Still, Beth did a good job. I found some nice examples of vertical designs in west and Dwemer ruins. They commented how levitation was ruining their cool dungeon designs. Yeah, we are enjoying linear dungeons so much right now. They should bring back levitation and work on designs that would work with it. Some innovation please.

I would like to see this too. There are some (Shriekwind Bastion was like woaaah when I first saw it), but for the most part its "wind down tunnels until final room, take a left in final room and wind back to the start"

Edit: Yea on levitation... it was broken back in Morrowind cuz there were no barred doors. Now that you can only open certain doors from 1 side, the levitation argument ruining dungeon design is kinda moot. And bring back acrobatics while you are at it. Who needs to levitate when I can fortify acrobatics +1000 and just jump to that little ledge?

yes.
skyrim also needs tower dungeons (towers, like the ones that go up, not forts that dig themselves underground) and a 1000 floor tower dungeon (with some outside levels, just so people can test that slowfall spell they have been working so hard on :whistling: )

Like you I used to be into platformers and made arguments in forums defending their honor, but then I took an arrow to the knee.

Hey, epic dungeons you can get lost in are far to few these days. I say bring them on! Maybe a Moria-type designed that takes 3 days to pass through.

For those who don't wish to get lost, let me just pull out my handy-dandy Quest Marker Arrow... to the knee, of course

Actually, Morrowind's dungeons were amazingly done. The level design is one of my favourite aspects of games, which is why I love Morrowind so much. All caves were well designed and even down to small touches, like the texture of a cave wall, added a lot of variety.

Jus' sayin'.

I can quote you for truth about the Dungeon Design of Morrowind being good (While we are here, I think that Skyrim, dungeon-design-wise, is as good as Morrowind)

But to the textures of the cave's walls to be different is a little to much isn't it? :tongue:

Aww, you need to explore more before posting something like this.

Morrowind dungeons were scary

Well, actually, in at least one dungeon... I don't want to spoil it for you

OP is on crack. I'm going up and down, forward and back, left and right all the time.

err...Viking culture was anachronistically brutal and peaceful. While they held chess in extremely high regard and farmed, they would also, according to recovered histories, give a captured foe the chance to show his bravery by tying him face down, slicing open his back, breaking his ribs so they pointed upwards, and draping his lungs over the ribs so they flapped like an eagle's wings. You know, as a favor to him. Extra points if the victim didn't scream. They may have also sprinkled salt on the lucky guy's lungs, too, for kicks. They also had an incredibly repetitive [censored] theme in their legends.

The Nords of Skyrim don't really fit that mold. They aren't even really sea-reavers

edit- that's censored? I guess you have to censor things on the forums...well I can't go around the censor but the term is used for forced relations with a woman, and it's not pleasant

Well no, the blood eagle probably wouldn't be PC, even for a M-rated game.

The nords aren't sea reavers because they don't have to be. You should compare the boats at Windhelm to the norse longship though.

i dont think op's seen how high the throat of the worlds is yet

This is exaclty what I'm talking about. I know you can get high up. But there's nothing under the throat of the world. There's nothing above it either. It's one level, and if you run in one direction yes, you'll fall down the mountain, but you still won't be above or below anything. You are running across ground that is not flat, but it's still just one story the whole time.

I've been to Blackreach. It's the perfect example of what I'm thinking of. How many levels does Blackreach have? It has a ground floor across the whole place, and it has an upper level. That's it. You can jump down to the lower bits from the higher bits, but there's not a whole lot of vertical challenge to figuring the place out. Even though it's the huge, cavernous, sprawling space, Bethesda just didn't make any use of the Y axis.

I can think of one place, which is attached to blackreach, and it's the dwemer ruin that you have to go in for part of the main quest. There's one room in there where you have several challenging levels to play on, and you can jump down to several (I think about 3) different "Floors." The big problem is that's the only good example I can think of for any vertical consideration of where you are in the dungeon, and it's sort of a moot point anyway because there's no real way to get up there from the bottom.

People saying I'm on crack, or I haven't played much, meh to you all. I've played 248 hours of this game. I'm perfectly aware of the variety of dungeons out there. However, I find that 9 times out of ten, when I look up in this game, the only thing there is the ceiling or the sky. Nothing interesting to explore above your head.

Try it, go into any random dungeon and start looking around above you. Anything interesting? Take some screenshots if you see something.

Not 3D? Dude can you not see your hands in front of your face and you obviously have not been struck by a Giants club yet. You will get to visit the sky very quickly

Stop staring at the floor and look up at the world around and above you.

Sorry if you didn't see that part.

So you want to go inside the mountains then...
btw I'm still up for giving you good places to get your vertical cravings

In some regards I agree with the OP. There isn't a lot of play with different heights in a lot of the game. If there is a multilevel area, most of the time it is a ground floor with stairs to a lower floor or a higher one. But there are some that are extremely impressive. Wolfskull Cave has a few different levels in the main chamber. Sure they are mainly small and only contain a simple enemy or two but the variation is nice.

When I saw some of the mountains I was really excited about how you could have all sorts of different levels for places to go. The game didn't meet up to my expectations on that front but tbh my expectations were a tad ridiculous.

Consider the ruin for the "Man who cried wolf" quest. Pretty awesome vertical stuff going on there, I think.

Also, bleak falls barrow(i think) has that cool pit thing, there are at least 3 levels in that. Plus forts that have 3-4 levels. So it exists, maybe just not as much as you'd like.

As far as I've been able to tell, there are immense dungeons that go up and down. You just can't go up and down very well without a levitate spell.....

No levitate, no climb, no varied jump height with pretty much 0 ways other than ranged attacks for the player ton interact with varied height environments I was not expecting much in this regard. There are some dungeons that do an okay job of it, but yes overall if you look up you see the ceiling occasionally you will see a shaft of light to the outside world but there is nothing you can do about it.

There are some places where you can pass through a mountain, I'd like to have seen more of these, but certainly even the mountains are more than one level in some places.

On a related note... does it really take an entire barrel to hold four tomatoes?

Well, I suppose if that's all the-

WAIT A MINUTE!

That isn't related at all!