RPGs with the best dungeons

[Higher Game]

Eschalon: Book 1 has some really great dungeons. Book 2 is actually going to focus more heavily on them, which is so surprising because the first one was already high quality.

 

[poocolator]

So what's the fun in shuffling your way through boring dungeons with the expectation of countless repetitive battles?

 

[Mackerel]

I always liked Wizardry 7's dungeons, they had lots of secret doors, traps, and puzzles to keep it interesting. Munkharama and the Funhouse were my favorites from what I remember.

 

[Carlos' Bitch1]

So what's the fun in shuffling your way through boring dungeons with the expectation of countless repetitive battles?

Don't shuffle through boring dungeons. Does that answer your question? Find games with good ones!


Edit: Which Realms of Arkania come off being the best? I have never tried one of them before.

 

[Claw]

You have to ask?
Jasede doesn't post often enough, is that it?

It's the one about finding the legendary weapon.
Just kidding. Star Trail is the best.

 

[ricolikesrice]

best:

Star Trail
Ultima Underworld

worst:

Storms of Zehir
Oblivion

 

[Unkillable Cat]

The Crypt in Arx Fatalis is a wonderful "dungeon".

The Tomb of Praecor Loth in Ultima Underworld 2 is also pure win.

Durlag's Tower and Watcher's Keep are the best dungeons the Infinity Engine games came up with back in the day.

 

[Jasede]

I honestly thought Watcher's Keep was lame, but I can't really say why. I think it's just that Infinity Engine just wasn't fun to me anymore when I finally played it.

Durlag's Tower was a lot of fun, though. Though it did not make any sense at all. It did, however, have really good encounter design. (IMO)

And Blackadder: yes, what Claw said. Star Trail is the RoA game I played first and it is certainly the best. If you try to get it, attempt finding the rare edition that comes with 2, not 1 CDs for extra music. RoA music is great. Star Trail is RoA 2.

RoA 1 is also worth playing, but not as polished. Very rough experience, but fun too. It is great to import your characters to RoA 2. And after that you can get them into RoA 3, which is inferior but still rather fun. I always liked this "import characters WITHOUT castration of their items/skills/XP" thing.

 

[Panthera]

Most of the ones that came to mind have already been named, so some that would be my obvious choices:

The Cathedral of Carnage in M&MIII. MOOSE JUICE.

Dark Messiah of Might and Magic as a whole.

The Mantellan Crux, and Dagoth Ur's citadel.

Diablo II's worm lair.

 

[Andhaira]

Edit: Which Realms of Arkania come off being the best? I have never tried one of them before.

You have no idea what you are missing. Star Trail is my favortie crpg of all time. Be warned though the game is seriously, seriously hardkore but in the best way possible. For example, when resting if you don't use sleeping bags/blankets then your characters may get diseased. Which you then either cure in town OR use your pc with wilderness lore to find specific herbs. OTOH you could use your wizard with the proper spell to heal the disease, but be warned there are dozens upon dozens of spells in the game and one wizard only masters a bare few.

 

[Darth Roxor]

I really liked the tombs in the valley outside Kuldahar in IWD1.

 

[Luzur]

the dungeons in Might and Magic III, since you could read up on their background and story.

 

[Burning Bridges]

Ultima Underworld

this

 

[Annie Mitsoda]

RPG with the worst dungeons: SoZ

Sad thing is, they could have been the best in years.

If only those few rooms were actual dungeons.

Trust me, I know what you mean. It was way too short of a dev cycle to really fill out the world with a lot of expansive ones. BUT, if I ever get the goddamn CHANCE, I plan to fill them out/make more, with more sidequests. I know there was a lot of extra stuff we wanted to put in, but with 9 months to complete a game, you're triage-ing stuff like a mad motherfuck. I did my best to make the Dragon Caves seem like a more complex area - I had in mind a mansion that, well... the Swamp Castles mentioned in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, for example. "Everyone said I was mad to build a castle in the swamp, but I did it anyway! And it sank into the swamp. So I built a second one. That burned down, fell over, and THEN sank into the swamp." So I tried to make it seem like there was, at one point, some rhyme or reason to the place. I myself, being a giant nerd, like places that DO seem like they have some backstory to it, some sense of flow instead of just being bad guys grouped together.

