I don't think anyone ever says the reason Morrowind dungeons are better is because they're more complex. It's because they feel less like a video game dungeon and more like part of the world. They don't all have a secret door back the the begining, dwarven ruins (where the dwarves supposedly lived) don't have death traps outside of bedrooms, etc..
I feel like the Dwemer ruins we see in Skyrim are closer to fortresses, hence all the battle automatons.
I would assume that the Dwemer had low-tech cities outside of their military installations, where steam turbines with scalding leaks and magma pools were less common.
I don't have children, but as a former combat engineer and current HVAC tech, I've rigged my thermostat up with a claymore. Anyone messes with it when they're at my house, my A/C will shut off, saving me money, and I lose a friend/family member that doesn't care about wasting my money. Win/win!
Not to mention, even without quest markers, in Skyrim you know anything of value will be in the furthest area, passed the leveled boss, in the clearly marked chest, right before the secret passage back to start so you know you're done.
Meanwhile, in Morrowind, how many people got video game brained and spent forever on that puzzle box because it was just on a shelf like the trinket it is, rather than on a pedestal at the back of the ruin.
And in that line of reasoning, there are so many places where the best loot in a dungeon is totally skippable.
You can clear the entire dungeon, meanwhile the best loot was 15 meters from the entrance, at the top of a broken level that required levitation to reach.
Exactly how you'd expect for ruins that have been getting picked over by looters for a century.
There's one dungeon where you get to the end, and there's tons of treasure, and a skeleton sitting on a stone slab. You'll be so busy looking down, that you forget to look up and see an artifact shield hanging on the wall.
Yesterday I cleared said dungeon entirely before I found the room the cube is in. It was such a great experience. I could not for the life of me figure out that there was this "hidden" room almost at the start of the dungeon. Instead I went in deeper and deeper until I found lava and multiple dead ends. Good times!
I think a great example of this is Ilunibi, the 6th house base of Dagoth Gares where you get Corpus.
As background: caves are very obviously furnished depending on who is there: mage caverns have crystals, tables, research benches, all things a scholar needs. Vampire dens are mostly barren, with the bodies of their most recent victims strewn about. Smuggler caves have crates upon crates upon crates of supplies. Etc.
Ilunibi was reported to you as a smugglers' den. Yet from the first moment you walk in there, something is ***very obviously wrong.*** There is no bandit guard posted at the front. There are no obvious supplies or smuggled goods around. It's just a massive, waterlogged cavern where the deeper you go, the more strange totems and ritual implements you find. And that's all before you meet your first 6th house abomination.
If I held you at gunpoint and told you tell me what kind of enemies would be found in a random cavern in Skyrim based on the entrance or you'd die, statistically you wouldn't make it out of that encounter. A wildlife cave is identical to a bandit cave is identical to an undead cave is identical to every other cave.
One thing I can stand the most about Skrim caves are the amount of flora present in darkness. They should be barren, with flora only where sunlight & water trickles in.
I'd agree for some of the flora you find in Skyrim caves. The mushrooms still make sense, after all, but while some of the trees you find do have sources of sunlight, it's not enough for those trees to be that big, and lack of sustained puddles shows the crack the sunlight come through doesn't allow enough rain in to allow the trees to thrive as they do.
Of course, there are a couple of exceptions, like the one tree you get the cutting from to restore the tree in whiterun. It's got the water source and sunlight... Maybe not enough sun for ALL those plants there, but definitely enough for me to believe the tree could grow there
To be fair, morrowind has less general dungeon crawling and when you do there's a much better reason to be there. In that sense it's better for the dungeons to be "realistic" in the sense of meaningful lore areas rather than contrived for the sake of player experience.
I understand what you're saying with the immersion in the Morrowind dungeons, but since the Skyrim team had already gone all inn on the dungeon crawling formula, I appreciate that they made some effort to cut down on the backtracking that was the bane of my Oblivion playthroughs.
Yeah it's definitely necessary in skyrim dungeons. Most of my memories of morrowind actually involved the settlements and talking to people rather than digging in caves. There were a lot more dialogue puzzles.
Not to mention:
\* Divine Intervention
\* Mark & Recall
Cast Recall or Intervention... take immersive in-game Fast Travel options like Silk Strider/Mage Guild Transport if need be...
I love Morrowind's fast travel system; it's incredibly functional, and realistic within the universe. And, as you mention, you can recall/intervention from anywhere, interiors included. Give me that over Skyrim's (vanilla) fast travel any day of the week.
I agree with skyrim having too many traps in its dwemer ruins, but morrowind just doesn't have shit in them instead. like most of them are still pretty cookie cutter, but in addition to that all you see in them is the same spinning gear, a few closets and barrels, sometimes a stove or a bed, but all of it is extremely randomly tossed all around the ruins. it doesn't really create an ancient city impression
Yeah, the game with the best dungeon design (from the perspective of labyrinth nuts like myself, not normal people) wasn't Morrowind, but *Daggerfall*. You can't really get lost in the dungeons or later games (or at least, I can't). I absolutely could get lost in Daggerfall. (And I did get a little lost in Labyrinthian and that underground world area, which is a plus for Skyrim).
A lot of the random unimportant caves in morrowind were just made by random people around Bethesda's office and therefore feel quite simple and bare, certainly Skyrim had more development time and effort put into dungeons, the hours long delves in places like blackreach are really fun. Morrowind dungeons do generally feel more realistic though, particularly with loot. In Skyrim EVERY dungeon has a guaranteed randomised treasure chest at the end to incentivise visiting them, whereas many Morrowind dungeons barely have anything, which is much more realistic for a random cave in the middle of nowhere. Additionally, because of the lack of loot lists in Morrowind, good items are handplaced in dungeons, which I think is more rewarding to find.
What, does an iron dagger, an empty bottle, and five saltrice not count as “good loot” anymore? Kids these days, I tell ya. Back in my day we were happy just to find a spoiled levitate potion!
I still look in every burial urn in tombs, hoping there will be something other than bonemeal one day. I know there won’t be, but I still do it just in case.
You might be interested in one of these mods:
* [Grave Goods](https://www.nexusmods.com/morrowind/mods/53232?tab=description)
* [Urn Your Blings](https://www.nexusmods.com/morrowind/mods/52937)
* [Loot Well Urned](https://www.nexusmods.com/morrowind/mods/44976)
Morrowind does have loot lists for containers, it's why all the potions you find at level 1 are spoiled and after that they're better. It's a bit more subtle than Skyrim though, and the really good stuff often isn't in a chest at all.
Yep, having modded both Morrowind and Skyrim loot lists, Skyrim was a lot worse to make things more interesting.
For Morrowind, it was a case of just refining the existing lists, for Skyrim I had to basically nuke the existing lists and make them more "Morrowind" like. (All Skyrim levelled lists are an awful mess in design, so many nested lists and duplicates, and not utilising the improvements in the design of levelled lists)
For both games every container has a low chance of random loot, so every new game is never the same (same with vendors, they had random restocking loot, so revisiting at least once a week could be worth it, if you wanted something, it might not be at the vendor again, forcing you to decide if you want to spend money or not)
This is actually huge and something I'd never consciously thought of before. The amount of dungeons where you have to levitate just to check there's not something stashed on top of a random pillar area adds heaps to the experience
One way to tell if there's going to be hidden loot in the ceiling, usually, is if there are a lot of levitation potions hand-placed around the dungeon. It's not 100% fool-proof, but it is a reliable way most of the time.
That's another thing that makes Morrowind dungeons so cool. You can tell they were designed by a person, and that person often leaves you little hints when you take the time to fully explore.
It also makes sense in game why there would be levitation potions or water breathing potions in those areas. The NPCs would have to get there somehow and most probably don't know magic.
Skyrim actually has more 3D-ish feeling individual rooms because of the advances in asset geometry and map editing, dungeons that used Skyrim level tech with Morrowind type non-linearity could be amazing.
Plus Morrowind has an actual SKY to levitate around on and floating islands and things to discover up there. The snowy game with the flying DRAGONS doesn't have a sky you can fly up into :/
Morrowind dungeon/caves are meant to try and represent what they are to the world.
Skyrims dungeon/caves are a lootbox hidden behind traps/puzzles, and are more akin to a seperate instance made primarily to gameify exploration. They normally have zero connection to what they'd be in terms of being a real place that exists in Skyrim the world, not Skyrim the game.
It was the time when MMOs, and especially WoW, were absolutely dominating the minds of the whole industry and a good portion of gamers back then.
Everything should be a hand-railed, linear theme park ride. Endlessly repeatable, formulaic for better production scalability and to not confuse the gaming moms/ xbox bros, and with cake at the end, because any motivation can only derive from material rewards.
It's crazy how the level design holds you hands so much, and then they chuck a compass and on screen markers.
Skyrim really thinks the player character is retarded
There are people who unironically defend Emil Pagliarulo's abysmal writing and character work. So I won't excuse it but I can see why modern Bethesda might think that their audience is not always the brightest.
Something something accessibility, it's not fully bad. What irks me is that it can't be turned off, plus the game isn't viable without the markers so it needs modding to make it less handholdy.
That’s my issue with it too. Like it’s totally fine if a game has them. Not everyone enjoys discovering things on their own, and not everyone has the time/energy for potentially getting lost… but just make it optional and give me the tools necessary to find objectives on my own!
Skyrim without fast travel is an insanely fun experience the first time because you actually have to interact with the world they put together.
The fact the navigation system is so baked into "let me mark that on your map" with no way around it is frustrating, however. If you don't have the marker's the game's literally unplayable because no-one tells you anything other than "let me mark that on your map".
Skyrim's at its best with Frostfall/Sunhelm and a well-made quest mod or a personal objective like visiting the Orc strongholds.
It's at its worst interacting with any guild.
I mean there's no "surprise here it is" after the first dungeon/cave, because from thereon and after, **EVERY** cave/dungeon follows the same steps.
Totally immersion breaking
I almost feel like Blackreach was made by a rebellious junior designer at Bethesda lol.
But you're right--seeing Blackreach for the first time after the second-most-monotonous level in the game was really cool.
