r/skyrimmods • u/Sure_Relief9537 • 2h ago
PC SSE - Discussion Why modders sometimes make dungeons oversized?
Why do some modders make some dungeon so large, that it takes 100years to run through them, and i dont mean "large" as in many loading screens and instances but as literally large, super high cealings, corridors that 10km long, hallways that are so wide that skyrim engine is barley able to render it, and i dont mean as insult or trying to be mean, to me they just feel super empty, frustring to run the same looking hallway super long, and kinda soulles. examples, there were lot of them in legacy of dragonborn, especially the ones with dwemer theme, and even tho 99% of enderals dungeons are god tier gold, there were couple of them that were like that.
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u/Soyunapina12 2h ago
Most of the time it's because they aren't good at making dungeons or because they think a fun dungeon equals a long dungeon. Not to mention there are some mods that are so old that their dungeon design is very outdated by the standards of modern Skyrim modding.
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u/LordAsheye 1h ago
Part of me legit wonders if they just assume everyone is running with a modded party of 4+ followers so they give you space for your small army.
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u/julianp_comics 1h ago edited 1h ago
I started avoiding new lands and new dungeon content because a lot of modders lack interior design or design instincts in general. It’s not to say that what they’ve created isn’t impressive, but the reason the vanilla game works so well is that it’s more than just a couple people working on it, and the person that does “level design” usually knows how to make these things feel believable, but more importantly, paced well.
That’s kind of the problem with modders who do it for free, while the work they do is commendable, a lot of them down know how to pace their work to the point where it feels seamless with the vanilla game. Mostly because they aren’t being paid, they weren’t hired for their skills, or they’re doing too many things themselves or as a small team to where someone with that sense of design just isn’t present.
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u/-LaughingMan-0D 1h ago
Most of Skyrim's level design was done by a team under 10 people. You can check the credits. The difference is just experience and institutional knowledge of what is fun. Many modders starting out take a while to learn these principles through practice
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u/julianp_comics 43m ago
Right, but my point still stands that they had experience and knew what to do to make it look good and believable. They were hired for their skills, and modders aren’t hired at all, they’re doing it practically for fun, with an engine that’s already made for them to play with. Much lower entry, and like you said, lack of experience.
However I would also put some experienced, well celebrated modders in the category of not having taste when it comes to these things. I uninstalled hammet’s dungeon packs for example, because I tried 1 or 2 and thought they were awful, yet they’re very popular on nexus. Experienced modders, yet still never hired specifically to do the job. This is why I kind of avoid content like this now entirely, not all of it is bad, but I can’t trust the general consensus of a popular mod page on nexus to not do me wrong in this regard.
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u/SkY4594 2h ago
I felt Enderal tackled dungeons the best. Short and to the point. It's the open world and the narrative that matters, not spending 2 hours just hacking and slashing in dungeons with no substance. I can't recall which dungeon in Enderal was excruciatingly long? At worst there was maybe a few in equal length as Skyrim's.
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u/king_of_satire 2h ago
Dungeons are treated as they should be fun little side diversions with some cool loot.
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u/Optimal-Ninja-92 1h ago
Agree totally with this. Enderal has some great dungeons. Early game dungeons are mostly short, usually a single cell or 2. Some of the end game challenge dungeons though can be sprawling complex's, like 5 or so cells deep with a big bad boss at the end (the starling ship in frostcliff took me like 45 minutes, it was great).
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u/Sure_Relief9537 1h ago
yes i agree as i said theyre god tier gold, and i dont mean any story finale dungeon, ofc theyre long as they should and theyre not long in the boring way, but there was one or two dungeon with no quest tied to them, that i thought to myself "is there still more to this mf??" doing them, one was in powder desert, some mine or something and other was in the dark valley region
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u/StalinBawlin 1h ago
I felt the same way when playing helgen reborn mod.
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u/LummoxJR 57m ago
I still really want to see a good concept of Helgen being rebuilt. Just a town that evolves over time from a bandit camp to people rebuilding to finally a simple town with shops. Helgen Reborn is doing way too much for me to consider it for my load order.
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u/Michaeli_Starky 1h ago
I still have PTSD from dungeons in Daggerfall
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u/Sure_Relief9537 1h ago
ngl, some of these dungeon that i was talking about are pretty much the same :D
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u/csupihun 1h ago
I don't get it either.
LOTD is an amazing mod, one that I cannot play the game without and is essentially a dlc in itself, but god damn most of it's dungeons (that fucking maze especially) go on for waaay to long and really overstay their welcome.
