I really fucking hate dungeons/caves/crypts/sewers in RPGs.

[Excidium]

You guys don't hate dungeons, you just hate badly made dungeons. Every of your favorite games had cool dungeons, like Fallout. It doesn't have to be a sewer or a castle to be a "dungeon". Heck, in Wizardry and Might & Magic a lot of overland areas and cities can be considered dungeons.

Indeed!

But don't say you don't like dungeons. That's like saying you don't like inventories, or stats. They are integral to the genre.

No. Dungeons are just enviroments, they aren't integral to the genre in any way.

 

[Awor Szurkrarz]

Did anyone even bother to create interesting realistic dungeons with realistic dungeon challenges?

What about the Ultima Underworlds? They had a good mix of exploration, fighting and problem-solving in more of a realistic setting (more realistic than most games where it's a bunch of mobs standing around waiting to be attacked).

Some examples of realism in UU?

 

[Excidium]

Maybe the creatures having different languages? Like you need to learn some of the lizardman words to communicate with them. I thought that was pretty cool.

 

[Jasede]

Different environments are integral to my enjoyment of an RPG. And obviously, to me, my tastes are the only correct and true path, so all RPGs need to have dungeons (= varied environments).

It's part of my Jasedeocentric world view, a simple philosophy resting on a few fundamental axioms: "I. Jasede is always correct about anything relevant to Jasede outside of things that he can not possibly be trusted to observe due to lacking experience and/or background." and "II. Jasede wins every argument by default, especially the ones he loses.".

I'm hoping that by following this shallow individualism I'll eventually become a normal person that looks out for his own well-being constantly rather than being easily tricked by the cruel world that is not as naive and idealized and romantic as I dream.

 

[Excidium]

I respect that!

 

[Awor Szurkrarz]

Maybe the creatures having different languages? Like you need to learn some of the lizardman words to communicate with them. I thought that was pretty cool.

It doesn't require going to undergrounds. I mean something that would make them like real dungeons and caves and stuff.

 

[Ruprekt]

With that kind of thinking we can't have sci-fi rpgs either because in reality 'colonizing' hostile planets is a fucking stupid idea.

 

[Awor Szurkrarz]

With that kind of thinking we can't have sci-fi rpgs either because in reality 'colonizing' hostile planets is a fucking stupid idea.

Sci-fi doesn't have to include colonizing hostile planet. Also, it's a question of dungeons adding something of value, not just leaving the city with its tons of characters and inns and taverns.

 

[Roguey]

Yes, Risen did it quite nicely. Had some damn hard fights in there too. Although that might just have been because of the absolutely shitty combat system.

I don't get it, what's shitty aboout it? Perhaps you are talking only about magic, which was unremarkable (not shitty), but melee combat in Risen was pretty great in my opinion. Best I've seen in action RPG actually.

Risen's problem is how in the early game you can win every fight by equipping a shield and circle-strafing, and in the mid-late game you can win every fight by spamming charge attacks. Fortunately the sequel is fixing the former by streamlining shields out of the game world.

Temple of Elemental Evil is a pretty good example of a very long well-made dungeon.

If you're referring to the crpg, it had far too many bugbears for that. Yeah, you can avoid most of them by wearing robes and making alliances, but they still shouldn't be there to begin with (at least so I wouldn't have to see all those complaints about them).

 

[OSK]

The problem of course is that there is only so much variation you can have in a city.

Do you really need desert world? And water world? And forest world? You can have plenty of variation within a city. Look at Tarant, one of the greatest RPG cities ever. You have residential areas of varying degrees of wealth, an industrial area, commercial areas, sewers, a graveyard, etc. Visiting the bar in The Boil is different than visiting the high-end gentleman's club. I'd love to take all that and expound everything into an entire game.

Everything is known in a city. In the dark, you know little beyond the perimeter of your own sight..

What city doesn't have a locked door? What city doesn't have areas restricted to the general public? A seedy underbelly or an exclusive upper-class? And just because you know the physical layout of a city, doesn't mean you know what's going on in the minds of its citizens. I find a tangled web of interactions and relationships between factions and individuals far more interesting than the twists and turns in a dungeon.