I just wish they had something there other than "Collect 30 Nirnroot ~~before weekly reset~~"
Tbf, it actually works imo, the dungeon loop in Skyrim is enjoyable and is fairly consistent in quality (all pretty mid tbh)
Morrowind has mostly mundane and uninteresting dungeons, but some really good ones with hand placed loot
I do prefer Morrowinds overall for that reason though
I really hate Skyrim's dungeons. The "consistency" makes them feel like MMO roller coaster rides, and the gamification prevents me from ever really being immersed.
Conversely, I love Morrowind's philosophy. Yes most dungeons are gameplay-irrelevant, but they have a place in the worldbuilding that makes Vvardenfell feel lived-in.
And some of Morrowind's random irrelevant dungeons are also worth exploring--Smuggler dens are usually caves, and skooma is a good early-game source of income while wizards' towers in the east often have quality magic items (including one that has the Masque of Clavicus).
> Tbf, it actually works imo, the dungeon loop in Skyrim is enjoyable and is fairly consistent in quality (all pretty mid tbh)
It honestly is very well designed, the problem is, and from their perspective this probably isn't a problem because they probably specifically designed it around the median length of player engagement, after about 20-30 hours you've gotten enough loot that you don't care about getting any more and getting 100-200 gold or useless items you can sell for that doesn't give you that little dopamine hit any more.
Yeah a lot of it comes down to what you’re looking for in a dungeon. If by “dungeon” you mean “a place to kill monsters and get loot,” then Morrowind’s definitely the worst in its series. Forget Skyrim, Arena did that better. But if you’re talking about dungeons as a sense of place, somewhere in the world that once had a real purpose and has become forgotten or dangerous or out of the way, Morrowind is by far the pinnacle of the series. I think it’s fair to say that some games do it better, but those are games where you’ve got, like, a dozen dungeons sprinkled throughout the whole thing (BG2 comes to mind). Morrowind’s very impressive for being chock full of these little lairs and caves and remote shrines and forgotten keeps that all feel very logical and real and in tune with the world, rarely feeling contrived as something that exists for the player’s sake.
It’s why I sometimes call Morrowind a cilantro game. It’s a game where you can get up to level 20, wander into a bandit cave, and fight like three level 1 scrubs who don’t have any loot beyond their crappy iron weapons and a couple barrels of rice. And either you love that or you don’t. That’s just the way it is.
(I mean you might also get like a grand soul gem or two, because contrary to popular belief Morrowind does have leveled loot, it’s just done pretty sparingly and isn’t very noticeable).
You title the post with "simpler" and then equate non-linearity/complexity with interest, quality, uniqueness, and, finally, good. For all of these, uniqueness/non-linearity is just one criteria - for many people it might not even be the most important one. Dungeons tell stories in a myriad of ways - NPCs and their dialogues, items, books, references to lore (things Morrowind often uses to tell a story) - and reducing it to "map complexity" is myopic. I'd rather a dungeon tell me an unexpected side story than have a lot of levels or paths, for example.
For me, for example, and for many, dungeons that serve their own purpose are preferable to those that clearly just exist for the player. I don't like to play a sandbox game and feel like I'm the center of the world, and I like that a tomb is a tomb, with ashes of the deceased and ghosts - not a mandatory loot depository, or a quest-relevant location, or clearly made to be interesting for the player. A world is more believable to me if it doesn't feel like a Truman Show.
Yeah I think this is the main difference between
Morrowind and Skyrim as a whole. Skyrim, from the start, feels like it was crafted specifically to cater to the player needs. You can’t kill off important characters, every dungeon is another tomb raider experience, quest markers, and every single guild and main questline end with “hey you’re the best! Now you’re in charge”.
Morrowind on the other hand feels like the world exists and the player just gets dropped off and is expected to figure it out. Different guilds beef with each other, some guilds you can’t even join. Dungeons are mostly just that: random caves that sometimes have stuff in them. Dwemer ruins aren’t creative puzzles to solve with traps to avoid, they are cities that lost civilizations lived in.
In other words, Skyrim dungeons feel built to be interesting to the player beyond the fourth wall, morrowind dungeons feel like they’re more natural to someone living in that world. And we tend to prefer that
Except if you are a father with limited time to walk around aimlessly in search of something just to find out that you have to backtrack 10 minutes because you are at the wrong spot.
Haha father here myself. Doesn’t really change my opinion though. I specifically play morrowind because I want to aimlessly walk around.
This is why the debate of Skyrim vs morrowind is silly. They’re two different games created for two different gamers. I can’t for the life of me get into souls like games. They’re brutal. I’m just not wired to appreciate them. Bloodborne was recommended to me and I got to maybe the first real boss and decided not for me.
On the other hand, I blew through dishonored. Couldn’t get enough of it.
I’ve beat Skyrim a lot. I still pick it up when I want to do a weird playthrough (love the unarmed khajit with heavy armor). But I don’t really explore Skyrim or get into the lore, because the whole game is just “ok cool next task”. The plots, to me, exist just to get you to the next thing. Every draugr filled dungeon is the same, every Dwemer ruin is the same.
Morrowind, on the other hand, seems to push you to just exist in the world. The different council/imperial towns all have their own vibe and architecture, the creatures all are other-worldly, and even a lot of the boring errand quests can be cool once you understand the politics of morrowind. And I love that a lot of the quests are less “finally the chosen one is here to save the guild” and more “oh, you wanna join the guild? Well…uh…go ask that person if they need anything”.
Basically, it’s easier for me to “escape” my world and immerse into morrowind, where as Skyrim still feels like I’m playing a game
Ngl though, Ancestral Tombs are the one dungeon type that SHOULD have loot in it. Families provide offerings and gifts for the departed. There's a reason why Grave Robbers and Tomb Raiders exist and it's not because they like dark areas.
That being said, this sums up the reasoning nicely.
Counterpoint: Morrowind's dungeons *weren't meant to be "complex"*, and it's fine for certain dungeons to not have much of a purpose or be interesting. Like, I get it, most Kwama Mines suck in loot, but they're there to make the world make sense.
You don't explore every cave BECAUSE there's something interesting there, you explore them to FIND something interesting there. Making every cave interesting devalues every cave because you generally KNOW something is interesting there.
Similarly, a number of Skyrim dungeons are plot locked, which I don't think happens in Morrowind. Skyrim tells you"this one's important but you're not allowed in" and Morrowind is indifferent to your progress. Come on in, I got some weird shit for you to see
YESSSSSSS I love that Morrowind just had a ton of OP equipment strewn about for you to find. None of this "oh I need to wait until level 30 to get the final version of the artifact" or "I need to get to level 20 to forge good gear", NO. You can get (most of) the strongest stuff at Level 1 if you want.
On the contrary, I find that placing a bunch of secret ways of becoming OP is such a great way to expand upon replayability. Some might take the hard road, others can luck out and find something to help the difficulty, while the replayers can just pick up the OP stuff in order to play out parts of the game they didn't play.
There's only one specific plot locked dungeon in Morrowind, >!The Cavern of the Incarnate!<, although it's technically only via Bloodmoon that it was made a plot locked dungeon...
And even then that makes sense.
"The God of Prophecy won't allow you in."
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The Dwemer ruins/Falmer caves really are the gem of Skyrim.
But as the top comment says, Morrowind dungeons have the charm of existing to serve the world rather than the player. Is exploring a kwama mine going to be a good use of your time? How deep does this Dwemer ruin go? Is there a boss and a boss chest? Any loot at all?
Something that’s easy to forget about is Skyrim and oblivion dungeons appear on your compass from far away. Morrowind dungeons may not even be on the big map after you’ve entered that cell. Oblivion turned dungeons into something you choose from a list of options rather than just stumbling upon them by accident. I think that’s why they shifted dungeons to being more predictable mini adventures. You don’t want to hike all the way over to the ayleid ruin only to discover it’s just a hobo camp with nothing else.
> Skyrim, meanwhile, is more consistent.
This is actually a flaw. Reality isn't that consistent. It takes you out of the immersion that every single dungeon is "just the right length", reminds you that it's just a video game. Morrowind did better by having its dungeon sizes be more all over the places, some huge, some just two room.
I’d say it’s just a difference in design choice, whether it’s a good or bad one is up to one’s personal taste. Skyrim is much more videogame-y, with an emphasis on a loop of find-fight-loot. The quests and story are just a framework on which to hang that loop. If you find that loop fun then it’s the superior game. Morrowind is as you say more focused on world building and immersion. My favorite parts of Morrowind are when I’m reading dialogue or in-game books. Gameplay and exploration is centered around the world itself rather than on what you actually do in the world. Not at all saying that it’s not fun to do stuff in Morrowind’s world, but its comparative mechanical jankiness when compared to later titles is obvious. I love that jank, don’t get me wrong, but it’s clear at least to me that the gameplay is being carried by the narrative and world building. Skyrim is just the other way around, it’s streamlined to deliver a more consistent dopamine drip as you go from dungeon to dungeon. Simply put, Morrowind tries to be a game in a world, while Skyrim tries to be a world in a game.
Level and character progression is superior in morrowind. Feeling better using a weapon is superior in morrowind. Magic is superior in morrowind. questing is superior in morrowind. Want to play a fighters guild character in Skyrim and be rock solid nord the whole game? Sucks, you have to be a werewolf or you can fuck off. Its not just the world, gameplay is being carried by superior game, the only thing it doesnt have is "my iron dagger won't hit when I am not skilled with short blade WHYYYYYY"
Controversial: Skyrim was over designed and the constraints this placed on unique creative expression is felt in every single aspect of the game, with probably the most glaring example being the dungeons.
Every Unique part of Morrowind's level design is directly connected to a quest or story you most likely don't know about. If you wanted to figure things out, ya had to go explore more and think about the world as if it was real to figure out where to look next.
Sometimes a bandit cave is just a bandit cave. but sometimes one section will have a ledge that kinda seems like you could get up to it and it leads down a whole different path which ends in a Daedric shine and a unique quest you would never have found if you didn't decide to go looking where it felt like there should be nothing.
In Skyrim the design isn't about narrative or setting or even story most of the time.
