What makes a good dungeon

What makes a good dungeon? Good slaves, I would think.

I think Eye of the Beholder had one of the best designed dungeons. I still remember the anxiety of spiders, rust monsters and displacer beasts when roaming lost in it's corridors from my first play through.

 

Soo, about that dressing down of that oblivion dungeon?

It's easy to make that typo given how 'e' and 'r' are right next to each other.

 

I've never played that Oblivion DLC, so I'm actually a little interested in Bethesda's concept of a mega-dungeon. https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Sundercliff_Watch

 

Dragon's Dogma is probably the gold standard in dungeon design for me.

A lot of the dungeons in that game really capture the fun of dungeon exploration. The puzzles are definitely on the easy side, but that's fine by me, as that keeps things moving. There are lots of secrets to find, which is great. They also feature some clever encounter design (e.g. skeleton mages shooting fireballs at you from platforms suspended over deep pits). You can easily run into monsters capable of curb-stomping your party, but, if you survive, you can also find some great loot.

Most of all, though, I like the atmosphere. A lot of that is probably due to the lighting engine and sound design. Darkness in Dragon's Dogma is actually dark, and hearing the tormented moans of undead lurking just out of sight in the inky blackness around you is wonderfully eerie.

 

I removed it from the article, but the whole point was kinda showing all the things a dungeon can have and Oblivion's dungeon DOESN'T. Felt very mean and bitter (it was), and in the end the article works well enough without it, I guess.

The dungeon was Sundercliff Watch, which comes with the Mehrune's Razor DLC, sold like this:



This is the map:



Basically, the dungeon is the counter-example to everything in the article. It's clearly designed following tabletop RPG design principles, but they don't work AT ALL in Oblivion - there's simply not enough interaction "verbs" here to do even 10% of what the dungeon designer wanted.

For example, the entrance has a gate asking for a password. Cool, an obstacle! But the password is in a bag in front of it. And I mean LITERALLY IN FRONT:



Why? Because Oblivion doesn't have dialog trees or persuasion skills, there's no alternate paths and they don't trust the player enough to hide the diary. Tabletop RPGs would allow hundreds of solutions, from blasting the door down to disguising yourself, Fallout would have the classic combat/dialog/stealth solutions, an immersive sim would at the very least give optional paths for you to crawl through.... Oblivion just gives you the password.

And it doesn't even mean anything, because the guard attacks you as soon as he opens the gate.

That's the most complex interaction the dungeon offers until the last room. All those other areas just include two things of note: you need to kill two unique enemies to get the keys to the mid-dungeon gate (they don't even have names, it's just "Commander" & "Forge Master"), and there's a thief trapped in a prison cell that you can kill or free (he attacks the "Commander" if you free him).

Everything else is just walking across very obvious paths, killing the same level scaled enemies and reading poorly written notes on the ground about the lore of a mega dungeon DLC that didn't even bother to fucking name its NPCs. And since Oblivion's combat is so shitty, fighting for so long gets really boring, really fast.

In short, someone at Bethesda adapted their lame home-made D&D dungeon into Oblivion, called it "the deepest & most challenging dungeon" and sold it to suckers. And those suckers still haunt reddit, telling people that it's a good dungeon.

 

Agreed with the above post, and we can't forget level scaling loot. Man Oblivion dungeon crawling was an abomination, and I thought that 100% at the time too. It's more enjoyable with mods, but there's only so much make-up that can be put on the pig.

 

Japanimu devs pretty much shit on western devs regarding this. There I said it.

 

There you go. It is clear as daylight that japanimu devs put much more effort in designing interesting dungeon.

 

That's a great article, it has reignited my passion to play those old titles I missed as a child that you really need to map by hand.

Currently I'm about 3/4 through the first Eye of the Beholder game and I find the dungeon design excellent. There's variety, each level or group of levels have their own personality, pacing and challenges. I particularly liked arriving at the first dwarven level (L5) after having survived the hectic and dread inspiring spider level (L4). Level 5 felt quite serene and contemplative in comparison, much like a peaceful part of a great symphony after a loud and aggressive crescendo. And then the intricate vertical interconnectedness of the next three drow levels bring the whole atmospheric dungeon exploration experience to a whole new level (pun intended!). Not to mention the extra layer of complexity offered by the stone teleport portals. As felipepepe pointed out in his article, manual map creation is a vital part of the experience and I would not have it any other way (I considered using the All Seeing Eye but then realised it would diminish the enjoyment of the exploration too greatly).