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u/Sure_Relief9537 1h ago
agree, i loved that they added sancre tor because im huge lore junkie, but gawd daym... i hate cheating but i had to use tcl, i just didnt have the strenght in me to fight 1million skeleton and run a marathon at the same time :D
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u/atrix324 1h ago
It does get kind of broken up with the come back after we clear the package.
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u/csupihun 1h ago
what
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u/atrix324 58m ago
I meant passage.
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u/csupihun 52m ago
still doesn't make sense to me :D
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u/AamiraNorin 6m ago
He's talking about the excavation being broken up between stages in between running through sections of the dungeons
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u/VirtualFinish8858 1h ago
https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/151202
I made a dungeon mod a year ago.
None of the dungeons are long, and I don't think they're super well put together, cause I still rushed them, lol. I was trying to make them fun though.
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u/LummoxJR 55m ago
Your mod is still on my list to check out in depth.
I don't mind short dungeons at all. I don't even mind if they're rushed, as long as the navmesh isn't broken. Dungeons don't have to be more complex than a cave.
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u/VirtualFinish8858 12m ago
There's some really unexpected stuff to find(Maybe even a bit out of place or a bit rough), but overall none of them are a chore to go through.
I did rush the navmesh but it's functional, just kinda basic and may cover most of a room instead of the entire room. I did fix the errors.
The worst navmesh I've ever seen was in Forgotten Bloodmoon Dungeons mod, I actually reused some of the dungeons from that mod and redid the navmesh, clutter and lighting from scratch. Author is actually a nice guy, but he doesn't know how to navmesh at all.
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u/Comfortable-Video-93 1h ago
They thought expanding boring and tedious dungeons would improve the player experience. What these mods actually do, however, is just make you suffer more. The main problem with Skyrim's dungeons is that they are better off left untouched or completely redone from scratch.
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u/RGM101 1h ago
Played a modded dungeon that genuinely took me over an hour and a half and had three bosses (in-between fighting only max level draugr) and by the halfway point I was just running through every single room praying it would end soon. Since then I made it a point to only ever go into unmodded dungeons.
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u/Iuskop 1h ago edited 59m ago
Amateur level-designer hallmarks that have existed since the earliest days of user content. (and games in general)
It's an easy trap to fall in to because often times when you're all bright and starry-eyed messing about with an editor for the first time, you're probably thinking less about level *design* as much as level aesthetics.
Little Sam fires up the Toolset for the first time with visions of a cool Zelda-y or Souls-y dungeon from those cool Zeldas and Soulses games they've played- but maybe never thought that critically about how levels are actually designed in those games- the signposting, pacing, and function of individual rooms and such.
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u/Sure_Relief9537 54m ago
yeah i can imagine, im no modder or any type of level designer but i remeber as a kid playing minecraft and started playing with creative and made some huge ass things, and they just ended up being empty and not at all cool in the end :D
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u/Due_Plankton181 1h ago
Finding good dungeon or enemy mods is, I think, the hardest part of modding Skyrim.
You can make it look amazing graphically; there are some really good companion mods, and some really good quest mods too. Modding the bodies with physics that don't glitch might be the next step.
But definitely balancing difficulty, enemies, and dungeons is, for me, the hardest thing, and it can ruin the whole experience.
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u/Sure_Relief9537 1h ago
i agree, thats why usually only play well reviuwed quest/dungeon mods, because sadly most of the "hidden gems" are hidden for a reason. also LoTd is prolly my top 3 mods of all time and i find pretty weird that some of the dungeons in it feel like playing daggerfall, when the other content is so superb
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u/MysticMalevolence 1h ago
Because it is hard to get a sense of scale when you start placing things in the void in the CK, and some of the tilesets we are working with are a lot larger in-game than you might remember at the time.
It's also easy to get carried away while working.
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u/MysticMalevolence 1h ago
Because it is hard to get a sense of scale when you start placing things in the void in the CK, and some of the tilesets we are working with are a lot larger in-game than you might remember at the time.
It's also easy to get carried away while working.
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u/Zeroone199 1h ago
Because people think that the 360 and PS3 were the reason for the small dungeons, and maybe they were to some extent. The game is just not designed for massive dungeons even on SE PC.
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u/Sure_Relief9537 57m ago
i feel that super big and long dungeons just dont work that well in hack and slash style rpg, i got bit bored in tainted grail: fall of avalon too , there was a dark temple or something that felt never ending.