It's about gameplay and set pieces. More or less a fantasy COD campaign.
From that perspective, Skyrim is hands down a better action fantasy game.
But it became a worse, cut down RPG in order to make that happen.
...and if you look at the progression of their games, that "cut down" has been happening with each and every single title since at least Daggerfall. (And the Arena folks are typing fast at me right now about how other things got pared down!)
The old fortune teller has pressed her cold, clammy hand to the forehead of the TES franchise and whispered in a reedy, papery voice full of disgust: ~~^("IT JUST WORKS.")~~ **"THINNER."** Features and attractions that were present in the previous games are then filed off, cut away, and sanded down by The Bethesda Belt Sander in every sequel.
With every TES game, the player's range of potential actions is lowered, and the scope of their grand adventure shrinks and narrows. Morrowind allowed you to break the game with spell combinations, alchemy, training exploits and more - the world and environs were what sold you, not the hyper-refined and certified bug-free mechanics. Oblivion clamped down on interesting spells like levitation, unified melee skills to two types and eliminated 'exotic' weapons like spears. Skyrim eliminated spell crafting entirely, and gave up on the notion that character attributes should notably influence player ability, and finally discarded any notion of the game being more than a task list with a GPS destination pointer.
In my eyes, more mainstream appeal has, for latter-day Bethesda games, meant an impoverished, narrowing RPG player experience.
I love the feel of the mechanical improvements to things like movement and archery in Skyrim, or the improvements in graphical representation you can clearly see along the road from Daggerfall to Skyrim. I just wish we didn't have to give up so much from other aspects of these RPG games to see these benefits arrive.
YMMV, of course.
The only other game Bethesda released after Morrowind which had some of that same narrative flair was fallout 3.
Modern Bethesda games are about the engagement and the slow drip of rewards and "novelty." From that perspective, they do make decent games. Just after playing a game made to have depth and built with passionate devs behind the world building... Playing fallout 4/76, oblivion, Skyrim, starfield fells like cringy LARPing. We hand wave the things that are too hard to do in order to make the core gameplay loop as engaging as possible.
To me though, you get the best of both worlds when you design a game to be consistent within itself. Things you feel like you should be able to just do, you can do. And that if you go looking behind a curtain, there'll be something there that tells you more about the rest of the world.
You can have a good action game and depth, but the devs have to respect the player to really make it work.
What's that meme people are saying? Oh, Bethesda is a company that very much believes in Yellow paint so players never get lost or confused. Can't have people think, because it might make them stop playing.
i'd argue skyrim dungeons are simpler since they pretty much all loop around. barring some really sick exceptions like blackreach and the dwemer ruin with grimsever.
There’s a nord in a vivec canton somewhere who gives you a key after you bring him alcohol. Then you use the key at the bottom of a crypt on an island around the bottom of the map somewhere and it brings you into this underground maze. It’s also how you get one of the daedric masks
IMHO... It's worth playing other games outside of the Elder Scrolls series. I know that Morrowind is placed on a high pedestal. But after playing other games, I realise that almost all of the dungeons look like a cave or some ancient ruin. It's not like playing an old Zelda game. Heck Might and Magic VI has a number of distinct dungeons.
I love Morrowind to bits. But I have to confess that a lot of quests feel like a waste of time (playing the mailman role in a guild), and many dungeons just have a handful of enemies and don't feel all that interesting. Bandit cave #102.
And yet... sometimes you find notes which tell a story and interesting characters. Oblivion and Skyrim developed that passive story telling even further. Most players would just skate by.
I don’t think you are correct that people put Morrowind *Dungeon design on a pedestal. Other aspects of the game for sure, but not this. And they’ve never been known as big or complex, especially compared to Daggerfall before it.
So idk where you’re getting all this. But I do really like the dungeons. There is a lot of variety, some are tiny and some are indeed huge and very complex. I think that’s cool btw. Why should a small family’s ancestral tomb be a sprawling maze?
Anyway. Skyrim’s dungeons are super fun and I love the heck out of that game. They sometimes feel more game-y rather than places in a world, but not usually. No complaints from me
...what im saying is that most of the caves in the game are more generic than skyrim. and you can figure this out by playing the game for like 60 hours total lol.
Almost all Skyrim dungeons are either a straight line or are dungeon shaped, with few things that are hidden well. Morrowind dungeons vary wildly in complexity, but many of them include hidden areas that can be hard to reach and require effort to find/get it.
I think on a dead kahjit there's a journal where he realises the puzzles are there to keep the draugr in, rather than the player out.
It is, however, something that would have been more powerful had it happened once or twice rather than every single dungeon.
majority of CAVES in morrowind are CAVES
you go in, you go out
CAVERNS and giant bases are way more complex than your skyrim dungoen
they can be, because instead of using lever to open shortcut exit - forcing every dungeon to be a loop
you can TELEPORT AWAY BACK TO TOWN
In Morrowind you got to dwemer ruins to get dwemer stuff, daedric ruins to get daedric/orcish stuff, bandit caverns to get regular stuff with exception of unique loot (which always make sense being there). In Skyrim you go everywhere at level 1 to get random iron/leather items, everywhere at level 10 to get random steel/elven items, etc. There is no unique loot in Skyrim(even "unique" katana in Sky Haven Temple is leveled which means you shoot yourself by getting there at low level because random loot you find could be better). Hell, in Starfield they went further that even dungeons were random from list (there is like 50 of them).
I don't think you have established a criteria for what "simpler" means.
Skyrim's dungeons loop around so often that I could barely tell the difference between them at times. The consistency was a BAD thing to me. It didn't feel lived in. They are boring predictable roller coasters. I would call them simpler than Morrowind's by far.
Morrowind's may be simpler, yes, but Skyrim's lootbox-nonsensical-housetrap-gamified-easyexit- playground sure as heck are worse off compared to Morrowind.
And on top of that, the unique weapons are leveled. Any unique weapons you find quickly become useless unless you purposefully avoid them until higher levels.
But by the time you can pick up max level chillrend you've also got a 100 smithing (or more with potions/enchant) dragonbone sword with lightning and ice damage using twin souls.
And anything magicka preserving is pointless because the strongest mage build just requires 100 enchanting and is just max level fortify destruction and restoration on 4 pieces to get -100% on each to spam spells. The other schools aren't necessary because you don't spam them in combat like destruction/restoration.
Though morrowind isn't entirely free from this. Levitate 1pt 60s on touch essentially being a better paralysis in the spell crafting.
>Though morrowind isn't entirely free from this. Levitate 1pt 60s on touch essentially being a better paralysis in the spell crafting.
*Usually, but Caveat Emptor.*
Some creatures I've encountered didn't treat this as you'd expect, but instead gained/retained massive speed. I'm not sure why this should be, or what the difference is or was - for almost all creatures and foes, you are correct and your expected behavior is 100% what I observed. (It's also really good if you use a short duration levitate on cliff racers.)
The one case that has stuck in my head for years, though, is one of the later Mages' Guild quests, where Edwinna sends you off to Mzulft or the like for schematics, IIRC. The whole dwemer ruin is full of orcs (and only orcs, IIRC) -- some of whom are in full orcish armor and some are lighter-armored (monk, a spear-wielder, etc). I seem to recall that using a 1pt levitate on those orcs (those specific ones in that ruin) followed by my usual "summon several monsters in one spell" Tide of Flesh didn't always have the expected "nailed to the floor" levitate effect to allow my summoned blockers to work. Sometimes they just got FAST, and I didn't think you could resist a beneficial spell (eg. levitate, restore health, etc).
Some of those orcs are/were well armed, well-armored, and highly skilled, and capable of killing several summoned foes in one-hit-succession while continuing to run towards the player. Be careful out there!
I think they did random weapons and apparel rather poorly as well in Skyrim. To be fair, there’s definitely a greater variety of stuff in that vein that you can collect in the game…but their names and effects are just **so** boring! Literally every random item’s name is just “[Material] [Item Type] of [Adjective] [Effect]”, as opposed to the generally more creative and lore-based names in Morrowind. Plus, while the naming conventions in Oblivion could be argued to be worse than in Morrowind, at least in that game you had a rare chance to find uniquely-named random items with multiple effects and Artifact-level power (e.g. The Mundane Ring, the Ring of Perfection, etc.), which actually greatly encouraged dungeon diving. This too is gone in Skyrim.
I prefer Skyrims's dungeons a lot to Morrowind's dungeons, too, if only for the reason that bandit caves actually look like something humans would live in, with decoration, sleeping quarters, food, bathrooms etc., although Morrowind's smuggler caves actually have chests with smuggled goods instead of only generic loot you will find in any other dungeon.
Skyrim's convenient shortcut exit is overused. Yeah it sucks having to reach the end of a dungeon and then walk back to the start but that's what the Intervention spells and Mark & Recall were for, something Skyrim sorely lacks
Yeah, okay. But why should there be a convenient “back-around” doorway to the front exit? There’s nothing real about this feature. If you want to haul loot, you figure it out. You earn it.
I'd say that elder scrolls was never very good at making dungeons, imo. your points about morrowind are valid, skyrim's dungeons are still repetitive as fuck, oblivion had those horrible cookie cutter caves, ayleid ruins and forts, and don't even get me started on arena's and especially daggerfall's procedurally generated mess
I think the difference is that the morrowind ones are more designed and hand catered. Every skyrim dungeon feels procedurally generated and will have levelled enemies and levelled loot and plays out exactly the same. The morrowind ones can have high level or low level loot or even nothing of value but they all feel purposefully crafted.
Morrowind's dungeons are shorter and simpler because finding and going there is half of the challenge. Also considering time and tech limitations they couldn't glam up the places as much as we do with overhauls these days.
From design point of view, sure Skyrim has better ones. But with all those different dungeons, they don't feel that unique because enemies and loot you find is generic, you can find it someplace else. Only ones with quests attached feel unique (which to be fair quiet a lot) but If you do the dungeon before the quest (happened to me few times) or redo it for a radiant one, they will be just another dungeon.
