Having a couple of buildings that would take several days to pass through would be cool. -)

Be careful what you wish for. Moria in Lord of the Rings Online is both loved and hated. It is loved by the lore-monkeys because it's beautfiul. It's hated by just about everyone that just wants to play the game because it is almost impossible to navigate with all the different floors and winding passages. Trying to get to a specific location is a nightmare unless you've already done it several times before. Handy dandy quest marker? LOL. LotRO has an actual map on-screen and it's absolutely useless in Moria. Skyrim's map would be less than useless.

Wow, people have weird complaints here. I think Bethesda has done a good enough job with the design. What they really need to work on is AI and basic gameplay.

I think the hardest part is if you make something big and grandiose in any direction you need to worry about 3 things:

Wasted Space (For both the player, the disk space, and wasting the modeler, texture artist, and world builder's time)
Appearances (If you make it big, it better be pretty)
Purpose/Content (Long empty hallway with treasure at the end is the same as a short empty hallway with treasure at the end. Only longer. On a side note, spamming generic traps just makes it longer and more annoying)

Lol, this. Plus alot of the Dwemer ruins have really cool, very tall cities. Some remind me Zion. But most of the normal stuff wont have alot of layers, why should it?

Ditto

Blackreach.

Sadly, my poor little hobbit hasn't even made it to level 30 yet. I think he has been taking a mutli-month siesta in Bree. I'll have to check how fat he's been getting since I saw him last




Indeed, the game-world, while still small and cluttered, is the least of Bethesda's problem's. I'd be very happy if they made the gameplay mechanics as well as they did the world.


Ps. Does anybody else remember the mod that created a tunnel that stretched all of the way from Vvardenfell to Mournhold? Supposedly, it was full-scale. It was an alternative way, though long and tedious, to get companions to both places

I agree, not saying bad about Skyrim.


Nope I liked that the caves in Molag Amur looked like they were in a lava filled wasteland, whereas the caves in Bitter coast looked like they were some muddy swamp-like cave. Morrowind was full of little details like this that made all the difference. Textures don't actually take much space, either. Voiced Dialogue is what kills the content in Oblivion/Skyrim.

Yeah, because the barrows filled with draugr, Dwemer ruins filled with Falmer, and bandit caves are the only types of dungeons. Talk abut variety! :rolleyes:

ikr. Wish Falmer had their own dungeons.

This is poignant. I understand what you are trying to say, and it makes a lot of sense. Still though, I think Skyrim could easily have gone upwards with some of their dungeons and still kept with this idea. You just want to make sure the space isn't empty up there, but that there's something to do, and some way to get there. If you look above you and see ledges and rooms that you can get to, then that's not wasting time or space.

That's where I have a different opinion. A long hallway is completely different than a short one. Especially in an open-world RPG. Is the end result the same? Yes. But that's the difference between reading an epic like Lord of the Rings and reading its Cliffs Notes. It's the difference between the original Mona Lisa and a stick figure adaption. In the end, you get the same thing, but you lose what makes it special. The longer hallway is just as much of a piece art as the timing and sustaining of notes in Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor.

Yes, such streamlined logic makes sense in a game like Halo or even a Zelda. But in an epic, game design should take a backseat to the lore, art, and atmosphere. That long, empty hallway should be placed with care just as pauses are placed in music and empty space to a painting. When used properly, it can make or break the atmosphere and emotion that you are striving to achieve.

I'm not saying that the rest of Skyrim is deserving of being called a masterpiece, but that shouldn't affect the actual art. After all, you could take the argument another step to the extreme. A game with one short, 30-minute dungeon with a boss is the same as 300+ hour-long dungeons with a boss.


Ps. I wouldn't mind mazes with dead ends everywhere. Now that would be interesting... frustrating, but challenging!

Nah, most dungeons were pretty 2D in Morrowind too, you could see them well drawn on the map, multiple levels on the same area tend to be rare.


And yeah, most of the Dwemer ruins tend to be pretty tall...

I'm much more bothered by the ridiculous linearity of the dungeons. An extra alcoven behind a locked door is pretty much the only diversion from the, admittedly very pretty and well designed, narrow hose levels the dungeons are. A few exceptions exist, of course.

Agreed. Not to mention that they all seem to be designed circularly. As soon as I make it to the "end," I'm a secret door and five steps away from the entrance.

If I get into modding, the first things I may make are a portable ladder and a secret door open spell... or a sledgehammer to bash them open ;-P

It would save me 30 minutes of fighting scaled-enemies with scaled-loot.