As it has been previously mentioned, verticality or "3D-ness" of the dungeon design can really add to the enjoyment. Once excellent example of that is ELEX with the jetpack (although I don't think they explored that mechanic to its full potential in their level design), another is the Styx games (not RPGs, though).

As another non-RPG example, I found the level design of the first Half-Life game very good; basically it's great for the same reasons that makes an RPG dungeon great (backtracking, possibility to overcome obstacles in a brute-force or in more clever ways, constants sense of dread as descending downwards).

Lastly, interestingly lighting and sound design can really make a difference even to the simplest of dungeons. A good example of this for me was Nehrim (the Oblivion mod) where while the dungeons were mostly simplistic linear affairs, somehow the great atmosphere made them so enjoyable and interesting that I felt compelled to visit all of them, even though most of them were optional. Another non-RPG example for a good "dungeony" atmosphere is the (warning, popamole alert!) optional puzzle levels in Rise of Tomb Raider, which are arguably the only redeeming part of the game. I wish, in fact, for a highly atmospheric dungeon exploration game with modern graphics, maybe Monomyth will fit into that niche. Legend of Grimrock was also great, although in retrospect the level design didn't come near to the ingenuity of EoB I (haven't played the second installment yet).

 

In regards to puzzles, I'll have to go with the normie opinion and say that IMO the best dungeon puzzles I've seen in any game is very far in Majora's Mask (and the series in general).

 

Lol, opened this ready to reply "whatever the opposite of oblivion's are", and the thread didn't disappoint.

 

In order to ask this question meaningfully (whatever the hell that implies) it seems necessary (Christ almighty) to distinguish between 'dungeon' and 'level' or even 'worldspace.' (sigh of relief wipes sweat from brow panting with exertion) Starting with an oblivion dungeon as the point of departure is at least very amusing. Anyways:

What the hell is a dungeon? Can you have a dungeon abovegrounds? Is a dungeon necessarily an involuted underground space, treacherous to traverse? Is a dungeon suffocating just in affect and mechanics or does it make you actually breath easier in real life once you exit? Some of these questions are disingenuous but I think its sort of obligatory to describe the parameters of what you are talking about or at least agree on them.

I think there is some component of attrition and removal from a broader world that makes a dungeon satisfying. (we still haven't defined what a dungeon is yet, holy shit) Then you have to admit, is a dungeon just an indication or a reflection of a more straightforward, player-servile world up above that neatly and kindly knits together all the tools and opportunities that the player would like to use to proceed? All the neat little idiot shops and nice little quest giving peoples and back alley rapists you want to make love to and the one guy that gives you a magic wand just because. I think in some respects a dungeon should be cruel or at least counter intuitive on that basis. So what are some illustrative dungeons?

I choose Dark souls (kill me) and SMT nocturne. Needless to say Souls dungeons are cruel and sometimes not very intelligently so. How many pits in the catacombs did you get shoved into by a skeleton, roll into liike the dumbfuck the amalgam of game interface and flesh puppet hand your lust for game has made you? Lots and lots. How far did you get from a bonfire while your regen dwindled to nothing, again lots (???). The general aim of the Souls style gameplay/environment is to show the player their greed is anticipated, and coax the player into demonstrating it further. In this respect a dungeon is a form of calibration - given a potentially infinite expanse above and below, the player has a finite set of resources with which to discover an unknown and unsignposted environment that maybe stretches forever. And indeed plenty of game dungeons go to their logical extreme and include infinite abysses, which is I guess as literal and wonderful as it gets (seriously). What about Nocturne? Nocturne is also about anticipating the player, but in this case the game seems to put much more effort on baffling their expectations rather than confounding them. In Nocturne dropping down a pit always leads somewhere but I don't think even to a condition of finality and reset like Souls. Stuff like Labryinth of Amala has levels upon levels but unlike Souls where the areas are joined in ways you can't expect until you arrive and crawl over each inch, Nocturne usually denotes each level as a separate entity. L1, L2 etc. This is a form of knowledge and control ceded to the player. Things like labyrinths or teleport mazes have to be charted and mapped out, so you have a firm grip on the new videogame specific causality of this virtual space. You also get a minimap in Nocturne, so you always know the space is essentially bounded.

