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What do you consider to be a dungeon?

vonAchdorf

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Sep 20, 2014
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It's a place that is it's own thing, kind of "disconnected" from the rest of the world of the game. You have to enter in it and obtain something while dealing with the particular challenges it throws at you: puzzles, traps and enemies that can only be found in this place and that are thematicaly consistents. They can also have their own particular rules or alterations of the pre-established rules: you can walk on the ceiling, casting magic burns the user (uses HP), only one member of the party can enter in some rooms for whatever reason, etc.

Sounds about right. Maze-like isn't a requirement, or Skyrim wouldn't have dungeons.

It's a bit the same like with RPGs - you cannot exactly pinpoint it, but you know a dungeon / RPG when you see it.
 

AArmanFV

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Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire
I didn't actually played Fallout 3 or NV, but I played the original Fallout and the vault in the glow or the military base of the mutants in example, could be a Dungeon, but the maze characteristic it's missing. A "light type" of Dungeon could be called I guess, but for a purist of Dungeon Crawlers it shouldn't by definition.
 

Neanderthal

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Somewhere where GM can take away some o possibilities available to players, an that player decides to venture into or through despite risk because of some sort of gain, whether that be info, quicker travel, treasure or whatever. Chance for GM to really throw every trick in book at player, an craft a narrative or situation that really excels. Outside dungeons, which can be outside in my reckonin, its a bit harder to ensnare players in shit that goes on cos o their free will, but my gaff, my rules. Usually I save em for high points o campaign, an use em very sparingly then.
 
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Sacred82

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I consider dungeons one-go areas. If it exists for you to plow through to the end, then leave and never return, it's a dungeon. Note this does include purely optional, purely mechanical respawns. If it serves as a link to other chunks of the gameworld, it's just a map or whatever. By this logic "dungeons" that serve as a landbridge to some other place or that are repopulated in a story-related fashion aren't dungeons, while a completely optional one-go map at the periphery of the gameworld would be one.
 
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JarlFrank

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A cool indoor place filled with enemies, traps, loot, and some background lore that should be challenging to traverse and throw a variety of problems at you.

Doesn't even have to be an RPG to have a dungeon. Thief's Bonehoard is one of the best dungeons ever created.
 

DeepOcean

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Dungeon:
-Dungeon has something to do with the idea of being locked off on a nasty place like a prison, a place you wouldn't be for leisure, it is a nasty place and you are only on there to accomplish a goal.
-Place with a memorable story with detailed backstory. A generic cave with a few wolves isn't a dungeon, doesn't matter how long it is.
- Dungeons are places of decay where the tendency is for things to go to worse, they mostly had a glorious past and are now in complete decay.
-They are places far from civilized society, a underground city with a huge thriving civilization in it isn't a dungeon. If there is a civilization in it, it must be a really unstable one where people are more trying to survive than living on happiness.
 
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Sacred82

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-Dungeon has something to do with the idea of being locked off on a nasty place like a prison, a place you wouldn't be for leisure, it is a nasty place and you are only on there to accomplish a goal.

- Dungeons are places of decay where the tendency is for things to go to worse, they mostly had a glorious past and are now in complete decay.

I think both of these are important. Dungeons aren't hospitable like hubs, and not even semi-hospitable like overworld maps filled with monsters. Limited resting is one way to make that difference clear.
 

Sigourn

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So with all this info, can we consider most of New Vegas' abandoned houses that have a couple enemies on it, some food and lot, and the staggering amount of caves with nothing but a couple duffle bags and 5 random wildlife, dungeons?
 

Zombra

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Make the Codex Great Again! RPG Wokedex Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut Codex+ Now Streaming! Serpent in the Staglands Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 BattleTech Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Any indoor, hostile location. That's the key.

What is a "hostile" location? Any environment containing danger* or the feeling of danger. That's right - player perception is part of the definition. An empty cave may just be a cave to Player A. But if it looks scary to Player B, it becomes a dungeon.

*And yes, this includes "threats" that are statistically meaningless, e.g. large rats that attack your level 50 paladin.

So with all this info, can we consider most of New Vegas' abandoned houses that have a couple enemies on it, some food and lot, and the staggering amount of caves with nothing but a couple duffle bags and 5 random wildlife, dungeons?
Absolutely. They're tiny, crap dungeons, but they qualify.
 
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Damned Registrations

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I would define a dungeon in a video game as any confined space where it is unsafe to rest. It stops being a dungeon if you've killed everything inside and it won't respawn, and at that point becomes your personal murderhobo storage locker/house/whatever. "Confined space" is taken to mean from a gameplay standpoint too, referring to it having limited entrance/exits. A forest can be a 'dungeon' if it's only got a few ways in or out of it. Like the shaded woods in Dark Souls 2 would qualify as a 'dungeon'.
 

CyberWhale

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From Wiki: A dungeon is a room or cell in which prisoners are held, especially underground. Dungeons are generally associated with medieval castles, though their association with torture probably belongs more to the Renaissance period. An oubliette or bottle dungeon is a form of dungeon which is accessible only from a hatch or hole (an angstloch) in a high ceiling.

Checkmate retards.
 

Naveen

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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
A guy criticized NV "dungeons" because they were short and unmemorable and you dismissed it because "they are not really dungeons, but locations"? I don't understand. You actually agree with what he said, what do you care what word he used? If they are short and unremarkable, they are short and unremarkable; that was the criticism. He could have said they were just "places" or "areas."
 

agris

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Unless you have been to Lower Guk or Sebilis, you have never seen a real dungeon.

Hidden in this barb is a lot of truth. As someone who really dislikes MMORPGs, some of the original EQ1 content rivals anything we've seen a single-player RPG deliver. Not just Sebilis (and the requisite quest for access), but a lot of the velious dungeon zones whose names are escaping me right now.

I don't mean ivory-tower shit like the temple of the sleeper, that was pretty standard as far as dungeons go, but dungeons like skyshrine, siren's grotto, velketor's labyrinth, etc.
 

ortucis

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Dungeons are a lazy game developers way of keeping certain group of gamers engaged doing same repetitive shite. Those gamers are a blessing for developers like Blizzard, who couldn't design a good looking unique level with its own character if their lives depended on it.
 

Alkarl

Learned
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Oct 9, 2016
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Semantics. Remember back when everyone called an NES game a nintendo tape? lol. What is the difference between a cassette tape and an nes cartridge? Functionally, a lot. Components are definitely different too. Then you have the C64, where some of the games WERE tapes.

Basically, are you attempting to define a dungeon literally or contextually? Contextually, a cave qualifies. A house qualifies. Even outdoor areas qualify. In blobbers, everything that isn't a town, is a dungeon. In old school games, dungeons were typically hostile areas with some over arching puzzle or several smaller puzzles to solve in order to progress.

When Obsidian hired/was hiring individuals to design the environments in question, I'm pretty sure the title was along the lines of dungeon designer. Not unsafe house decorator. Not cave builder. These locations are contextually dungeons.

And yeah, they weren't very memorable. Other than the bugs, nothing in that game was.
 

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