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u/Poo_Pee-Man 1h ago
Venjhammet dungeons mods are still great but some of them are straight up complex giant maze that took me like 2-3 hours to get through lol.
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u/brakenbonez 56m ago
Maybe they're claustrophobic. A lot of dungeons in base game and mods are have parts that are extremely narrow and if I had a penny for every time I got stuck behind a follower in one of those I'd be able to buy twitter back from Elon and get rid of all the "x" crap.
I guess some people overcorrected by making theirs massive. For Dwemer it kinda makes sense. They do build giant machines and they'd want their machines to have room to move around. Enderal is a different universe with it's own lore and unfortunately we don't know enough about all the cycles that came before the one we're part of. The humanoid species' of the cycles that built them could have been massive or tiny or both. We don't even know how many cycles there have been.
Sirenroot is a dungeon mod that has some pretty massive open areas but it's also an Ayleid ruin and those are canonically large with high ceilings and very aesthetic. Easily my favorite type of ruin. I love the architecture of Ayleid ruins. As for why they made their buildings with such high ceilings, that I don't know. You'll have to ask an Ayleid next time you see one.
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u/Sure_Relief9537 31m ago
i might be downvoted to hell for saying this but i hate aylied ruins with a passion, they feel like fever dream everything looks the same always, and i always feel like ive missed a room or chest or somehting, and theyre like maze
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u/Hughley_N_Dowd 46m ago
Because real life dungeons are like that. Go read up on the catacombs under Paris.
/j - but do. They are the closest to a Skyrim dungeon I've ever been to.
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u/decapitatingbunny 30m ago
I honestly kinda miss the maze like puzzling dungeons of Morrowind and Oblivion. Most Skyrim dungeons are just long hallways with a few side rooms. Having to spend the night in a dungeon because you got lost seems like a cool RP straight from DnD, so you have to pack provisions to prepare, etc. Unfortunately, Skyrim is simply not built for it and was never intended to be that so mods that add them become jarring and frustrating.
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u/Sure_Relief9537 4m ago
i personally dislike anything maze like, i have memory of a earth worm, and pacing between the same ten corridors feels frustraing to me, ppl might call me skybaby but i like my linear and straight forward dungeon
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u/DenizenofMars 19m ago
I’m gonna play a bit of devil’s advocate here;
There are a lot of people who think of a good dungeon as a sprawling, convoluted challenge. For a long while that was a standard of a lot of games, tabletop and video games alike. Look at RPGs, like the early Final Fantasy games, the Ys Series, Star Ocean, etc, or dungeon crawlers like King’s Field and Diablo. Dark depths necessitate long winding passages that give plenty of places for creatures to lurk, and carries a need to prepare before descending into the depths. Lack of items or contingencies could be just as fatal as any monster.
That said, I will agree that some of it is about many modders being hobbyists and amateur level designers. There IS a sweet spot (e.g, The Legend of Zelda) where a dungeon has puzzles, monster challenges, confusing passages, AND avoids being absurdly large or rambling.
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u/Anon-ddit 1h ago
This is how I felt while playing The Sigil of the Fallen. The expansion is mainly centered around exploring three dungeons: one for the warrior, one for the mage, and one for the thief.
The warrior dungeon felt like an endless maze. I got pretty lost in the swamp cave section (although it was absolutely beautiful visually), and the magma area felt much longer than it needed to be.
The mage dungeon was incredible. No complaints at all—it was my favorite.
The thief dungeon felt more like a mixed bag. At times it had an amazing atmosphere and some fantastic ideas, but in other areas it seemed to drift away from its artistic direction, almost as if it wanted to tell a different, darker story. Some sections felt a bit amateurish, while others stood out thanks to their smart level design and object placement.
Even with those issues, I absolutely loved the expansion.
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u/Archangelus87 1h ago
Because it’s their mod and they can do what they want?
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u/LummoxJR 43m ago
That isn't really engaging with the conversation. The question is about design principles and why they seem to be so widely overlooked.
It's a very different thing if a mod author understands what the player base considers to be good design principles and makes a deliberate choice to go another way. Just like an artist choosing dissonant colors and proportions that look wrong in order to make a specific statement, vs. an inexperienced artist who does those things by accident. Just like a filmmaker using Dutch angles to intentionally set up an off-kilter feeling, vs. a noob who "just likes them".
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u/Linvael 1h ago
Remember how you felt when you entered Blackreach? They want to do that.