Dungeons are typically populated with monsters. Cities are typically populated with people. Monsters are for killing. People are for talking with, bartering with, undertaking quests for, bluffing, betraying, stealing from, etc. and killing. Dungeons are for looting and hack and slash. Cities are for story and choices and consequences.

That's why I feel like dungeons are fillers to the good stuff.

 

[Mastermind]

Cities are always the best part of RPGs. Fuck the filler. Just give me an RPG that takes place entirely within a large, fleshed out city.

Dragon Age 2.

 

[Awor Szurkrarz]

Dungeons are typically populated with monsters. Cities are typically populated with people. Monsters are for killing. People are for talking with, bartering with, undertaking quests for, bluffing, betraying, stealing from, etc. and killing. Dungeons are for looting and hack and slash. Cities are for story and choices and consequences.

I prefer to kill people than some weird monsters or robots. And towns and villages are for hack & slash.

 

[PorkaMorka]

Cities are awful in CRPGs, as long as the game still encourages you to talk to every NPC, explore every house and loot every cupboard.

Most houses will not have very much interesting stuff in them, most NPCs will not have much interesting to say and most cupboards will not have good loot. And that's how it should be.

But it makes for a tedious couple of hours every time you get to a city and have to scour it clean.

Huge difference from P&P cities, where you'd pretty much never do any of that boring shit.

Dungeons are fun as long as lots and lots of effort is put into them. They tend to be rich in gameplay rather than reading text and looting cupboards.

But the real stars of the RPG genre are the times when you get to break into an evil temple still occupied by the priests, or a keep that actually isn't abandoned, or a thieves guild which isn't an excuse for chatting.

Fighting people tends to be much more tactically interesting (and satisfying) than fighting monsters, especially if someone were to put some effort into making the priests of the evil temple actually react appropriately when you kick in the door... not just sit in each room waiting for you to trigger them.

 

[ArcturusXIV]

Actually, part of the story being told in 'Forests' -- i.e. wide open dungeon -- is not a bad idea! Maybe we need to think more laterally...

I wouldn't mind an RPG with ocean travel/exploration, multiple continents, so on. Not with that as a focus, just with the option of that, I'm sick of every Elder Scrolls game being a "bunch" of cities on one continent, except #2 and so on.

Generic is bad. What you are talking about, I believe, Kamikaze, is having *culture* to your areas. Everything needs a lore, or it is pretty basic, bland, and boring soup.

Also, you can theme things by culture. Arabian, European, Chinese, et cetera, so no city needs to be a row of cardboard boxes, think that was what earlier posts were suggesting. Again, this is a cultural lore issue, nothing with history is ever too bland...

 

[Awor Szurkrarz]

Cities are awful in CRPGs, as long as the game still encourages you to talk to every NPC, explore every house and loot every cupboard.

Most houses will not have very much interesting stuff in them, most NPCs will not have much interesting to say and most cupboards will not have good loot. And that's how it should be.

One thing that I enjoyed in towns in Baldur's Gate was walking from house to house and murdering everyone inside.

But it makes for a tedious couple of hours every time you get to a city and have to scour it clean.

OCD?

Huge difference from P&P cities, where you'd pretty much never do any of that boring shit.

Darklands.

 

[OSK]

Cities are awful in CRPGs, as long as the game still encourages you to talk to every NPC, explore every house and loot every cupboard.

What games encourage that? I typically find that certain gamers force that upon themselves. These people are usually the same ones who pick up every piece of loot, even if it's some shitty stone dagger worth a single piece of gold, just so they can carry it to the nearest merchant to sell. If you force yourself to open every chest and cupboard in every building, yeah, it'll probably get tedious. But if the game isn't pushing you towards these bland, uninteresting areas, is it the fault of the game or the gamer?

Generic is bad. What you are talking about, I believe, Kamikaze, is having *culture* to your areas. Everything needs a lore, or it is pretty basic, bland, and boring soup.

