I just wanted to get an opinion of other modders with regards to dungeon Length versus the amount of depth of detail in a shorter dungeon.
I recently decided to take up dungeon building in Skyrim (though I have used the creation kit for both Morrowind and Oblivion, in neither did I set my focus on dungeon building) and I set to building a fairly sized dungeon, trying to keep all the basics in mind considering the dungeons already in skyrim. Essentially, I was trying to make as "vanilla" of a dungeon as possible. Now most of skyrim's dungeons are fairly short, but clearly have had effort and time placed into cluttering, lighting and effects.
While that might not sound like an overly difficult task, properly cluttering up a dungeon, even if you know exactly what pieces you are looking for can be a plodding task.
So to make it as vanilla as possible I spent plenty of time hand placing clutter, tweaking every candle light and so on.
Well while I did this on my other monitor I was watching a speedrunner play through Swords and Serpents. As a joke I quickly threw together an exact replica of the first floor of the dungeon in SnS. The first floor was extensive and In the time it took to make my "Vanilla skyrim" style dungeon I could easily assemble plenty of these floors.
So I kinda took a step back and looked at old dungeoneering compared to new. While old dungeons made a large fairly wide open (go where you please) labyrinth the skyrim ones seem to be a single path which usually doubles back on itself for easy exit.
To be fair to newer RPGs in terms of dungeon length, old rpgs did extend their own length with turn based combat, and while a single encounter in Skyrim can take anywhere between a second and usually no more then 30 seconds, a single encounter in an older RPG could last minutes.
Now granted, one could possibly make a extremely detailed, wide open expansive detailed labyrinth. However the time that would need to be invested into such a dungeon would be... substantial.
But then I sort of miss the days of spending hours in a dungeon, going back and forth.
So, Opinions on Dungeon Length vs Immersiveness, Linearity vs Freeform, Long Combat vs Short Skirmishes, Old School vs New School?