I'd like to hear more about WHY people like certain dungeons. What makes them memorable to you? Setting, creatures, traps, puzzles, what?

 

[Burning Bridges]

Hi Annie. Concerning Ultima Underworld that's easy. Because it was the first (and also one of the last) rpg's that really made use of additional degrees of freedom that the 3d engine offered (swim, jump, levitate, etc). To me it felt very convincing because it was more like a dungeon simulation without making use of typical 2D rpg abstractions (though they have their advatanges too).

So far for the technical side, but artistically it was of course very strong as well. This combination makes it imo one of the best dungeon experiences ever.

 

[Freelance Henchman]

I think the best dungeon ever for me was the one in Dungeon Master, the old Atari ST/Amiga game (there was also a sequel that was also quite good). It just brought atmosphere (scary monsters, the distant sounds of a closing gate and such), combat and puzzles together in an entertaining blend.

 

[Silellak]

I always liked how each Ultima dungeon had its own back story and personality, though this wasn't really clear until the later Ultimas (6 and 7).

The Underworld as a whole in Ultima 5 gets a special nod.

I'd like to hear more about WHY people like certain dungeons. What makes them memorable to you? Setting, creatures, traps, puzzles, what?

Setting/back story matters the most to me. I think all of the creatures, traps, puzzles, and treasures should be a natural extension of the back story of any particular dungeon, and the game world in general. If there's a trap there, who put it there and why? If there's a treasure, who left it there? Why do certain creatures live here and others don't? Otherwise, it's just a boring hole in the ground that seems out of place in the story. JRPGs, especially older ones, have this problem a lot, but WRPGs can be just as guilty.

See: Destard and its dragons. Wrong, and its back story of previously being a prison - which makes sense due to its proximity to the city of Justice. It's also interesting to see how the dungeons develop over the course of the series - one of them, I forget which, becomes a Blackrock mine.

To be fair, I don't really care for pre-Ultima 6 dungeons, other than Ultima 5's underworld, because I'm not a fan of the "fake 1st person dungeons" the series used before that. If you want to give me a 1st person dungeon, make it like Ultima Underworld (another fantastic dungeon in general), or don't give me one at all.

/Ultima fanboy

 

[JarlFrank]

I'd like to hear more about WHY people like certain dungeons. What makes them memorable to you? Setting, creatures, traps, puzzles, what?

All of these. Although I don't care much about the monsters, only that they should have a reason to be there (finding bandits in level 10 of the dungeon while the previous 9 levels had elementals would be silly, for example) and I generally perfer fighting humanoids.

A good dungeon should have a proper dose of challenge and loot. Give me some hordes of cheap enemies that are easy to butcher, giving me the feeling that it will be easy, only to crush me with a big bad endboss, like many roguelikes do. Give me proper rewards for my efforts. By that I mean, include some heavily-guarded treasure chambers, make the difficult fights pay off but do NOT, I repeat, NOT make it into a Monty Haul. Finding a magical sword in every corner makes you go "meh" whenever you find one instead of "wow!" if magic items are more rare.

Also, give the dungeon a story. Inner logic. A reason to exist. A history, maybe. Finding a book somewhere in the dungeon describing how Agranaxxx the Wizard built this tower ages ago can be more awesome than finding good equipment. A good dungeon has a history with many clues hidden within, so exploration pays off by giving you some nice lore.

Also, puzzles, yes. I like puzzles. In Darkside of Xeen there was a part of a dungeon where you had to use the jump spell to enter chambers with stat-raising potions. Trying to just walk into them closed the doors, so you had to cleverly use your spells... things like that are always welcome and show the player that the developer actually put some thought into the dungeon design instead of just saying "hey let's make a place where the player can gain XP".

 

[Gnidrologist]

The whole Baldur's Gate series is a pretty neat dungeon.

 

[Ardanis]

Fallout - the nuked Vault that BoS sends to on a quest of initiation, the place likely is the abovementioned Glow but I can't remember for sure

Fallout 2 - Sierra Army Depot (family Wright quest)

Not an RPG, but Fallout Tactics also had a nice 5th or 6th mission to obtain batteries from yet another abandoned military base.

Clearly, the Abandoned Military Base (AMB) design makes the best dungeon for me.

