "insult" is. A bit of ego-lowering would do it nice as well.

Funniest post I've ever seen.

Communication is a negotiation through a misunderstanding to achieve an understanding. As a native speaker of English learning to speak a second language, I'm thinking that your best bet is to do some serious deflation of ego. I find it hilariously ironic that you've suggested that a common social interaction is insulting to some people, and then hypocritically gone on to use that social interaction yourself in the next sentence but one.

May I just point out that your post, "I'm thinking... that you didn't completely grasp my comment though. My understanding of concepts in English is above par, is yours?" demonstrates a fundamental flaw in your argument. You've made an error in word choice, a punctuation error, a spelling error and an error in word order. I am kind of scared to know what particular benchmark you are measuring yourself against.

I would not worry about the tools, because those are just tools, and the more important issue is who is using those tools, and Skyrim has a lot more man-power behind those tools designing the dungeons, and I'm sure that they are doing a great work with them.

*IF* their design decisions are right, which I hope so, and as for the right design decision, i mean these:

I mean, making unique places that have great stories behind them, in form of meaningful clutter and population, and so on...

And I mean designing dungeons that progressively get harder to conquer with fitting loot in them.

And I mean designing dungeons that each have individually unique chambers and places in them that are unique enough that keep in out minds.

And I mean designing dungeons that can be great place-holders for great quest-lines and have enough separate sections that could be locked off from each other and they can keep us busy figuring out how we can reach some out of reach places in them and o on...

The different styles of tile-sets are just general styles for the places, but within each style of tile set, professional designers can make dungeons with great difference, with intelligent use of clutters, populations and the like...

Edit: corrections.

The mine and generic cave in oblivion was actually in the same set the mine thingy was just a couple of planks and stuff.

I completely agree with you! A good example of how much it depends on how you make the dungeon and not which set you're working with is The German "mod" Nehrim, their opening dungeon was completely amazing and immersive

So really guys, making a few basic assumptions, this is actually a fair bit of diversity.

1. DwemeR Ruins
2. Nordic Ruins
3. Imperial Forts
4. Caves (probably includes moss cave, normal cave and mine stuff, as it was in Oblivion, and also probably spider web sections)
5. Ice cave
6. Something else.

I mean what else could they make? Especially since each should have quite a bit of diversity so each Dwemer ruin won't look the same and will use different sorts of pieces, rather than just a few basic ones rearrnged.

dwemer ruins
imperial forts
caves with various textures ( i estimate... limestone caves (white and shiney),chalk caves (white and not shiny) volcanic caves (black and not shiny), wet caves (black and shiny) dirt caves (brown) mud caves (brown and shiny) standard cave (grey) wet cave 2 (grey and shiney)
nordic tombs
elven ruins
daedric ruins

the icecave probably isnt a tileset


with this variety i would be very happy, especially since extra features such as....

dust
moss
extra rocks
plants
lava
water
snow
ice
fog and mist
LIGHTING
crystals
mining props
furniture
statues
random structures etc

can all be added in

Herp Derp

It doesn't really matter if the templates aren't diverse. They can add whatever they need to the templates to make them unique. Devoting 8 times the resources to the matter should be enough. If they still can't make dungeon crawling interesting with 8 people, then they should probably all be fired. Adding in more fixed items will do the trick as well. There needs to be particular reasons you go to particular caves.

Relax. Sewers, mines, forts, and ruins are not caves. You can call them dungeons or subterranean dwellings, but they are not caves in and of themselves. There was only one type of "cave" in Oblivion. I'm getting the feeling that what Todd meant in that interview is that there will be 5 or 6 types of caves, as well as other types of subterrenean dwellings.



:facepalm: have a little faith in Bethesda. Please???

This ironically applies to politics too... theres a Thomans Jefferson/Payne (not really sure) quote out there somewhere to back me up.

Link, please. My theory here is that there are that "5-6" cave types, ans the number for dungeons is bigger, given that they're focusing on more varied dungeons this time.