Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Dungeons

Really Surprised This Hasnt Been Asked Anyplace Yet...... How Many Dungeons Are in the Game?? And Is there a HUGE Dungeon Like Watchers Keep on BG2???? I Hope there are Plenty of Dungeons to explore ....What would A Dungeons and Dragons Game be without Dungeons.......

There is no way that Larian are going to tell us how many dungeons there are (they almost certainly don’t know that themselves), but it would be neat to know if there is a major, optional endgame dungeon like Durlag’s Tower or Watcher’s Keep planned. I liked those.

Well, considering there are, what, 80+ combat encounters just in EA, compared to the 22ish-whatever combat encounters in DoS2 EA...there is a high likelihood of dungeons. Unless all the encounters are in the same area...I mean, we already know of 2 dungeons; the crypt in the first ever playthrough video, and the cave in the goblin camp. Not to mention the entire Underdark area. So I think that you can be rest assured your desire for dungeons will be sated

Yeah, I'd place my money on Dungeons of all sorts. I guess the real question is what do you consider a dungeon as there were a lot of caves, cellars, crypts, and other areas in DOS2 that I would think were kind of dungeon crawly. Either way, yeah, I'd put money on dungeons. Also, post full launch, it should be easy to add huge dungeons as additional content for side stories if their base game is already in place.

Is it wrong to admit that I don’t really like dungeons that much.

Well, it’s fine it’s a mix of small, modest and the occasional big dungeon, but I find it a bit of a slog if every time you go underground, you have to trawl through a maze of corridors and rooms with most of them not being particularly interesting or serving a good purpose.

nah I'm right there with ya. it does feel wrong in the context of a "dungeons and dragons" game, but it is what it is. i don't mind them too much (and can quite enjoy them) if it's not too long of a slog to get through, but especially when resting mechanics are at play the longer they are the less patient I become with them. there's one dungeon in particular in pathfinder that still gives me nightmares.

Can you think of a Dungeon that had a memorable theme, one which wasn't just generic? What made it distinct and stand out in your memory?
Journey to the Barrier Peaks was one of the most prominent for me. It is a bit unusual, as the "dungeon" was in fact what we would know today as a crashed spaceship. The setting in the map was of interest too. It was near some magicians valley, lost in deep woods, if I recall.

This means there are Dragons as well? Somehow I think there are more dungeons than dragons.

I love dungeons, and I love dungeon crawlers and roguelikes too. I like the challenge that a good dungeon provides, and it feels very "classic" to delve through one that pushes your character to the limit. I thought the Eye of the Beholder series was great, for example. I only wish it were turn based.

EOTB was awesome for its time. It had some great puzzles (such as hidden buttons). This reminds me...note to self: stay far away from walkthroughs.

I generally prefer dungeons that make sense. For example, when I build dungeons, I often look up old blueprints of castles or mansions and base the dungeon's layout off of them; none of this "labyrinth" nonsense where corridors and room placement makes no sense. It also helps when determining the ecology of dungeon; where is the kitchen, food storage, and commodes (all potential sources of food for its denizens), where are the bedrooms (smaller nests for vermin) and living spaces (dens for larger predators), what walls have structural damage or where are the balconies/outer doors (how did the dungeon's habitants come to reside there).

I've only ever really done one, and not really a dungeon (the remit being "Oblivion's castles don't have many NPCs; why don't you add some?" So I got a bit carried away and massively extended them, including caves, new districts of the town and so on. And then ran out of energy, unsurprisingly, so it was never finished).

Er anyway. So as much as I tried to make it actually make sense, in that it fitted together logically and contained no physical impossibilities, I think I would've actually done a better job if I'd taken your approach and actually researched it properly. One glaring example is that actual "contemporary" architecture tended to not feature long corridors: the odd gallery maybe but they tended to be a series of rooms as a corridor is essentially wasted space and a bit of a modern invention. But I liked them, so that's the way it happened.

Of course I would've been even better advised to just follow the bloody remit. Maybe that way I would've finished it... though it's not like I have an especially impressive legacy of ever releasing my mods, finished or not.

When i tcome sto dungeons, i think you can be a bit self aware but then sitll realize that they have a mystery of hteir own.

5e isnt all that much about dungeons. But dungeons is what any edition of DnD does best. Its in its DNA.
Ideally dungeons are part of the settings flavor, in FR this is not much the case but in other DnD settings there usually is an implied reason for the world beeing literred with them.

You dont realy need a theme. "Murder death guantlet" is theme enaugh, hto of course themed dungeons are still nice. But at the end of the day the improtance of a dungeon is: beeing big, beeing fixed, beeing dangerous, ,beeing filled with monsters that arent there for sport. And of course there beeing riches to gain.

You shouldnt be able to easily rest in dungeons. And killing the monsters shouldnt be the point. The point should be the riches. The Monsters are in your way. The traps are in your way, the enviroment is in your way.
it should be a death gauntlet between you and and the loot.

Ideally, a dungeon has a sort of ecology of its own. Its got several factions in it and its so expansive that you dont see everything.

Video games generaly arent great at dungeons, but i think its about time that DUNGEONS are brought back into Video games.

The dungeon crawling genre is dead outside of Japan, time for CRPG to conquer back that lost ground.

>Dungoens make sense
i kind of disagree.
They dont have to. They are old, crumbled things. Designed by madmen and wizards and worse yet to kill intruders. They evovled further, bled into the underdark, twisted under the weight of curses an strange experiments.
Designign dungeons after real life Blueprints means taht youll end up with just a couple of rooms

That's a reasonable point. Down with realistic dungeons that are only a couple of rooms!

Dungeons Dont Make Sense....... Your Playing A DUNGEONS and Dragons Game.....You Have to be kidding ,,,,,,,,,,,, Dungeons in These games Most of the Time Make The Games Great!! You Obviously Did Not Play BG or BG2, how would those Games have been Without Any Dungeon?????? BG2 you start The game in a Dungeon! OMG be real ...... You ABSOULETLY need Dungeons in BG3!!!

Big is beautiful! The only time I made a serious attempt at modding was with the NWN2 toolset; I wanted to produce a full-scale version of Waterdeep, including Skullport and Undermountain. I translated maps of Waterdeep topography, and split it up into the largest available NWN2 area format ( 320m x 320m; about 90 seconds to run across in-game ); and ended up with about 75 areas ( I think ) to cover the city at street level ( ignoring Skullport and Undermountain ).

I got as far as sculpting the city terrain and building the city wall for the first of these areas before the reality of the 32-bit engine caught up with me. You can't build anything significant within 2GB memory, unless the engine is designed to stream data in and out, and NWN2 definitely was not! Good thing too, really, as I'd still be doing it now if the engine hadn't continually choked on the data volume.

But...I'd still really like to recreate Waterdeep; so for my sanity's sake, I hope the BG3 toolset isn't up to the task!

I cannot tell whether or not you are being facetious. I did infact play both BG and BG2 (not to mention IWD & IWD2). I have also played every edition of D&D since 2nd Edition. Now do I think all dungeons have to make sense? No, probably not. I mean Undermountain was built by the Mad Mage Halastar (Note that his title is not the "Wise Mage", but "Mad Mage", so sense is kind of thrown out the window). But, I don't like it when a supermajority of the dungeons I encounter seem to be laid out by a random seed generator, and with no thought as to why a room has a particular feature, trap, treasure, or trap.