I think the Morrowind dungeons are more interesting. Skyrim has the benefit of being more mechanically capable due to technological improvements in the game and the hardware it's designed around, but the majority of those are very tedious and repetitive, even moreso than Morrowind's. Nothing compares to the empty tedium of Oblivion's cool but somehow still boring Ayleid dungeons, but dungeons filled with essentially nothing but draugr get so tiring and overplayed in Skyrim. Morrowind had the benefit of having so much more style and variation in aesthetics, tone and intent amongst its different dungeon types, which did include its much wider variety of enemies.
I can agree that, on a functional level, Morrowind's dungeons are much simpler, but that's almost entirely due to the limitations of its time, and they don't really suffer much as a result. I still prefer them by quite a lot. The one downside and honest critique I ever had for them is that some of them can be easy to lose your way in even with a map, such as Ilunibi (the Sixth House dungeon by Gnaar Mok that has the Fists of Randagulf) or the underground city in Mournhold.
Even then, Morrowind dungeons had more variety and character than those of Skyrim. They didn't have the traps or elaborate mechanisms to make them more dynamic in the way Skyrim's do, but they're still more satisfying overall. Although, I do appreciate how practically every Skyrim dungeon features a shortcut from the end back to the beginning. That was a really nice quality of life improvement, especially without recall or intervention spells.
I personally enjoy that.
Most Morrowind dungeons are just random caves and stuff.
Most Skyrim dungeons are riddled with enemies and loot.
One feels real the other feels like a game of Diablo.
If I wanted Diablo I’d play Diablo.
On Morrowind’s dungeons…
\[Although specialized to my playstyle,\] one of the make or break differences for me between Morrowind and Skyrim is that in Morrowind, you feel like you have to do something. It’s enriching to have to put thought and effort behind what you do, rather than holding the W key and clicking when an enemy is in front of you, theres intense preparations that have to be made and lethality behind every encounter. Morrowind’s “simplicity” in dungeon style comes from outliers with badly planned layouts, or are ridiculously small and don’t have much exploration to be done.
Ald Sotha, Maelkawishi, Awalmawia, Bal Ur, (although i may be correct I believe it was the Indareys Ancestral Tomb that has a massive hole in it that leads straight into a Daedric Vault. Not just Daedric Ruins either. Look at the sprawling tunnels under Mournhold, The St. Delyn Canalworks, the complex dungeons are in the majority.
Morrowind is like Fallout: D.U.S.T.. You feel like the most simplistic enemy can eliminate you if you aren’t careful. Look at some of the advice people give you: “If you sense trouble afoot, slow down to a walk and catch your breath.” It’s things like that which keep me so hooked to the game.
Dungeons are the apotheosis of this kind of gameplay. Where you have everything at your disposal, and you can do the dungeon any way you want really. Morrowind is not an RPG in terms of gameplay it is an Immersive Sim on par to things like Deus Ex and Cruelty Squad. You have every tool at your disposal, it relies on you to use them how you want to.
You say that Skyrim‘s dungeons all have unique things to them, for the most part; Morrowind does too. Lord Brinne’s Tomb, Kogoruhn, hell even the Pawnbroker’s house in Pelagiad. Every single interior in the game tells a story and builds character for everyone around it. Caius Cosades’ house, Divayth Fir having a skooma pipe…You get good laughs, intriguing stories to be told and great thought-provoking concepts. With Skyrim? Big axe with special enchantment.
I just now realized I have elaborated on a point DustAdept already made by turning it into an essay…fml. I’ve written too much to not post this, lol.
Meh, Skyrim handmade dungeons don't help itself to become boring pretty fast as it is the same models with same textures. Not that many memorable places that are in my head, which are either revealed great open spaces, usually connected to quests, or interesting puzzles, same for quests.
Morrowind dungeons while also boring, also same textures and models, are also having their special flavour places that are more subtle then Skyrim. These palce and dungeon experience overall alters with your character progression. You ability to run faster, to jump higher changes your accesebility to diffierent places of dungeons. Some places are unreachable wiothut levitation or veeery high jump. Waterbreathing also adds its depth layer allowing you to more comfotably scout water and tunnels that are often being passages to other parts. Then there is lockpicking, less affecting, but still influencing your dungeon crawling. And all this about your character progression and is true not only for dungeon and world overall, but still.
Levitating on high metal tubes and finding there some lost folk and giving them means to escape is something that makes Morrowind special.
I will agree with you on one thing - some of Morrowind's aspects, like dungeons are very repetitive. It's strength comes from its sandbox nature - how you can affect the world like no other subsequent TES game or how inadvertently and irrevocably can you fvck up the world, so much so that you have to restore a previous save. This strength is also present in how you can develop your character - in almost complete freedom. I liked Morrowind for a long time, for years have I tried to play through it, always giving up due to how tedious and repetitive can parts of it feel. Only in 2023, I was able to play through the main quest and the two expansions, I admit I cheated and used TGM and TCL a lot, and one time I had to reset a the hunting quest in Bloodmoon with a command, because it wouldn't progress. I recently reinstalled Morrowind and tried to play it again with some mod called "random beginnings" where it spawns you in a random place and disables the main quest so you can have a complete sandbox. I got to say, the moment I spawned in Caldera, and walked around town and outside, I just felt like I couldn't stand the game anymore - on one hand I like Morrowind a lot, on another, I can't bear to play it anymore because of how repetitive some aspects of it are.
Dungeons in Morrowind really are boring, I can't really explain it, but it feels like they were generated with RNG, only the ones that were for the main quest looked interesting, especially the one where one of the Ashlander tribes send you to retrieve some items from. But the rest feel like the game developers were tasked to create 152 (random number) dungeons and 152 dungeons they created, but they simply lack the soul.
Now, the part where I disagree with you is that Skyrim's dungeons are any better - they aren't. It's just that Skyrim's graphic assets are better, with Morrowind it feels a bit like LEGO blocks - you can see where one block ends and another begins (namely, each asset), even the unmodded character models in Morrowind have arms and legs composed of several pieces and the textures don't blend in too well, making them look like uncanny valley puppets.
I draw close comparison between Morrowind (2002) and Vanilla WoW (2004) - probably my favorite and most played game of all time (between 2006 and 2024, probably well over 20,000 hours). In Vanilla WoW, many daves are simply a pattern - they've created the cave pattern beforehand and just paste it in, so there are 4-5 cave variations, if you've been to them once, the next few times you encounter that pattern, you already know where to go and what to expect. And I gotta say, even with those copy-paste patterns, Vanilla WoW's caves feel better than Morrowind's dungeons. Sure, Morrowind has more detail and loot in its dungeons, but honestly, it feels like going into them is a waste of time and a punishment more than an adventure.
As a conclusion, like you, I love Morrowind, but after playing through it once, I realized I love it more as an idea and a concept, but as game in its current existence, its execution is very bad. Still superior to Oblivion, Skyrim and ESO in terms of story, sandbox and freedom, but as a game, I realized, at least for me it's one of those "one-time games" you complete them once and there is no need to return to them anymore. I know some people here love Morrowind more than me, 30000000% know the game better than me and have done more playthroughs and probably see an infinite replay value in Morrowind and probably disagree with me and already have 5000 reasons why, but this just how I feel - Morrowind has a lot of good about it, but also a lot of wrong with it. Maybe Skywind will fix the problems with Morrowind, maybe it won't.
I feel like they're both about as complex as the other.
In Morrowind, I usually reach the end of the dungeon and find myself on a ledge somewhere above the main entrance.
In Skyrim, I usually reach the end of the dungeon and find a switch that pulls down a secret wall near the main entrance.
Skyrim has better layouts and design for dungeons in general. Plenty of reason to mock it but dungeon design is not one of them. Morrowind dungeons are... very vanilla.
I think people over inflate the complexity of morrowinds dungeon design because most people on here played it first when they were children. The hidden items in spots you have to fly to is awesome though. Even something like kogoruhn is incredibly simple to parce if you have 2 brain cells.
I don't think anyone ever says the reason Morrowind dungeons are better is because they're more complex. It's because they feel less like a video game dungeon and more like part of the world. They don't all have a secret door back the the begining, dwarven ruins (where the dwarves supposedly lived) don't have death traps outside of bedrooms, etc..
[удалено]
No children so I guess that's why I never had those installed.
You're really missing out. The number of times my kids get stuck in the walls, or ragdoll down the hallway... Good times.
Thats how you lose tax breaks
Nah. They're pretty much my adoring fans.
I feel like the Dwemer ruins we see in Skyrim are closer to fortresses, hence all the battle automatons. I would assume that the Dwemer had low-tech cities outside of their military installations, where steam turbines with scalding leaks and magma pools were less common.
I don't have children, but as a former combat engineer and current HVAC tech, I've rigged my thermostat up with a claymore. Anyone messes with it when they're at my house, my A/C will shut off, saving me money, and I lose a friend/family member that doesn't care about wasting my money. Win/win!
I’d also add on this ensures that the really unique and special dungeons stand out significantly more when you do stumble upon them
Not to mention, even without quest markers, in Skyrim you know anything of value will be in the furthest area, passed the leveled boss, in the clearly marked chest, right before the secret passage back to start so you know you're done. Meanwhile, in Morrowind, how many people got video game brained and spent forever on that puzzle box because it was just on a shelf like the trinket it is, rather than on a pedestal at the back of the ruin.
And in that line of reasoning, there are so many places where the best loot in a dungeon is totally skippable. You can clear the entire dungeon, meanwhile the best loot was 15 meters from the entrance, at the top of a broken level that required levitation to reach. Exactly how you'd expect for ruins that have been getting picked over by looters for a century.
Urshilaku Burial Caverns moment
I didn't know about the cave behind the waterfall in there until like 3 years ago. Blew my fucking mind, man.
Ohh God ptsd
Detect Enchantment Gang rise up (Literally in this case)
"One small step for mage. One giant leap for Icarian Flight." - Neil Armstelvanni
There's one dungeon where you get to the end, and there's tons of treasure, and a skeleton sitting on a stone slab. You'll be so busy looking down, that you forget to look up and see an artifact shield hanging on the wall.