Not to mention all of the "riddles" are the same and basically this:

[img]http://img405.imageshack.us/img405/8915/foerm.jpg[/img]

It's actually kind of insulting.

Edit: Why the f*** does this board even have an "insert image" function ...?

I don't get any loading when climbing the throat of the world. Thats pretty high!

Have only read the first page, but: Ever been to the Sightless Pit? No Spoiler, but i was totally confused as i entered this place.

i was with untill this post sure it would be nice to have some cool big dungeons, but if they were put it in i want a reason for them some lore behind who built this monolith and why i also would prefere 1 or 2 then 10-20 massive dungeon's nor would i want massive a dungeons for the sake of having massive dungeon's (whats the point of a long hallway if thats all it is an epic dungeon would need to be something more then that)

as for the " lore, art, and atmosphere" taking a backseat....................... your taking the piss right? TES is about the world the history the tone everything
apart from everything we over devoted fans [censored] about game mechanics being taken away and TES being dumbed down

what your advocating is that TES's heart and soul be ripped out and cast aside because somethings cool
we should make dungeons master pieces at the by degrading skyrim (and TES) as a whole? i think not

theirs plenty of games with cool dungeons and thats what their known for "that game had kick [censored] dungeons"
i think TES is more then that and to go that way would degrade the series even more then it has

I'm just saying that by "streamlining" the level design, they are already degrading TES. Why does a long hallway have to be cut down to a short one? To save a few extra steps? With that line of thinking, why even have dungeons in the first place? Why not just have one large room with a boss and a treasure chest instead of long, enemy-filled dungeons with twists and turns? Everyone ends up dead anyway, why not just make it one dead boss instead dozens of nobodies then finally a boss?

In Skyrim, there's only one way to go in a dungeon. And if there are different paths, they all end up in the same place. There are no dead ends or alternatative destinations. The level design has turned into nothing more than Halo... a linear path from beginning to end. Not even to mention that many are actually big circles. You end up at the very beginning. That sure was convenient! Whatever happened to the core RPG gameplay mechanic of backtracking?

The level design of dungeons doesn't hinder the rest of the game. It can only enhance it. If they didn't want the dungeons to matter, they wouldn't have hand-crafted them. But they obviously wanted to make them look better and less generic... however, they forgot completely about adding depth to the designs. Sure, there are some that are better, but the majority I've seen go from Point A to Point B to Point C which is just on the other side of a secret door from Point A. It doesn't matter how pretty or unique the dungeon is, it's the same loop over and over.

Variety is the spice of life, but the same thing repeatedly gets old fast. And that's not even to mention level-scaled enemies and loot which already takes away the purpose of dungeon crawling.

The whole point is that I cannot get lost. I literally CANNOT get lost. I don't even need a quest arrow to tell me that. As long as I go in the only direction, I will find my way out soon. There is no fear, no excitement, no nervousness. Enter a dungeon, move forward until you kill everything, gather loot, exit. It's Halo with swords. Compare Skyrim's dungeons to Daggerfall's or Arena. Those are true TES dungeons.


Ps. I said that lore, art, and atmosphere SHOULD be the very basis of the game. That's why a long, empty hallway SHOULD exist instead of replacing it with a short hallway for expedience sake.

Only the occasional spider is above you chilling in it's webbing. 200hrs of game play and have only seen this in 1 dungeon. In 2 caverns there was a spider above in its webbing, were actually 2 in 1 cavern and 1 in the other....wish that happened more often.

I think Morrowind is the best example for this topic.

It just shows that the developers of Skyrim cannot think in three dimensions enough. I remember hearing a comment by one of the developers, saying that during their meetings in other TES games, some of them would interject on quest ideas, claiming that they could easily be exploited by levitation, etc. I would say that most dungeons of Skyrim could be beaten by a nine year old...This is very strange considering that this is a mature rated game.

Perhaps they got intimidated by the complexity of such tall and intricate dungeons.

Here is my suggestion to Bethesda, stop following the communist mentality where something must be made that "anyone" can easily complete it. Lock out content, based on our choices. Kill off quest-related characters if we make poor decisions. If that endangers the main quest, then make a secret quest like you did in Morrowind. I bet your ratings would sky-rocket if you challenged us.

Do Septimus' quest. It takes you to a dungeon that is at least 15 floors high and you start at the top and need to descend. It's so tall, in fact, that a Level 3 Become Ethereal doesn't last long enough to safely jump to the bottom.

Well, that is reassuring. I must be unlucky so far with my 70+ hours. I am looking forward to this one then, along with Labyrinthian and Forelhost.