Which is why you get the feeling of "dungeon vu" after crawling through five of them because the same building blocks appear everywhere. That's not an argument in its favor.
Daggerfall MQ dungeons arent randomized and are really memorables. The randomized roguelike generic side quest dungeons are a lot of fun but it still a deeply flawed system and it forces you to sometimes heavily rely on debug command as some quest-items spawn points are literally unreachable.
...and after 5 hours you check and find out that the quest item/mob spawned outside of the dungeon map in the void you can't reach without cheating - that's classic daggerfall experience. I still like daggerfall but it really gets boring fast and the only content actually worth pursuing is the main quest sadly.
i have a better theory
But the thing is, it's not just that it's a "decline" from Daggerfall, it's that it doesn't make the most of the change in dev philosophy. You absolutely can make a game that retains many of DF's strong points while also benefitting from the opportunities offered by a smaller and more focused worldspace, but Morrowind generally isn't that game - combat is poor despite being a major focus of the game, range of viable character builds is needlessly reduced, NPCs have no routines even in the most basic sense of stores closing at night (which cripples thief classes and makes the game lose out on the sense of """immersion""" that could be offered by the smaller handcrafted world), and all the other shit we mentioned.
I, for one, missed the immensity of the dungeons in Daggerfall compared to those of Morrowind. Really, there was always a sense of dread whenever exploring them, the darkness, you could immediately identify monsters by the sounds they make (hello Ancient Vampires and Liches...).
Yeah, but for every Urshilaku Burial Caverns, there's plenty of worthless shit like this (and this is a quest dungeon):
But the thing is, it's not just that it's a "decline" from Daggerfall, it's that it doesn't make the most of the change in dev philosophy. You absolutely can make a game that retains many of DF's strong points while also benefitting from the opportunities offered by a smaller and more focused worldspace, but Morrowind generally isn't that game - combat is poor despite being a major focus of the game, range of viable character builds is needlessly reduced, NPCs have no routines even in the most basic sense of stores closing at night (which cripples thief classes and makes the game lose out on the sense of """immersion""" that could be offered by the smaller handcrafted world), and all the other shit we mentioned.
The question isn't just how MW compares to DF, it's also how well MW stands on its own and how much it made of the potential offered by the new format. The weaker dungeons aren't just weak because they're not like the ones in DF, they're weak because they're not very good on their own.
Don't speak of Daggerfall OST to me, I still get the Tavern #2 melody stuck in my head before sleep whenever I remember it. NOOOO IT HAPPENED AGAIN!
I cant remember if Morrowind was released on console alongside PC....but that could be why the dungeons were so tiny. xbox 360 had like 3 kilobytes of vram.
It was released on the Xbox, but PC had priority.
Yeah, but for every Urshilaku Burial Caverns, there's plenty of worthless shit like this (and this is a quest dungeon):
Yeah, and Fallout 3 metros look exactly like metros, but they're still samey, relentlessly dull to navigate, and ultimately amount to a waste of the player's time. See also: Ayelid ruins from Oblivion, and pretty much every single dungeon in Fo4. It's a problem Todd-era Bethesda run into in all their games. I'm guessing you're not going to make this same defence of Starfield's procgen world outposts, which are universally regarded as shit.