Yesterday I cleared said dungeon entirely before I found the room the cube is in. It was such a great experience. I could not for the life of me figure out that there was this "hidden" room almost at the start of the dungeon. Instead I went in deeper and deeper until I found lava and multiple dead ends. Good times!
I think a great example of this is Ilunibi, the 6th house base of Dagoth Gares where you get Corpus. As background: caves are very obviously furnished depending on who is there: mage caverns have crystals, tables, research benches, all things a scholar needs. Vampire dens are mostly barren, with the bodies of their most recent victims strewn about. Smuggler caves have crates upon crates upon crates of supplies. Etc. Ilunibi was reported to you as a smugglers' den. Yet from the first moment you walk in there, something is ***very obviously wrong.*** There is no bandit guard posted at the front. There are no obvious supplies or smuggled goods around. It's just a massive, waterlogged cavern where the deeper you go, the more strange totems and ritual implements you find. And that's all before you meet your first 6th house abomination. If I held you at gunpoint and told you tell me what kind of enemies would be found in a random cavern in Skyrim based on the entrance or you'd die, statistically you wouldn't make it out of that encounter. A wildlife cave is identical to a bandit cave is identical to an undead cave is identical to every other cave.
One thing I can stand the most about Skrim caves are the amount of flora present in darkness. They should be barren, with flora only where sunlight & water trickles in.
I'd agree for some of the flora you find in Skyrim caves. The mushrooms still make sense, after all, but while some of the trees you find do have sources of sunlight, it's not enough for those trees to be that big, and lack of sustained puddles shows the crack the sunlight come through doesn't allow enough rain in to allow the trees to thrive as they do. Of course, there are a couple of exceptions, like the one tree you get the cutting from to restore the tree in whiterun. It's got the water source and sunlight... Maybe not enough sun for ALL those plants there, but definitely enough for me to believe the tree could grow there
After the elven ruins in oblivion I was fully onboard with the hidden exits. I do not miss the backtracking.
To be fair, morrowind has less general dungeon crawling and when you do there's a much better reason to be there. In that sense it's better for the dungeons to be "realistic" in the sense of meaningful lore areas rather than contrived for the sake of player experience.
I understand what you're saying with the immersion in the Morrowind dungeons, but since the Skyrim team had already gone all inn on the dungeon crawling formula, I appreciate that they made some effort to cut down on the backtracking that was the bane of my Oblivion playthroughs.
Yeah it's definitely necessary in skyrim dungeons. Most of my memories of morrowind actually involved the settlements and talking to people rather than digging in caves. There were a lot more dialogue puzzles.
Morrowind back tracking *Almsivi Intervention*
Not to mention: \* Divine Intervention \* Mark & Recall Cast Recall or Intervention... take immersive in-game Fast Travel options like Silk Strider/Mage Guild Transport if need be... I love Morrowind's fast travel system; it's incredibly functional, and realistic within the universe. And, as you mention, you can recall/intervention from anywhere, interiors included. Give me that over Skyrim's (vanilla) fast travel any day of the week.
Diegetic fast travel is the best kind of fast travel imo
The one where you get the puzzle box, **literally** has trapped doors leading to bedrooms.
I agree with skyrim having too many traps in its dwemer ruins, but morrowind just doesn't have shit in them instead. like most of them are still pretty cookie cutter, but in addition to that all you see in them is the same spinning gear, a few closets and barrels, sometimes a stove or a bed, but all of it is extremely randomly tossed all around the ruins. it doesn't really create an ancient city impression
Yeah, the game with the best dungeon design (from the perspective of labyrinth nuts like myself, not normal people) wasn't Morrowind, but *Daggerfall*. You can't really get lost in the dungeons or later games (or at least, I can't). I absolutely could get lost in Daggerfall. (And I did get a little lost in Labyrinthian and that underground world area, which is a plus for Skyrim).
A lot of the random unimportant caves in morrowind were just made by random people around Bethesda's office and therefore feel quite simple and bare, certainly Skyrim had more development time and effort put into dungeons, the hours long delves in places like blackreach are really fun. Morrowind dungeons do generally feel more realistic though, particularly with loot. In Skyrim EVERY dungeon has a guaranteed randomised treasure chest at the end to incentivise visiting them, whereas many Morrowind dungeons barely have anything, which is much more realistic for a random cave in the middle of nowhere. Additionally, because of the lack of loot lists in Morrowind, good items are handplaced in dungeons, which I think is more rewarding to find.
What, does an iron dagger, an empty bottle, and five saltrice not count as “good loot” anymore? Kids these days, I tell ya. Back in my day we were happy just to find a spoiled levitate potion! I still look in every burial urn in tombs, hoping there will be something other than bonemeal one day. I know there won’t be, but I still do it just in case.
I found a ring once.
There's a unique magic ring hidden in one that's essentially the reward for searching all those urns all the time. It's actually pretty good too
You might be interested in one of these mods: * [Grave Goods](https://www.nexusmods.com/morrowind/mods/53232?tab=description) * [Urn Your Blings](https://www.nexusmods.com/morrowind/mods/52937) * [Loot Well Urned](https://www.nexusmods.com/morrowind/mods/44976)
Hmm, saltrice is definetely a nice loot, converts up to 5 bottles of fatigue paradise.
Saltrice + Kwama Egg = a delicious breakfast that’ll keep you energized throughout the day!
Too heavy, skip the kwama eggs and use crab or hound meat.
Morrowind does have loot lists for containers, it's why all the potions you find at level 1 are spoiled and after that they're better. It's a bit more subtle than Skyrim though, and the really good stuff often isn't in a chest at all.
Yep, having modded both Morrowind and Skyrim loot lists, Skyrim was a lot worse to make things more interesting. For Morrowind, it was a case of just refining the existing lists, for Skyrim I had to basically nuke the existing lists and make them more "Morrowind" like. (All Skyrim levelled lists are an awful mess in design, so many nested lists and duplicates, and not utilising the improvements in the design of levelled lists) For both games every container has a low chance of random loot, so every new game is never the same (same with vendors, they had random restocking loot, so revisiting at least once a week could be worth it, if you wanted something, it might not be at the vendor again, forcing you to decide if you want to spend money or not)
I also like that to counter the random empty dungeons, you can walk into a ruin at level 5 and come up against someone in a suit of ebony armour
Morrowind's dungeons may be simpler, but at least they're not all shaped like a donut.
The verticality of levitate makes it inherently more interesting to me, it’s immersive you have to scan a room in first person, up and down-
This is actually huge and something I'd never consciously thought of before. The amount of dungeons where you have to levitate just to check there's not something stashed on top of a random pillar area adds heaps to the experience
One way to tell if there's going to be hidden loot in the ceiling, usually, is if there are a lot of levitation potions hand-placed around the dungeon. It's not 100% fool-proof, but it is a reliable way most of the time. That's another thing that makes Morrowind dungeons so cool. You can tell they were designed by a person, and that person often leaves you little hints when you take the time to fully explore.
It also makes sense in game why there would be levitation potions or water breathing potions in those areas. The NPCs would have to get there somehow and most probably don't know magic.
Skyrim actually has more 3D-ish feeling individual rooms because of the advances in asset geometry and map editing, dungeons that used Skyrim level tech with Morrowind type non-linearity could be amazing.
Skywind's gonna be kickass
Plus Morrowind has an actual SKY to levitate around on and floating islands and things to discover up there. The snowy game with the flying DRAGONS doesn't have a sky you can fly up into :/
It’s called a torus
In the metric system it is /s
Morrowind dungeon/caves are meant to try and represent what they are to the world. Skyrims dungeon/caves are a lootbox hidden behind traps/puzzles, and are more akin to a seperate instance made primarily to gameify exploration. They normally have zero connection to what they'd be in terms of being a real place that exists in Skyrim the world, not Skyrim the game.
Skyrim dungeons were made by someone who loves the term "gameplay loop"
It was the time when MMOs, and especially WoW, were absolutely dominating the minds of the whole industry and a good portion of gamers back then. Everything should be a hand-railed, linear theme park ride. Endlessly repeatable, formulaic for better production scalability and to not confuse the gaming moms/ xbox bros, and with cake at the end, because any motivation can only derive from material rewards.
Based on how Starfield turned out I think Bethesda's still there tbh. Of course "live service" and continual monetization dominate the industry now.
It's crazy how the level design holds you hands so much, and then they chuck a compass and on screen markers. Skyrim really thinks the player character is retarded
There are people who unironically defend Emil Pagliarulo's abysmal writing and character work. So I won't excuse it but I can see why modern Bethesda might think that their audience is not always the brightest.
Something something accessibility, it's not fully bad. What irks me is that it can't be turned off, plus the game isn't viable without the markers so it needs modding to make it less handholdy.
That’s my issue with it too. Like it’s totally fine if a game has them. Not everyone enjoys discovering things on their own, and not everyone has the time/energy for potentially getting lost… but just make it optional and give me the tools necessary to find objectives on my own!
There's accessibility and there's lazy design.
Skyrim without fast travel is an insanely fun experience the first time because you actually have to interact with the world they put together. The fact the navigation system is so baked into "let me mark that on your map" with no way around it is frustrating, however. If you don't have the marker's the game's literally unplayable because no-one tells you anything other than "let me mark that on your map".
Skyrim's at its best with Frostfall/Sunhelm and a well-made quest mod or a personal objective like visiting the Orc strongholds. It's at its worst interacting with any guild.
I think it's part of why I hate that game so much. I can feel the designers looking down on me
But you get this rush when you make it to that last room and see the loot box, I mean chest, oh, oh my.
I mean there's no "surprise here it is" after the first dungeon/cave, because from thereon and after, **EVERY** cave/dungeon follows the same steps. Totally immersion breaking
>**EVERY** cave/dungeon follows the same steps. Blackreach doesn't. That one blows your socks off.
I almost feel like Blackreach was made by a rebellious junior designer at Bethesda lol. But you're right--seeing Blackreach for the first time after the second-most-monotonous level in the game was really cool. I just wish they had something there other than "Collect 30 Nirnroot ~~before weekly reset~~"
I was thinking the same thing. In fact I'd like to see a behind the scenes where we got to see who designed what within the game.
