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The Baffling Dungeon Designs of Oblivion | Design Delve (Patreon)

Published:
2025-05-05 15:04:23
Imported:
2026-06

Content

This week's episode of Design Delve is now available!

Files

The Baffling Dungeon Designs of Oblivion | Design Delve

In today's episode, J & Ludo delve deep into the dungeon designs of Oblivion to see if they can deduce why they stink so bad. Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/SecondWindGroup Second Wind Merch: https://store.dftba.com/collections/second-wind https://sharkrobot.com/collections/second-wind For The Win Article with Joel Burgess: https://ftw.usatoday.com/story/tech/gaming/2022/01/20/skyrim-blackreach-oblivion/81406522007/ Music used in order of appearance: Intruder - Stray OST The Abyss - Hyper Light Drifter OST Checking in - Celeste OST The Notebooks - Stray OST Secret Lab - Stray OST

Comments

Ryallen

While I can't speak to the quality of Oblivion's dungeon design, I never cared for Skyrim's design due to its linearity. They felt like straight lines with different set dressing and weaksauce puzzles. Which feeds into the most important aspect of dungeons for me, which is layout. It needs to feel like a place that I'm exploring and finding new stuff in. Loot is important, giving the player a good reason to go through dungeons incentivizes people to actually want to see them, but I like a dungeon that feels like a place in of itself

Tippis

Then again, “Skyrim door” is a term of derision for a reason…

Ronny Cook

Skyrim's dungeons were generally very linear, which is good for narrative game design but wholly unrealistic in real life; very few real world locations are designed like Ikea. It's a consequence of game designers wanting to see most of the content in an environment, the alternative being the sparse distribution of points of interest in open world environments (as seen in all the Elder Scrolls games). To be honest both Skyrim and Oblivion were huge improvements on Daggerfall, which I actually quit after getting LOST in a randomly generated dungeon.

Allan Mills

Odd, I had to watch this video on YouTube. Patreon insists I sign in to prove I'm not a bot even though I am signed in. The modular design of dungeons in the Elder Scrolls games goes back to Daggerfall IIRC where you could get lost because the same dungeon segment was used multiple times in the same dungeon.

Matthew C Snow

I’m currently playing Oblivion for the first time, because of the remaster, and I can say that by the mid stage I lost a lot of motivation to cave/ruin dive. It’s mostly due to how samey all the dungeons are (it becomes clear real fast how they use variations of same seven rooms with negligible differences) and it involves a lot of getting lost in pointless tunnels/backtracking (while realistic, it’s realistically not fun to deal with). It’s also real hard to find any of those unique environmental details that Bethesda became known for. However, I do think that Skyrim was an overcorrection of those problems and the next elder scrolls should be a more middle ground