I don't know. I tend to think of culture and lore as parts of the setting and not active game mechanics. Personally, when I think of lore I think of Morrowind. There's all those books with stories about people, places and events that you never see in game. You can completely ignore all of them, and it will have little to no effect on your ability to play the game. The differences between cities and dungeons are far more than just setting. You actually play the game differently in a dungeon compared to how you play in a city. That's where I made the generalization that dungeons are typically made for combat, whereas cities typically encompass most, if not all, aspects of an RPG.

 

[PorkaMorka]

Cities are awful in CRPGs, as long as the game still encourages you to talk to every NPC, explore every house and loot every cupboard.

What games encourage that? I typically find that certain gamers force that upon themselves. These people are usually the same ones who pick up every piece of loot, even if it's some shitty stone dagger worth a single piece of gold, just so they can carry it to the nearest merchant to sell. If you force yourself to open every chest and cupboard in every building, yeah, it'll probably get tedious. But if the game isn't pushing you towards these bland, uninteresting areas, is it the fault of the game or the gamer?

BG1/BG2 are a great example of how you can miss important items / encounters if you don't break into every random house. Sure most of the houses are worthless but a few have awesome things inside and some of those also have no quest or dialog leading to them.

It's pretty much poor play not to explore all the houses, you're not only making your character weaker, you're missing out on content.

Missing out on a little gold from not selling all your loot is one thing, but missing out on powerful magic items and interesting encounters is another.

Are you telling me you didn't search the houses in BG1/BG2? Did you just use a walkthrough to skip to the good ones?

Huge difference from P&P cities, where you'd pretty much never do any of that boring shit.

Darklands.

Yes, as I typed that I thought... you know, Darklands cities really had far more in common with P&P cities than most other CRPGs. Maybe they were on to something there...

 

[Surf Solar]

Actually, part of the story being told in 'Forests'

This. I've yet to see a truely beautiful, atmospheric and interesting forest in any game. Same goes for maritime travel you mentionend.

As for people finding cities in RPGs boring - ideally the game should offer something interesting in every house, every NPC etc.

 

[MMXI]

BG1/BG2 are a great example of how you can miss important items / encounters if you don't break into every random house. Sure most of the houses are worthless but a few have awesome things inside and some of those also have no quest or dialog leading to them.

It's pretty much poor play not to explore all the houses, you're not only making your character weaker, you're missing out on content.

Missing out on a little gold from not selling all your loot is one thing, but missing out on powerful magic items and interesting encounters is another.

Are you telling me you didn't search the houses in BG1/BG2? Did you just use a walkthrough to skip to the good ones?

Actually, no. Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 are really bad examples. You could happily play through Baldur's Gate 1 skipping past all of those generic looking houses without missing out on anything decent. Baldur's Gate 2 happened to scrap all of those extraneous buildings to streamline the experience, meaning that the very few buildings you could actually enter were mostly worthwhile.

 

[eric__s]

You are so, so wrong, Sir. Dungeons carve a unique semblance of atmosphere for games that allow creativity and variation within design. Sound, ambience, becomes far more important than restless city traffic--the drip, drip, drip of water, noises that signal enemies, light, shadows, dynamics.

No, I don't think I'm wrong and I don't think I said anything that conflicts with what you've said. I think there are a lot of valid ways to design a dungeon - I enjoyed Al Qadim's dungeons as much as I enjoyed Wizardry 8's. What you're talking about is atmosphere, something that I think is far more important than story, but also something that is an aesthetic and not a mechanic.

Ultimately, the goal of Western RPGs is to allow the player to impact their environment, whether it's through the social ecosystem (choose your side at the end of Vampire: the Masquerade - Bloodlines) or physically (blow up that stupid city in Fallout 3). The player's actions have no meaning on an environment that is irrelevant to the game world.

One of my favorite dungeons is the Blood Peaks dungeon in Realms of Arkania: Star Trail. You start out a prisoner in a jail cell with no weapons. You overpower your guards and run loose in this massive orc castle. It's structured like a barracks; there are armories, other jail cells, arenas, a mess hall, puzzles, secret areas. You scavenge for equipment, sneak around, help other prisoners escape. It's a really neat experience, you feel like you've earned everything you have when you leave, but more importantly, it's connected to the game world. You're not in some forgotten crypt looking for an item, but trying to escape from a place that is actively used by an army of orcs. It is a place that matters and it is well designed.