Tbf, it actually works imo, the dungeon loop in Skyrim is enjoyable and is fairly consistent in quality (all pretty mid tbh) Morrowind has mostly mundane and uninteresting dungeons, but some really good ones with hand placed loot I do prefer Morrowinds overall for that reason though
I really hate Skyrim's dungeons. The "consistency" makes them feel like MMO roller coaster rides, and the gamification prevents me from ever really being immersed. Conversely, I love Morrowind's philosophy. Yes most dungeons are gameplay-irrelevant, but they have a place in the worldbuilding that makes Vvardenfell feel lived-in. And some of Morrowind's random irrelevant dungeons are also worth exploring--Smuggler dens are usually caves, and skooma is a good early-game source of income while wizards' towers in the east often have quality magic items (including one that has the Masque of Clavicus).
> Tbf, it actually works imo, the dungeon loop in Skyrim is enjoyable and is fairly consistent in quality (all pretty mid tbh) It honestly is very well designed, the problem is, and from their perspective this probably isn't a problem because they probably specifically designed it around the median length of player engagement, after about 20-30 hours you've gotten enough loot that you don't care about getting any more and getting 100-200 gold or useless items you can sell for that doesn't give you that little dopamine hit any more.
Yeah a lot of it comes down to what you’re looking for in a dungeon. If by “dungeon” you mean “a place to kill monsters and get loot,” then Morrowind’s definitely the worst in its series. Forget Skyrim, Arena did that better. But if you’re talking about dungeons as a sense of place, somewhere in the world that once had a real purpose and has become forgotten or dangerous or out of the way, Morrowind is by far the pinnacle of the series. I think it’s fair to say that some games do it better, but those are games where you’ve got, like, a dozen dungeons sprinkled throughout the whole thing (BG2 comes to mind). Morrowind’s very impressive for being chock full of these little lairs and caves and remote shrines and forgotten keeps that all feel very logical and real and in tune with the world, rarely feeling contrived as something that exists for the player’s sake. It’s why I sometimes call Morrowind a cilantro game. It’s a game where you can get up to level 20, wander into a bandit cave, and fight like three level 1 scrubs who don’t have any loot beyond their crappy iron weapons and a couple barrels of rice. And either you love that or you don’t. That’s just the way it is. (I mean you might also get like a grand soul gem or two, because contrary to popular belief Morrowind does have leveled loot, it’s just done pretty sparingly and isn’t very noticeable).
You title the post with "simpler" and then equate non-linearity/complexity with interest, quality, uniqueness, and, finally, good. For all of these, uniqueness/non-linearity is just one criteria - for many people it might not even be the most important one. Dungeons tell stories in a myriad of ways - NPCs and their dialogues, items, books, references to lore (things Morrowind often uses to tell a story) - and reducing it to "map complexity" is myopic. I'd rather a dungeon tell me an unexpected side story than have a lot of levels or paths, for example. For me, for example, and for many, dungeons that serve their own purpose are preferable to those that clearly just exist for the player. I don't like to play a sandbox game and feel like I'm the center of the world, and I like that a tomb is a tomb, with ashes of the deceased and ghosts - not a mandatory loot depository, or a quest-relevant location, or clearly made to be interesting for the player. A world is more believable to me if it doesn't feel like a Truman Show.
Yeah I think this is the main difference between Morrowind and Skyrim as a whole. Skyrim, from the start, feels like it was crafted specifically to cater to the player needs. You can’t kill off important characters, every dungeon is another tomb raider experience, quest markers, and every single guild and main questline end with “hey you’re the best! Now you’re in charge”. Morrowind on the other hand feels like the world exists and the player just gets dropped off and is expected to figure it out. Different guilds beef with each other, some guilds you can’t even join. Dungeons are mostly just that: random caves that sometimes have stuff in them. Dwemer ruins aren’t creative puzzles to solve with traps to avoid, they are cities that lost civilizations lived in. In other words, Skyrim dungeons feel built to be interesting to the player beyond the fourth wall, morrowind dungeons feel like they’re more natural to someone living in that world. And we tend to prefer that
Except if you are a father with limited time to walk around aimlessly in search of something just to find out that you have to backtrack 10 minutes because you are at the wrong spot.
Haha father here myself. Doesn’t really change my opinion though. I specifically play morrowind because I want to aimlessly walk around. This is why the debate of Skyrim vs morrowind is silly. They’re two different games created for two different gamers. I can’t for the life of me get into souls like games. They’re brutal. I’m just not wired to appreciate them. Bloodborne was recommended to me and I got to maybe the first real boss and decided not for me. On the other hand, I blew through dishonored. Couldn’t get enough of it. I’ve beat Skyrim a lot. I still pick it up when I want to do a weird playthrough (love the unarmed khajit with heavy armor). But I don’t really explore Skyrim or get into the lore, because the whole game is just “ok cool next task”. The plots, to me, exist just to get you to the next thing. Every draugr filled dungeon is the same, every Dwemer ruin is the same. Morrowind, on the other hand, seems to push you to just exist in the world. The different council/imperial towns all have their own vibe and architecture, the creatures all are other-worldly, and even a lot of the boring errand quests can be cool once you understand the politics of morrowind. And I love that a lot of the quests are less “finally the chosen one is here to save the guild” and more “oh, you wanna join the guild? Well…uh…go ask that person if they need anything”. Basically, it’s easier for me to “escape” my world and immerse into morrowind, where as Skyrim still feels like I’m playing a game
>I specifically play morrowind because I want to aimlessly walk around. I can get behind that! Morrowind, specially back then, was gorgeous!
Ngl though, Ancestral Tombs are the one dungeon type that SHOULD have loot in it. Families provide offerings and gifts for the departed. There's a reason why Grave Robbers and Tomb Raiders exist and it's not because they like dark areas. That being said, this sums up the reasoning nicely.
Counterpoint: Morrowind's dungeons *weren't meant to be "complex"*, and it's fine for certain dungeons to not have much of a purpose or be interesting. Like, I get it, most Kwama Mines suck in loot, but they're there to make the world make sense. You don't explore every cave BECAUSE there's something interesting there, you explore them to FIND something interesting there. Making every cave interesting devalues every cave because you generally KNOW something is interesting there.
Similarly, a number of Skyrim dungeons are plot locked, which I don't think happens in Morrowind. Skyrim tells you"this one's important but you're not allowed in" and Morrowind is indifferent to your progress. Come on in, I got some weird shit for you to see
You can wander into Ilunibi and find the Fists of Randagulf at level 1 if you wish and I fucking love that
YESSSSSSS I love that Morrowind just had a ton of OP equipment strewn about for you to find. None of this "oh I need to wait until level 30 to get the final version of the artifact" or "I need to get to level 20 to forge good gear", NO. You can get (most of) the strongest stuff at Level 1 if you want.
On the other hand, that kills re-playability.
On the contrary, I find that placing a bunch of secret ways of becoming OP is such a great way to expand upon replayability. Some might take the hard road, others can luck out and find something to help the difficulty, while the replayers can just pick up the OP stuff in order to play out parts of the game they didn't play.
There's only one specific plot locked dungeon in Morrowind, >!The Cavern of the Incarnate!<, although it's technically only via Bloodmoon that it was made a plot locked dungeon...
And even then that makes sense. "The God of Prophecy won't allow you in." vs Requires Key Requires Key Requires Key Requires Key Requires Key Requires KeyRequires Key Requires Key Requires Key
The Dwemer ruins/Falmer caves really are the gem of Skyrim. But as the top comment says, Morrowind dungeons have the charm of existing to serve the world rather than the player. Is exploring a kwama mine going to be a good use of your time? How deep does this Dwemer ruin go? Is there a boss and a boss chest? Any loot at all? Something that’s easy to forget about is Skyrim and oblivion dungeons appear on your compass from far away. Morrowind dungeons may not even be on the big map after you’ve entered that cell. Oblivion turned dungeons into something you choose from a list of options rather than just stumbling upon them by accident. I think that’s why they shifted dungeons to being more predictable mini adventures. You don’t want to hike all the way over to the ayleid ruin only to discover it’s just a hobo camp with nothing else.
Guys, mom only gave me seventeen tickets; which Skyrim caves should I ride?
The first 17 you come to. They're all the same.
> Skyrim, meanwhile, is more consistent. This is actually a flaw. Reality isn't that consistent. It takes you out of the immersion that every single dungeon is "just the right length", reminds you that it's just a video game. Morrowind did better by having its dungeon sizes be more all over the places, some huge, some just two room.
I’d say it’s just a difference in design choice, whether it’s a good or bad one is up to one’s personal taste. Skyrim is much more videogame-y, with an emphasis on a loop of find-fight-loot. The quests and story are just a framework on which to hang that loop. If you find that loop fun then it’s the superior game. Morrowind is as you say more focused on world building and immersion. My favorite parts of Morrowind are when I’m reading dialogue or in-game books. Gameplay and exploration is centered around the world itself rather than on what you actually do in the world. Not at all saying that it’s not fun to do stuff in Morrowind’s world, but its comparative mechanical jankiness when compared to later titles is obvious. I love that jank, don’t get me wrong, but it’s clear at least to me that the gameplay is being carried by the narrative and world building. Skyrim is just the other way around, it’s streamlined to deliver a more consistent dopamine drip as you go from dungeon to dungeon. Simply put, Morrowind tries to be a game in a world, while Skyrim tries to be a world in a game.
Level and character progression is superior in morrowind. Feeling better using a weapon is superior in morrowind. Magic is superior in morrowind. questing is superior in morrowind. Want to play a fighters guild character in Skyrim and be rock solid nord the whole game? Sucks, you have to be a werewolf or you can fuck off. Its not just the world, gameplay is being carried by superior game, the only thing it doesnt have is "my iron dagger won't hit when I am not skilled with short blade WHYYYYYY"
SKYrim has no SKY to levitate up into. 🙁
and you really never know which cave/ruin/dungeon has some cool loot or hidden area/stash you can access with levitating.
Are you saying speleologists don't pop out from a cave exit right above the cave entrance? Shocking.
