Ahoy,

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?

Larger, non-linear dungeons provide a lot more intellectual content than small, detailed dungeons. Details provide aesthetic content, but in this kind of game, you obviously have to re-use models, textures, and other stuff. So if you do not have a complex dungeon design, once you've been through one you've seen them all.

This is how I felt for almost all of Skyrim, and I got bored of going into random dungeons because I knew they were all going to be a straight line with draugr alone the way and a door leading to the exit at the end. More complicated dungeons with less detail are more fun to play, so make those if you actually want your game/mod to be... a game. If you just want it to be like an interactive movie that is an interesting aesthetic experience without much intellectual content or decision-making, then go with the smaller detailed ones.

Old games had to supply intellectual content, because aesthetics were pretty pathetic because of hardware limitations. Now, because of improved hardware, developers can provide aesthetics in place of intellectual content, and that seems like something very popular for most people, so it's increasingly done and they make more money from it.

The "old" style is better because you get more playing time out of it, and I find that aesthetic experiences are shallow and less intense/interesting than intellectual ones, so I'd suggest doing that. It depends on what you want to make though, obviously.

Quality. Defantly quality over quantity.

For example: look at blackreach. Wonderful dungeon. Linear path for two of the quests that takes you there. The third quest you get from poking around. Wonderful vistas, a full-fledged slave-city, multiple exits in northern Skyrim... and even a dragon! None of that is actually required for the one (minimum) visit that you need to go there, meaning something like 80-90% of it is actually the devs having fun with the area.

That third quest is basically something that gives you a gentle push to explore Blackreach without making you feel like you need to (unlike certain games where to get past door A you need to find key A... which is on the other freakin' side of the dungeon!)

Basically... the dungeon doesn't force "padding" to extend game length despite certainly having that capability. And that is the sign of a good dungeon. Most old-school dungeons have long winding dungeons to force game length. Blackreach has a long winding dungeon (that you can mostly skip) just for the hell of it.

Don't get me wrong, I won't argue about Blackreach, it is one of highlights of the game, hell, it is currently my desktop background. However it is more akin to a separate map, with destinations dotting its landscape and things to be found, as opposed to a dungeon. I will agree that more areas like Blackreach would be amazing, and if I had something to do with them all the better. However it is, in a way, a small overworld, with mini dungeons put in.

Granted, the game would be a better place if it were all as interesting as Blackreach. However I'd like to also put forward the fact that Blackreach stands out so much primarily due to its different aesthetics, which are the product of lots of people, and in fact the area itself is a conglomeration of work done by lots of people and even then it really isn't all that long.

When I make dungeons I try to keep a balance of "quality" and "quantity" or focus more on 1 depending what type of dungeon I'm making and how I want the experience to be.

Think about it like this, if you make a really long dungeon and don't use any clutter or detail than it gets boring because your seeing basically the same thing over and over again throughout the dungeon. I think some people don't really take into consideration how much clutter and detail does for a dungeon but when you look at it with and without it's a huge difference. But it doesn't matter how much detail you use if your dungeon isn't well thought out and the story behind it isn't good.

This includes layout, you want to try and make the layout unique so that the player experiences something new or at least gets a different feel from your dungeon instead of it being "just another dungeon". You also want to think about the challenge, you want to make it a challenge for the player so that it's fun, but not so difficult that they quit. You also want to determine which to focus on or whether or not to try and balance the 2 depending on the type of dungeon your making or the experience you want the player to have when playing your dungeon.

I could go on and on but what it comes down to is what the player experiences in your dungeon. The dungeon that has a great story and gives the player a unique experience is better than a big dungeon with no story and a vanilla experience.

While I'd immediately answer "quality over quantity," I don't think that encompasses the whole picture.

Quality in the context of an RPG dungeon for me is about far more than visuals or a lack of bugs; it's also about story/roleplay detail, subtle implications and explanations, explorability, and making the evironment make sense as part of a broader fictional world and setting. Morrowind is [arguably] a superior example of this kind of dungeon quality across a huge quantity of dungeons.

So I'd place all of those things above impressive visual design (which in my experience is too often substituted for LOTS of CLUTTER EVERYWHERE); which in turn might allow some level of compromise between sprawling explorable fantasy dungeons, and modder sanity. I'd really enjoy a huge, visually bare dungeon if its quality of story or background detail matched its size.

Maybe an immense labyrinth of bare stone above and below, while not much to look at, is littered with wall scrawls and pages from the journal of a lost hero's ghost, leading eventually to the level 80 boss monster that killed him... which may turn out to be a more sympathetic character than the hero. As long as games are still pretending to be RPGs, capturing the player's imagination should be at least as high a priority as what can be shown on the screen.

I don't have much to contribute, but I'll give a bump as I'm designing my first dungeon and would like input as well. I'm leaning towards quantity at the moment since Skyrim doesn't seem to have very many large, memorable dungeons.

Personally, i take the view that a dungeon is more than just the interior cell. The important thing isn't the geometry or even the clutter; it's the story.

it's two stories, in fact. There's one for the inhabitants and one for the player.

The inhabitants should be doing something. They should have some plan or project and it should be apparent to the player. That's true whether the inhabitants are training an army or just living from day to day. You should be able to tell. And the inhabitants story shouldn't just be living from day to day. Everywhere has its story. The same goes if the inhabitants are long dead: their story should remain.

The player's story is why he or she is there. Sometimes it's because the player was wandering at random and found a hole in the ground. ideally though, he's part of some wider story that brings him to this particular hole in the ground. The PC story may be part of the same as that of the inhabitants (they're training an army, he needs to stop them) or it may be completely unrelated, (Calcemo is stuying the Dwemer, the player needs to translate Gallus' journal) but there ought to be one. And if the player does just find a cave and wonder what's inside, there should be something to draw him into the story anyway.

I think most, if not all of the most memorable dungeons on Skyrim do this. I mentioned Calcermo's museum already. Wolfskull Cave also fits the pattern. The necromancers want to bring back Potema, the player wants to be Thane in Solitude.

The boring ones are the ones where it's just a bunch of things to kill and chests to loot. And that's going to remain true regardless of how big it is and how creatively laid out, at least to my mind. But if the dungeon is part of something greater, and designed to make that apparent to the player, then you can have a memorable location without needing vast size.