Basically, I think you always need to maintain your connection to the world wherever you are or whatever you're doing, even if you're completely isolated. This doesn't mean you need to be near NPCs or talking to people or anything. I'm going to use another example from Realms of Arkania: Star Trail. In the wilderness just outside the first town, you come across a dead body that you have the option of leaving or burying. There are no consequences for either action, but it is a reminder first of the danger of the wilderness and second that it is an inhabited world that exists whether you're involved in it or not. Those are things that need to be apparent not only when designing dungeons, but when designing anything in RPGs.

But the real stars of the RPG genre are the times when you get to break into an evil temple still occupied by the priests, or a keep that actually isn't abandoned, or a thieves guild which isn't an excuse for chatting.

This is it!

 

[Admiral jimbob]

But the real stars of the RPG genre are the times when you get to break into an evil temple still occupied by the priests, or a keep that actually isn't abandoned, or a thieves guild which isn't an excuse for chatting.

Fighting people tends to be much more tactically interesting (and satisfying) than fighting monsters, especially if someone were to put some effort into making the priests of the evil temple actually react appropriately when you kick in the door... not just sit in each room waiting for you to trigger them.

Best of both worlds. I do like cities, and I can pretty much agree with what OSK is saying; they don't need to just be somewhere you go and talk to people/restock/loot. I think Wasteland did cities really well (other than the many houses that just contained nothing at all) - they were full of danger and combat, but every place of interest in them allowed you to interact differently and find different ways about depending on your characters' skills. Each of them also had locations exactly like the examples Porka gave here. To me, that kind of area makes for the perfect RPG location, no "story" necessarily involved, though the option for me to indulge my inner atmosphere/lore whore would be a welcome bonus. I'd love to see an action-RPG set in a reactive, Thief-like city.

 

[PorkaMorka]

Actually, no. Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 are really bad examples. You could happily play through Baldur's Gate 1 skipping past all of those generic looking houses without missing out on anything decent. Baldur's Gate 2 happened to scrap all of those extraneous buildings to streamline the experience, meaning that the very few buildings you could actually enter were mostly worthwhile.

BG2 is a pretty good example, you start the important and rewarding Kangaxx the lich side quest by breaking into a random unmarked house, and that's definitely not the only random house in BG2 that has awesome stuff inside.

Ring of Gaxx
AC -2 -
+2 saves,
+10% magic res.,
immune to disease and poison,
+1 HP every 3 seconds,
Invisibility 1x/day,
Improved Haste 3x/day

That's what I call encouragement.

And there are certainly a number of nothing special houses in BG2 that you'll end up exploring, it may not have had as many empty houses as BG1 I'll admit.

The point stands, you need to explore it all and that tends to be a big time investment with little real gameplay involved. Compared to cities, most other environments in RPGs will have more gameplay per hour of exploration.

 

[Awor Szurkrarz]

I never did the Kangaxx quest in BG2.

 

[MMXI]

Point is that in Baldur's Gate you could enter every single building in the game. In Baldur's Gate II the majority of the buildings aren't accessible. Just check out the slum district for a good example. Out of all the buildings that are enterable, probably around 75% had a purpose in the game. Baldur's Gate 1 was sitting at the 10% level, with those 10% offering really crappy rewards such as a short bow +1.

I do agree, though, that breaking and entering into every single enterable house that you come across makes for really shitty gameplay. The best way around it that I've found is to have NPC schedules of some kind (and then perhaps some sort of knocking on the door interaction/mechanic). As completely shitty as Oblivion is as a game, it is one of the only ones in which I never felt the desire to enter every house.

 

[DemonKing]

I liked most of the dungeons in the IWD series - if you dug deep enough there was a surprisingly complex back story to some of them (eg the Shattered Hand).

There was some dumb stuff (like the 4th level of a dungeon full of savage monsters seemingly being full of peaceful priests - which would have set any gamer's spider sense tingling), but overall they did a pretty good job.