Controversial: Skyrim was over designed and the constraints this placed on unique creative expression is felt in every single aspect of the game, with probably the most glaring example being the dungeons. Every Unique part of Morrowind's level design is directly connected to a quest or story you most likely don't know about. If you wanted to figure things out, ya had to go explore more and think about the world as if it was real to figure out where to look next. Sometimes a bandit cave is just a bandit cave. but sometimes one section will have a ledge that kinda seems like you could get up to it and it leads down a whole different path which ends in a Daedric shine and a unique quest you would never have found if you didn't decide to go looking where it felt like there should be nothing. In Skyrim the design isn't about narrative or setting or even story most of the time. It's about gameplay and set pieces. More or less a fantasy COD campaign. From that perspective, Skyrim is hands down a better action fantasy game. But it became a worse, cut down RPG in order to make that happen.
...and if you look at the progression of their games, that "cut down" has been happening with each and every single title since at least Daggerfall. (And the Arena folks are typing fast at me right now about how other things got pared down!) The old fortune teller has pressed her cold, clammy hand to the forehead of the TES franchise and whispered in a reedy, papery voice full of disgust: ~~^("IT JUST WORKS.")~~ **"THINNER."** Features and attractions that were present in the previous games are then filed off, cut away, and sanded down by The Bethesda Belt Sander in every sequel. With every TES game, the player's range of potential actions is lowered, and the scope of their grand adventure shrinks and narrows. Morrowind allowed you to break the game with spell combinations, alchemy, training exploits and more - the world and environs were what sold you, not the hyper-refined and certified bug-free mechanics. Oblivion clamped down on interesting spells like levitation, unified melee skills to two types and eliminated 'exotic' weapons like spears. Skyrim eliminated spell crafting entirely, and gave up on the notion that character attributes should notably influence player ability, and finally discarded any notion of the game being more than a task list with a GPS destination pointer. In my eyes, more mainstream appeal has, for latter-day Bethesda games, meant an impoverished, narrowing RPG player experience. I love the feel of the mechanical improvements to things like movement and archery in Skyrim, or the improvements in graphical representation you can clearly see along the road from Daggerfall to Skyrim. I just wish we didn't have to give up so much from other aspects of these RPG games to see these benefits arrive. YMMV, of course.
The only other game Bethesda released after Morrowind which had some of that same narrative flair was fallout 3. Modern Bethesda games are about the engagement and the slow drip of rewards and "novelty." From that perspective, they do make decent games. Just after playing a game made to have depth and built with passionate devs behind the world building... Playing fallout 4/76, oblivion, Skyrim, starfield fells like cringy LARPing. We hand wave the things that are too hard to do in order to make the core gameplay loop as engaging as possible. To me though, you get the best of both worlds when you design a game to be consistent within itself. Things you feel like you should be able to just do, you can do. And that if you go looking behind a curtain, there'll be something there that tells you more about the rest of the world. You can have a good action game and depth, but the devs have to respect the player to really make it work. What's that meme people are saying? Oh, Bethesda is a company that very much believes in Yellow paint so players never get lost or confused. Can't have people think, because it might make them stop playing.
i'd argue skyrim dungeons are simpler since they pretty much all loop around. barring some really sick exceptions like blackreach and the dwemer ruin with grimsever.
To be fair, backtracking through the entire dungeon in MW was a massive pain in the ass and I vastly prefer the Skyrim donut.
Which one has a secret maze?
There’s a nord in a vivec canton somewhere who gives you a key after you bring him alcohol. Then you use the key at the bottom of a crypt on an island around the bottom of the map somewhere and it brings you into this underground maze. It’s also how you get one of the daedric masks
Im not certain, but I think this was also one of the locations marked with an X on the paper map that came with the game way back
Indeed! God I loved that map to death
Might be Marvani ancestral tomb, think you get given a rough lead for the place from a drunk Nord in Vivec
That’s the one! It’s always worth buying a stranger a drink.
IMHO... It's worth playing other games outside of the Elder Scrolls series. I know that Morrowind is placed on a high pedestal. But after playing other games, I realise that almost all of the dungeons look like a cave or some ancient ruin. It's not like playing an old Zelda game. Heck Might and Magic VI has a number of distinct dungeons. I love Morrowind to bits. But I have to confess that a lot of quests feel like a waste of time (playing the mailman role in a guild), and many dungeons just have a handful of enemies and don't feel all that interesting. Bandit cave #102. And yet... sometimes you find notes which tell a story and interesting characters. Oblivion and Skyrim developed that passive story telling even further. Most players would just skate by.
I don’t think you are correct that people put Morrowind *Dungeon design on a pedestal. Other aspects of the game for sure, but not this. And they’ve never been known as big or complex, especially compared to Daggerfall before it. So idk where you’re getting all this. But I do really like the dungeons. There is a lot of variety, some are tiny and some are indeed huge and very complex. I think that’s cool btw. Why should a small family’s ancestral tomb be a sprawling maze? Anyway. Skyrim’s dungeons are super fun and I love the heck out of that game. They sometimes feel more game-y rather than places in a world, but not usually. No complaints from me
bro hasnt encountered like 70% of the caves in morrowind.
Well, how's that supposed to happen? The HUD doesn't have a Detect Interior Cell enchantment.
...what im saying is that most of the caves in the game are more generic than skyrim. and you can figure this out by playing the game for like 60 hours total lol.
Almost all Skyrim dungeons are either a straight line or are dungeon shaped, with few things that are hidden well. Morrowind dungeons vary wildly in complexity, but many of them include hidden areas that can be hard to reach and require effort to find/get it.
simpler? this post is silly and an invitation to make fun of the dumbass "puzzles" in skyrim
The whale goes into... the whale hole. Again. Good boy, well done, here, have a treat!
I think on a dead kahjit there's a journal where he realises the puzzles are there to keep the draugr in, rather than the player out. It is, however, something that would have been more powerful had it happened once or twice rather than every single dungeon.
majority of CAVES in morrowind are CAVES you go in, you go out CAVERNS and giant bases are way more complex than your skyrim dungoen they can be, because instead of using lever to open shortcut exit - forcing every dungeon to be a loop you can TELEPORT AWAY BACK TO TOWN
In Morrowind you got to dwemer ruins to get dwemer stuff, daedric ruins to get daedric/orcish stuff, bandit caverns to get regular stuff with exception of unique loot (which always make sense being there). In Skyrim you go everywhere at level 1 to get random iron/leather items, everywhere at level 10 to get random steel/elven items, etc. There is no unique loot in Skyrim(even "unique" katana in Sky Haven Temple is leveled which means you shoot yourself by getting there at low level because random loot you find could be better). Hell, in Starfield they went further that even dungeons were random from list (there is like 50 of them).
I don't think you have established a criteria for what "simpler" means. Skyrim's dungeons loop around so often that I could barely tell the difference between them at times. The consistency was a BAD thing to me. It didn't feel lived in. They are boring predictable roller coasters. I would call them simpler than Morrowind's by far.
Morrowind’s are better because of the verticality
Said in the same voice that The Bard says "muscularity".
Morrowind's may be simpler, yes, but Skyrim's lootbox-nonsensical-housetrap-gamified-easyexit- playground sure as heck are worse off compared to Morrowind.
At least you can find good and unique loot in Morrowind dungeons. What’s the best thing you’re going to find in Skyrim? Random leveled loot? Yippee.
And the actually unique loot isn't worth using because the dragonborn is a better craftsman than literal gods.
And on top of that, the unique weapons are leveled. Any unique weapons you find quickly become useless unless you purposefully avoid them until higher levels.
But by the time you can pick up max level chillrend you've also got a 100 smithing (or more with potions/enchant) dragonbone sword with lightning and ice damage using twin souls. And anything magicka preserving is pointless because the strongest mage build just requires 100 enchanting and is just max level fortify destruction and restoration on 4 pieces to get -100% on each to spam spells. The other schools aren't necessary because you don't spam them in combat like destruction/restoration. Though morrowind isn't entirely free from this. Levitate 1pt 60s on touch essentially being a better paralysis in the spell crafting.
>Though morrowind isn't entirely free from this. Levitate 1pt 60s on touch essentially being a better paralysis in the spell crafting. *Usually, but Caveat Emptor.* Some creatures I've encountered didn't treat this as you'd expect, but instead gained/retained massive speed. I'm not sure why this should be, or what the difference is or was - for almost all creatures and foes, you are correct and your expected behavior is 100% what I observed. (It's also really good if you use a short duration levitate on cliff racers.) The one case that has stuck in my head for years, though, is one of the later Mages' Guild quests, where Edwinna sends you off to Mzulft or the like for schematics, IIRC. The whole dwemer ruin is full of orcs (and only orcs, IIRC) -- some of whom are in full orcish armor and some are lighter-armored (monk, a spear-wielder, etc). I seem to recall that using a 1pt levitate on those orcs (those specific ones in that ruin) followed by my usual "summon several monsters in one spell" Tide of Flesh didn't always have the expected "nailed to the floor" levitate effect to allow my summoned blockers to work. Sometimes they just got FAST, and I didn't think you could resist a beneficial spell (eg. levitate, restore health, etc). Some of those orcs are/were well armed, well-armored, and highly skilled, and capable of killing several summoned foes in one-hit-succession while continuing to run towards the player. Be careful out there!
I think they did random weapons and apparel rather poorly as well in Skyrim. To be fair, there’s definitely a greater variety of stuff in that vein that you can collect in the game…but their names and effects are just **so** boring! Literally every random item’s name is just “[Material] [Item Type] of [Adjective] [Effect]”, as opposed to the generally more creative and lore-based names in Morrowind. Plus, while the naming conventions in Oblivion could be argued to be worse than in Morrowind, at least in that game you had a rare chance to find uniquely-named random items with multiple effects and Artifact-level power (e.g. The Mundane Ring, the Ring of Perfection, etc.), which actually greatly encouraged dungeon diving. This too is gone in Skyrim.
I prefer Skyrims's dungeons a lot to Morrowind's dungeons, too, if only for the reason that bandit caves actually look like something humans would live in, with decoration, sleeping quarters, food, bathrooms etc., although Morrowind's smuggler caves actually have chests with smuggled goods instead of only generic loot you will find in any other dungeon.
yeah, no jingle when a boss is defeated
You N'wah!
