Poll: Do you like large dungeon crawling and grinding levels?

The problem with RPGs in general is that you can´t make them too realistic. You wouldn´t be able to carry a full grown armour around all day for example. And you couldn´t carry all your stuff. Try to carry 5000 pieces of gold :wink:

you must see that abstract: what is a dungeon?

its a time intervall where you dont have connection to a safe home, trader and free healing.

the same could be achieved in KCD if you you are shunned as a thief and had to live in the forest and at night - until you found the real robber.

its absolutely not needed to have a dark cave in order to have a “dungeon”.

understand?

I like dungeon crawling and grinding and story

I absolutely hate the grind. But i am addicted to finding every thing. The result is that i havnt finished any game in a loooong time.

i think one vital flaw of game design is that story and time are linked to space / geography. Rarely does one have a central place that is relevant and evolves through time.

For me in a good designed story / world the main playground should evolve. i hate “finishing” questhubs and moving on.

I absolutely hate dungeon grind levels. I like story and progression, and would prefer a shorter game over a longer one due to filler nonsense like that.

Dungeons frustrate me, and I don’t play a game to be frustrated.

Just to put things in perspective for you; I’ve clocked 80 hours on Witcher 3 currently and I haven’t even made it to Skellige.

@Hellboy:
I really don’t like dungeon crawls being padded with filler content ad nauseum as you describe as in “Wandering in the Dark”. Not only is this an artificial way of claiming higher amounts of gameplay time, but it turns something that is supposed to be entertainment (playing a game) into work (mindless repetition that you can’t avoid).

Also, and IMHO the worst thing about such filler, is that it breaks my suspension of disbelief. What do the scads of enemies in the dungeon/ruin/whatever eat, where’s the sewage plant, etc? If I’m always meeting large gangs of bandits on the roads, why haven’t they conquered the region for themselves already? And how do they keep recruiting more bandits to come here—surely they know by now that I’ve killed 200-300 of them already :). How can the peasants raise livestock here if the country is so full of lions, tigers, and bears?

In a fantasy game, you can always say all these things are possible due to magic or whatever. However, that doesn’t work in a game based on real life such as KC:D. There, you can’t have ridiculous situations. The only “monsters” are humans, we all know how they live, what they require to live, and how many people a given land area can support. Going beyond those limits will really be obvious.

That said, this is a time of war so armies have increased the population temporarily. And there will be stragglers turning brigand in the neighborhood. But armies are a finite size that’s always decreasing due to short-term feudal call-ups, desertion, disease, and casualties, and they can’t remain in the field very long due to needing supplies, especially if the other side burns the crops and villages. So even in wartime, there are still limits to what realistically should be in the game world.

I think this is a really great article, it’s not bashing Fallout 3 or Bethesda, it’s pointing out how it breaks the cliche dungeon crawling with a game essentially full of dungeons.

Damn near all of my favorite games start you out going through some kind of cityscape or similar for a while; this part is always exciting to me, but somewhere along the line they all feel the need to plunge me into some long reaching dark cave or catacomb and that’s where my interest usually dwindles.My re-plays of these games tend to stop at that point, as I find myself without the drive to continue.

It depends on the game for me.

If the dungeon is a big part of the story and has a boss that is really important to the game I like it to be a huge undertaking to enter and finish the dungeon. Of course it helps if the dungeon is detailed and maybe even has multiple layers of different styles to it.

If the dungeon is not really important and does not have new enemies or different looking locations in it then it starts to feel tedious. i felt that way in skyrim a lot of the time.

You’re missing one option:

I love dungeon crawling when it’s about exploration, adventure, puzzle solving, story driven, with just the right amount of enemies and looting. Leave hack&slash&grind&infinitelooting to Diablo.

1 Like

It really depends, If it is a large dungeon like the one Hellboy described from the witcher (Personally really liked that level and dungeon) AND it is story driven or important for the story or just really well made I really do not see a problem with it.
If it is a dungeon to just add playtime to the game then no.

Dungeon crawling gets old quick. To me this game seems to have a great deal of realism. If you were to apply this type of realism to standard dungeon crawlers, you couldn’t go into a dungeon and emerge 4 days later without serious health issues unless well prepared for the time spent there.

I have no issue with a mission involving a lengthy dungeon or level, as long as I have to prepare for it and it isn’t game breaking.

Nothing worse than emerging out of a dungeon a week later, at full health with countless treaures and absolutely no downpoints to having spent a week underground fighting deseased monsters and the like.

Late to the party haha.

I think that the basic concept behind dungeons is fine, the issue lies primarily in the term grinding.

One of my favorite area’s in skyrim is the underground dwemer kingdom region, which to even get to requires going through other caves and areas. Even though this stuff can be quite lengthy, the feelings of exploration you get throughout (ice cave turns to ruins turns to secret region, while following the notes of earlier explorers) and accomplishment when you finally summon and take down the dragon make it all worthwhile. Not to mention all the lore notes that fill the areas.

Dungeons can be amazing when they are engaging unto themselves, with exploration and lore and unique challenges.

The problem starts to arise when you’ve already gone through 50 caves and you have yet another cave, with yet another with similar design and content, which isn’t half as good as those few special places. It’s still kind of nice getting to the end and killing the final boss and getting the extra loot, but it isn’t anywhere as near as exciting. If anything the main reason you keep going into them is because it’s “better then nothing”, and who knows maybe you’ll find that one other dungeon that actually is cool and unique.

Or to sum it all up I’ll just use this quote:

1 Like

As a completionist I feel compelled to complete everything within a game. It’s not something that I necessarily enjoy but still do anyway. I think the scenario described in the OP and collectibles usually are really annoying filler content that I play through but don’t enjoy. This is a field that I think the Elder Scrolls series excels in because they have collectibles that mean something and dungeons are that are diverse. One example of a collectible done well are the dragon priest masks in Skyrim. They’re tough to find, difficult to obtain, and give an immediate tangible reward. Collecting feathers in Assassin’s Creed is a bad example of collectibles - please don’t do that. The dungeons in Elder Scrolls, while sometimes repetitive, are usually fairly short and each have at least one unique section in them to change things up.

I’m 100% in agreement with Dan, here. I hate dungeons and I always can’t wait to get out. I don’t even have any compulsion to explore them - I really just try to get out of there as quickly as possible, all loot be damned.

I think that repetitiveness tends to be the cardinal sin in large dungeons, especially in open world games. Assets get reused, as there is no manpower and no time to handcraft all of them.

I’d rather have smaller unique dungeons, than lots of large cloned iterations.

I’m also under the impression dungeon design in TW3 is one of the least successful aspects in what otherwise and according to most people is a stellar game.

Well, first of all I think we’re going out of context with the Dungeons here, let’s define it first;
According to the dictionary, a dungeon is: an ​underground ​prison, ​especially in a ​castle
Alright, but looking more into the word it actually means “keep”, and I honestly doubt you would find a bunch of empty castles in the vicinities of Medieval Bohemia. (ruins of slavs perhaps?)

I guess that you’d have to somehow sneak inside a castle, enter the dungeon and get loot? That wouldn’t be that bad actually…

On the grinding part, grinding is something rather distasteful for any game, and could ruin the whole game if not used correctly, I do believe it should not be implemented in this game whatsoever.

In given context:
“Dungeon crawling” - refers to activity where player goes through a place with precisely defined borders. In this place player encounter: Enemies, Loot, NPCs, Quest related content.

“Dungeon crawling” is simply a filler that makes a short way into a long way.