 

[Zomg]

Dungeon design is like cooking a fucking corndog. All you can do is fuck it up, not do it brilliantly. The inherent appeal is primitive and modest.

 

[Edward_R_Murrow]

I honestly thought Watcher's Keep was lame, but I can't really say why. I think it's just that Infinity Engine just wasn't fun to me anymore when I finally played it.

Honestly, I found the first 2 floors of Watcher's Keep pretty lame. They didn't have much in the way of challenge, and the puzzles on the second floor, while kind of cool, didn't make up for the lack of good encounters. The third one was alright. I mean, I liked the idea of making a few rooms have some sort of goofy global effect like a dead magic zone, a wild surge zone, or some such, but the enemies, as is, were pretty boring. Demons were pretty much walking XP bags, though if you install a mod that restores their original abilities, it actually becomes a good challenge.

Floor 4 and Floor 5 were where the fun was at. Lots of tough encounters with varied foes is always fun. And the Demogorgon fight was pretty awesome.

Durlag's Tower was a lot of fun, though. Though it did not make any sense at all. It did, however, have really good encounter design. (IMO)

Durlag's Tower was rather amazing. It made no sense, but it was constructed by a crazy dwarf, so does it have to? I loved how it constantly threw differing challenges at the player, from a clusterfuck of traps, to a dangerous group of differentiated guardians, to doppelgangers, to shifting doors that could separate the party, to powerful foes like greater wyverns, a massive "chess" themed fight, a bunch of puzzles, and finally a big rumble against the demonknight, where you could either use the mirror and end up fighting clones of your party, or fight the bugger straight up, and try to endure his ridiculous spell power.

I'd like to hear more about WHY people like certain dungeons. What makes them memorable to you? Setting, creatures, traps, puzzles, what?

I'm gamist as can be sometimes, so backstory, while nice, doesn't make a dungeon for me. I'm more into the interactive elements, whether they be well designed combat encounters, puzzles, or skill uses (a la the Glow or the Sierra Army Depot). If backstory i woven into the interactive elements, that is totally great. It's what made the Glow so fun, and the Severed Hand so nifty. The latter used the whole idea of some life-draining magical spell to explain why certain foes existed and to explain how ghostly, "shadowed" enemies could blink in out of nowhere, surrounding your party and forcing you to fight on different terms.

If you don't do this, backstory just becomes passive filler. Take for instance Arcanum's Vendigroth Ruins. This is supposed to be the ruins of a once mighty technological mecca, but outside of same papers and loot, you'd never know, because it plays exactly the same as any other dungeon. Or look at Morrowind/Oblivion dungeons. The developers spend so much time scattering items about, placing silverware and food on tables, and decorating the areas with bones/trash/etc. yet can't take any time to make unique experiences in their dungeons besides steamrolling all the enemies, and then sniffing out loot. Details are nice, but you have to get the fundamentals down first.

What I'm basically saying is, developers need to only put in dungeons that are fun to play first, then focus on prettying them up. The last few years have shown some of the most horrendous dungeons ever created, whether they be KOTOR/KOTOR2's bases full of plasteel cylinders, Mass Effect's "everything is the goddamn same" cut and paste jobs, Oblivion/Fallout 3's boring shitstains loving filled with unimportant details, or NWN2's crime against gaming with the orc caves. All of them made far more sense than something like Durlag's Tower, they were coherent, and fit in with the backstory...yet they were chores to play. I think developers have gotten the wrong message from a lot of people who constantly praise great dungeons backstory, lore, and details. Yes, that does elevate them above merely "good" dungeons, but first a dungeon has to be good based on fundamentals, and developers aren't really doing too well on that end.

 

[Jasede]

Yeah. I think it's like in cooking. You have to get the basics right of a dish before you can add spice to it. A few spices can't save the fish if it has been undercooked, but if it was cooked right it'll make it all the better. But first you need to focus on cooking it right.

 

[mondblut]

So what's the fun in shuffling your way through boring dungeons with the expectation of countless repetitive battles?

LARPer detected.

 

[SCO]

UW I & II being one long dungeon crawl, had awesome dungeons, filled with little secrets and multiple solutions, fly, bypass, solve the puzzle. So many secret passages... Thought i disliked II somewhat, because there seemed to be less of that. Arx Fatalis obviously too, but, again less than that, and thus, a small (very small considering current games) disappointment.