Optionally simpler dungeons

[denny.thray]

Daggerfall was, by far, my favorite elder scrolls game. When it came out, there really wasn't much like it. I loved creating characters, joining guilds, and designing spells and magic items. You could eventually make your character unto a god with enough magic items and such. Daggerfall also had a custom character creation system more robust (and more broken!) Than any other system I've seen.

There was only one problem that seriously prevented me from progressing far in the main quest.

The dungeons. Oh god, the dungeons.

I understand that there are people who like the dungeons. I am not one of them.

I considered them sprawling, unmappable mazes where it can take hours and hours and hours to find your goal. While it's rewarding, I don't find trudging through thousands of randomly generated hallways to be at all fun.

I understand that you can cheat by setting a property and using the [ and ] keys to go between treasure piles until you find your goal, and that's recommended to many players who dislike the dungeons. But I just didn't like the feeling of doing so.

I'd love the option to have simpler dungeons. To me, the best dungeons are dungeons that take at least 30 minutes and at most 60 minutes to get through, more often than not leaning on the 30 minutes side of things, with the longer dungeons aimed at big milestones.

[pango]

Hi denny.thray, welcome to the forums.
I think such post should go into "Mods & Features general"; It seems related to the Saner dungeons.
There was also a thread about custom dungeon modules in Creator's Corner.

I wonder what's the distribution of dungeon sizes, because they're very small ones (cemetaries), larges ones (you know them too well it seems ), but I don't feel there's so many dungeons in between, say the size of Privateer's Hold.
Maybe that's just a feeling, maybe that's because you're seldom sent to smaller dungeons for quests, I'm not sure.

[pango]

After some research...
If you look at Daggerfall region dungeons for their number of blocs/modules statistics, there's
5 modules dungeons: 73 (27,2%, total 27.2%)
8 modules dungeons: 67 (25%, total 52.2%)
10 modules dungeons: 37 (13.8%, total 66.0%)
11 modules dungeons: 9 (3.4%, total 69.4%)
12 modules dungeons: 36 (13.4%, total 82.8%)
13 modules dungeons: 36 (13,4%, total 96.3%)
14 modules dungeons: 9 (3.4%, total 99.6%)
16 modules dungeons: 1 (0.4%, total 100%) (Castle Daggerfall)

5 modules dungeons are all cemetaries or forgotten cemetaries, that have one center "inner" module and 4 "border" modules around it, that are usually(?) not connected to the inner dungeon space, so they feel real small, except Privateer's Hold, that while small feels totally different.
So maybe that's the origin of this feeling: the distribution of dungeon sizes would feel about smooth, except the 5 modules dungeons have almost all been turned into cramped cemetaries so there's a noticeable gap between them and the next dungeon size (8 modules).

The simplest solution, some mod or some option that would weight random quests toward smaller dungeons, could only help so much if 8 modules dungeons already feel too vast.
Another solution would be check if more "Privateer's Hold"-like 5 modules dungeons could have been created using existing modules (1 inner non-cemetary module + 4 border modules). My guess is that it could be done, given the modular nature of dungeons. However, where to put them in game? And that would be already much more involved than the first solution.

[Prester Lewin]

The 8 blockers mean 2 real or inner blocks. 10 or 11 will mean 3 real blocks. 12 or more will mean at least 4 real blocks.

If you compare Privateers Hold with the majority of dungeons in a more modern Elder Scrolls games or games by anyone else, PH would count as a reasonably big dungeon in those games.

What makes a lot of DF dungeons worse is that the design and entrance placement are often examples of what can only have been calculated sadism on the part of Bethesda. For example, a 4 real block dungeon where you have the 4 in a line and you start in the far corner or one of the end blocks. Even the more nightmarish dungeons of 5+ real blocks would be a lot more player-friendly if they had only placed the entrance centrally. Another of their delightful little tricks was to build dungeons with blocks that are slight variants of the same complex type side-by-side, just to confuse you.

... And I'm a player who has a good memory for many of the block variants and can often navigate back to the entrance across 3 real blocks without resorting to recall or the map. If I could do it, I'd provide a modded alternative to all radiant quest dungeons where the maximum number of real blocks was 2, and those hand-picked to contain the easier block layouts. Otherwise just one.

I hope this doesn't sound like I'm trying to troll anyone here; it's just a rant at Bethesda.

[Interkarma]

I have a branch of the code with a proof of concept for smaller dungeons that can be enabled by settings: Experimental Smaller Dungeons.

Other than "special" dungeons (Direnni, Wayrest, Scourg, etc.) this will reduce all dungeon sizes to the smallest viable block count of 5 - being 1 internal block closed by 4 border blocks. This respects Daggerfall's layout rules, integrates correctly with quest system, and with some tuning can still allow for variability in dungeon styles. Essentially this option makes every non-special dungeon the size of Privateer's Hold.

I agree PH is still a large map compared to later games, but it's not possible to go smaller than that in Daggerfall without an entirely new dungeon generation paradigm and custom art. It would also require a major overhaul to several other systems that plug into dungeons, and it needs to be optional so people who want classic Daggerfall can select one dungeon generation method over the other. That's a lot more engineering than I plan to take on in a free community project, and the method outlined in my proof of concept above will probably be "small enough" for majority of people who would like smaller dungeons.

[jfcaron]

Awesome, I'd love to see a setting checkbox for smaller dungeons, as a sort of build-in optional mod.

[Prester Lewin]

That is the kind of thing that would suit me very well, thanks, Ik, and would be a massive quality-of-life type gain over classic DF for many players who are either new to DF or were scared off by dungeon complexity in classic. In other words, it would make DFU even more of a hit.

[Interkarma]

I'll see if I can revive this feature sometime before 1.0. It needs some serious work above my proof of concept, but the idea is sound.

I will admit that as I've gotten older and responsibilities have piled on, I prefer smaller dungeons for general fetch quests, kill quests, etc. I still love the big sprawling story dungeons, but for short play sessions I love a quick dungeon dive over a long crawl.

[pango]

I'm glad my reasoning was sound, but it seems you've been there way before

I had a go with this branch, and it's fun to visit never-experienced-before dungeons.
They're already of decent size, and are definitely fun to pay. So I was wondering why they didn't use them more in Daggerfall world in the end.

One answer could be simply game design, they wanted dungeons to be massive, feel dreadful, and be a very significant step up vs anything else. Ok, maybe, and then that's the kind of decision that can be reconsidered 20 years later.

Another answer could be combinatorics. Given that border modules don't contribute a lot to the dungeon uniqueness, such small dungeon becomes defined almost only by the inner module. And since those have to be designed by hand, there's not a huge amount of them in store. So there's not a huge amount of different small dungeons.
Maybe they felt that players would notice patterns in those small dungeons too fast, and then when you have recognized the modules individually in small dungeons you'll also notice how larger dungeons are built.
I think there's definitely some demand for such smaller dungeons option, but that could be something to watch for if you use it.

[Hazelnut]

The locator devices that the Archaeologists guild mod adds are intended to be a solution to this problem. Don't help to 'clear' a dungeon, but to guide you in the right direction once you've explored 25% (currently) so that large dungeons stop being such time consuming bore fests of looking in every single nook and cranny. It's a different approach to changing dungeon size, but you may find it suits you.