Its interesting to bring up the Thief series, because of the heavy emphasis there on pure exploration and traversal of boundaries almost for its own sake ("i never stole from a god before"). In thief you have a mission based structure and you know in advance what you need and don't need. You get a map but they range from detailed to almost metaphorical. I kind of question whether or not thiefs missions are really dungeons, but then again stuff like cragscleft or constantine's manor essentially prove otherwise. Constantine's manor is kind of a great level and it includes cruel and counter intuitive things (that one upside down part) that test the player. Is a dungeon a form of test? It seems like the simplest possible description of a dungeon is a deep underground space filled with traps and monsters and pitfalls and glittering treasure. A historian would probably have an interesting take on what is unique videogamey about a dungeon. I think a dungeon is a kind of attempt to dream of a space that is unique to the medium. It forces the player to respond in specific and predictable ways to a set of stimuli. These occur in a terrain that the player cannot really anticipate or feel except by taking risks to probe an unknown territory. I guess a good dungeon makes you feel like an outsider, whether confronting a puzzle and relying on introspection to unlock the fact of its mystery or simply feeling hopelessly bereft like you have been left to drown in plain air. I guess there is nothing more marvelous than that.

 

Legend of Grimrock II conclusively demonstrated that a dungeon can include surface levels:




And we've known since Dungeon Master that puzzles are the most important component of a good dungeon:

 

If you look at dungeons next to each other within a game, they need unique purposes/backstories to keep them interesting. BG2 in particular did that well IMO (contrast Winspear Hill, Planar Sphere, the Underdark).

But they all had similar features, such as a "high level" party encounter, nice loot (sometimes tied to a very strong enemy like a dragon), several self-contained quests with their own mini stories, and NPCs or available actions that influenced things outside of the dungeon itself.

 

NO.

 

In blobbers puzzles and mapping challenges are the most important.
In other party based games enounter design is the most important.
In single character FPP games the dungeon layout and exploration is the most important.

 

Might & Magic 6 has fantastic dungeons, and always had a suprise in its sleeves. I mean, who would have expected that Castle Darkmoor would end like..., well like it ended? You're "casually" exploring the first dungeon halls of the castle, being SLIGHTLY annoyed with your heroes going mental after every fight, and then suddenly see this huuuuge area with millions of those eye fuckers flying around in the distance. I really love surprises like these. And of course the game also shines when it comes to the sheer variety of dungeons. The game had everything, from temples to caves, from castles to large pyramides, dragon caves, smuggler dens, space ships, and so on. MM6 was peak dungeon design for its time. Great encounters, great puzzles, large variety of themes, and really nice designs (making use of 3D and levitation a lot).

 

Answer's obvious: a good Dungeon Master.

 

"Most" doesn't mean "only". If your dungeon is a long corridor with nothing but a linear succession of battles in it, it's a bad dungeon no matter the encounter design.

 

Indeed.

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Great article. Gonna throw some of my favourites:

- Wizardry 1: Amazing how one of the first computer dungeons is one of the most tightly designed. A master class.
- Wizardry 8: Monastery. Best tutorial dungeon ever, with the precise amount of challenge and size. Wizardry 6 castle is close.
- Sen's fortress. Explained very wel on the article.
- Dragon's Dogma: Bitterblack Isle megadungeon. Great atmosphere and difficulty curve.
- Temple of Elemental Evil. Enjoyed doing quests for bad guys and backstabbing them afterwards.
- DCSS: a roguelike one. Procedurally generated but always fun and challenging to explore. Really impressive.

 

Good loot from dungeon's boss.

 

It's literally the first thing in my article:



I got the feeling that a good part of the replies here just saw the title and jumped to the comments

 

Yeah, but I'm not going to buy/steal Oblivion and its DLC (horsearmor, lol) just to marvel at a shitty/bad/passable dungeon.

This is the Codex. Not being mean and bitter is treated like mental illness (by the actual nutcases, but I digress).

The map might have mislead me into thinking it might be interesting.

That actually got me to think and I think I have come up with something interesting regarding multiple entry points/paths in cRPGs, why they often end up looking like a waste of development effort (sadly they do) and some ways to prevent that.

I now wonder which Morrowind dungeons (if any) you'd consider good.

And what about Skyrim (yeah, I know, most dungeons are linear slogs, but not all of them, especially if you consider dungeon complexes consisting of an indoor/outdoor hostile dungeon hub connecting multiple smaller locations, and even some of the smaller, more linear ones can offer some interesting gameplay variations).

That's very true.

The sad thing is that if you compare it to all the other dungeons in this game...

Additional thought:
What about good computer non-RPG dungeons? It's not like cRPGs tend to do very good job giving player multiple verbs to use (and choose from) so they are not at actual advantage here, compared to other games.

Would, say, Azrael's Tear be a good dungeon?

 

Oh, FFS.