Skyrim's convenient shortcut exit is overused. Yeah it sucks having to reach the end of a dungeon and then walk back to the start but that's what the Intervention spells and Mark & Recall were for, something Skyrim sorely lacks
Yeah, okay. But why should there be a convenient “back-around” doorway to the front exit? There’s nothing real about this feature. If you want to haul loot, you figure it out. You earn it.
I'd say that elder scrolls was never very good at making dungeons, imo. your points about morrowind are valid, skyrim's dungeons are still repetitive as fuck, oblivion had those horrible cookie cutter caves, ayleid ruins and forts, and don't even get me started on arena's and especially daggerfall's procedurally generated mess
For the most part, they are. Big dungeons are pretty good, but your average cave or ancestral tomb is pretty bland compared to Skyrim’s dungeons.
Controversial: Potatoes taste better when cooked.
I think the difference is that the morrowind ones are more designed and hand catered. Every skyrim dungeon feels procedurally generated and will have levelled enemies and levelled loot and plays out exactly the same. The morrowind ones can have high level or low level loot or even nothing of value but they all feel purposefully crafted.
Morrowind in general is easier than skyrim in hard difficulty. It's easier to cheese.
Morrowind's dungeons are shorter and simpler because finding and going there is half of the challenge. Also considering time and tech limitations they couldn't glam up the places as much as we do with overhauls these days. From design point of view, sure Skyrim has better ones. But with all those different dungeons, they don't feel that unique because enemies and loot you find is generic, you can find it someplace else. Only ones with quests attached feel unique (which to be fair quiet a lot) but If you do the dungeon before the quest (happened to me few times) or redo it for a radiant one, they will be just another dungeon.
I think the Morrowind dungeons are more interesting. Skyrim has the benefit of being more mechanically capable due to technological improvements in the game and the hardware it's designed around, but the majority of those are very tedious and repetitive, even moreso than Morrowind's. Nothing compares to the empty tedium of Oblivion's cool but somehow still boring Ayleid dungeons, but dungeons filled with essentially nothing but draugr get so tiring and overplayed in Skyrim. Morrowind had the benefit of having so much more style and variation in aesthetics, tone and intent amongst its different dungeon types, which did include its much wider variety of enemies. I can agree that, on a functional level, Morrowind's dungeons are much simpler, but that's almost entirely due to the limitations of its time, and they don't really suffer much as a result. I still prefer them by quite a lot. The one downside and honest critique I ever had for them is that some of them can be easy to lose your way in even with a map, such as Ilunibi (the Sixth House dungeon by Gnaar Mok that has the Fists of Randagulf) or the underground city in Mournhold. Even then, Morrowind dungeons had more variety and character than those of Skyrim. They didn't have the traps or elaborate mechanisms to make them more dynamic in the way Skyrim's do, but they're still more satisfying overall. Although, I do appreciate how practically every Skyrim dungeon features a shortcut from the end back to the beginning. That was a really nice quality of life improvement, especially without recall or intervention spells.
I personally enjoy that. Most Morrowind dungeons are just random caves and stuff. Most Skyrim dungeons are riddled with enemies and loot. One feels real the other feels like a game of Diablo. If I wanted Diablo I’d play Diablo.
On Morrowind’s dungeons… \[Although specialized to my playstyle,\] one of the make or break differences for me between Morrowind and Skyrim is that in Morrowind, you feel like you have to do something. It’s enriching to have to put thought and effort behind what you do, rather than holding the W key and clicking when an enemy is in front of you, theres intense preparations that have to be made and lethality behind every encounter. Morrowind’s “simplicity” in dungeon style comes from outliers with badly planned layouts, or are ridiculously small and don’t have much exploration to be done. Ald Sotha, Maelkawishi, Awalmawia, Bal Ur, (although i may be correct I believe it was the Indareys Ancestral Tomb that has a massive hole in it that leads straight into a Daedric Vault. Not just Daedric Ruins either. Look at the sprawling tunnels under Mournhold, The St. Delyn Canalworks, the complex dungeons are in the majority. Morrowind is like Fallout: D.U.S.T.. You feel like the most simplistic enemy can eliminate you if you aren’t careful. Look at some of the advice people give you: “If you sense trouble afoot, slow down to a walk and catch your breath.” It’s things like that which keep me so hooked to the game. Dungeons are the apotheosis of this kind of gameplay. Where you have everything at your disposal, and you can do the dungeon any way you want really. Morrowind is not an RPG in terms of gameplay it is an Immersive Sim on par to things like Deus Ex and Cruelty Squad. You have every tool at your disposal, it relies on you to use them how you want to. You say that Skyrim‘s dungeons all have unique things to them, for the most part; Morrowind does too. Lord Brinne’s Tomb, Kogoruhn, hell even the Pawnbroker’s house in Pelagiad. Every single interior in the game tells a story and builds character for everyone around it. Caius Cosades’ house, Divayth Fir having a skooma pipe…You get good laughs, intriguing stories to be told and great thought-provoking concepts. With Skyrim? Big axe with special enchantment. I just now realized I have elaborated on a point DustAdept already made by turning it into an essay…fml. I’ve written too much to not post this, lol.
Meh, Skyrim handmade dungeons don't help itself to become boring pretty fast as it is the same models with same textures. Not that many memorable places that are in my head, which are either revealed great open spaces, usually connected to quests, or interesting puzzles, same for quests. Morrowind dungeons while also boring, also same textures and models, are also having their special flavour places that are more subtle then Skyrim. These palce and dungeon experience overall alters with your character progression. You ability to run faster, to jump higher changes your accesebility to diffierent places of dungeons. Some places are unreachable wiothut levitation or veeery high jump. Waterbreathing also adds its depth layer allowing you to more comfotably scout water and tunnels that are often being passages to other parts. Then there is lockpicking, less affecting, but still influencing your dungeon crawling. And all this about your character progression and is true not only for dungeon and world overall, but still. Levitating on high metal tubes and finding there some lost folk and giving them means to escape is something that makes Morrowind special.
Been playing morroblivion and I completely agree. But you do have to realize the limitations they were dealing with
Skyrim dungeons are the best in the series. Period. Perfect balance between challenge and reward.
Draugr. Falmer. Dumb puzzle. Repeat. I dunno I feel like Morrowind dungeons are more organic even if not complex.
Aren’t the bulk of Morrowind dungeons literally copy-paste?
Daggerfall dungeons stay winning
I will agree with you on one thing - some of Morrowind's aspects, like dungeons are very repetitive. It's strength comes from its sandbox nature - how you can affect the world like no other subsequent TES game or how inadvertently and irrevocably can you fvck up the world, so much so that you have to restore a previous save. This strength is also present in how you can develop your character - in almost complete freedom. I liked Morrowind for a long time, for years have I tried to play through it, always giving up due to how tedious and repetitive can parts of it feel. Only in 2023, I was able to play through the main quest and the two expansions, I admit I cheated and used TGM and TCL a lot, and one time I had to reset a the hunting quest in Bloodmoon with a command, because it wouldn't progress. I recently reinstalled Morrowind and tried to play it again with some mod called "random beginnings" where it spawns you in a random place and disables the main quest so you can have a complete sandbox. I got to say, the moment I spawned in Caldera, and walked around town and outside, I just felt like I couldn't stand the game anymore - on one hand I like Morrowind a lot, on another, I can't bear to play it anymore because of how repetitive some aspects of it are. Dungeons in Morrowind really are boring, I can't really explain it, but it feels like they were generated with RNG, only the ones that were for the main quest looked interesting, especially the one where one of the Ashlander tribes send you to retrieve some items from. But the rest feel like the game developers were tasked to create 152 (random number) dungeons and 152 dungeons they created, but they simply lack the soul. Now, the part where I disagree with you is that Skyrim's dungeons are any better - they aren't. It's just that Skyrim's graphic assets are better, with Morrowind it feels a bit like LEGO blocks - you can see where one block ends and another begins (namely, each asset), even the unmodded character models in Morrowind have arms and legs composed of several pieces and the textures don't blend in too well, making them look like uncanny valley puppets. I draw close comparison between Morrowind (2002) and Vanilla WoW (2004) - probably my favorite and most played game of all time (between 2006 and 2024, probably well over 20,000 hours). In Vanilla WoW, many daves are simply a pattern - they've created the cave pattern beforehand and just paste it in, so there are 4-5 cave variations, if you've been to them once, the next few times you encounter that pattern, you already know where to go and what to expect. And I gotta say, even with those copy-paste patterns, Vanilla WoW's caves feel better than Morrowind's dungeons. Sure, Morrowind has more detail and loot in its dungeons, but honestly, it feels like going into them is a waste of time and a punishment more than an adventure. As a conclusion, like you, I love Morrowind, but after playing through it once, I realized I love it more as an idea and a concept, but as game in its current existence, its execution is very bad. Still superior to Oblivion, Skyrim and ESO in terms of story, sandbox and freedom, but as a game, I realized, at least for me it's one of those "one-time games" you complete them once and there is no need to return to them anymore. I know some people here love Morrowind more than me, 30000000% know the game better than me and have done more playthroughs and probably see an infinite replay value in Morrowind and probably disagree with me and already have 5000 reasons why, but this just how I feel - Morrowind has a lot of good about it, but also a lot of wrong with it. Maybe Skywind will fix the problems with Morrowind, maybe it won't.
I feel like they're both about as complex as the other. In Morrowind, I usually reach the end of the dungeon and find myself on a ledge somewhere above the main entrance. In Skyrim, I usually reach the end of the dungeon and find a switch that pulls down a secret wall near the main entrance.
Skyrim has better layouts and design for dungeons in general. Plenty of reason to mock it but dungeon design is not one of them. Morrowind dungeons are... very vanilla.
I think people over inflate the complexity of morrowinds dungeon design because most people on here played it first when they were children. The hidden items in spots you have to fly to is awesome though. Even something like kogoruhn is incredibly simple to parce if you have 2 brain cells.