Best dungeons in RPGs

[wndrbr]

I've noticed that we don't have a thread on the best dungeons in RPGs. Any suggestions?

Rules:
- don't mention Durlag's tower and The Glow, because both are too famous and everybody already know about them;
- don't mention Ultima Underworld or other games that are entirely comprised of dungeons and have nothing else;
- don't mention Ocean hotel from VTMB or other scripted cinematic setpiece areas, they are not dungeons.

[rusty_shackleford]

The Glow, Fallout.

Up until that point nothing in the game was all that deep(teehee). What comes after doesn't really compare and it was the highlight of the game for me. Lots of cool worldbuilding stuff, bit spooky, just around the time you get to stretch your legs.

[rusty_shackleford]

I actually didn't notice you said not to mention the glow I've been up for like 30 hours

[Tweed]

Arx Fatalis -The Crypt: This place creeped me out all the way. The undead are creepy, the traps keep you on edge till you disarm them, and the ambiance is great. The final tomb has some great design as well, but I was never a fan of that big season/sundial/whatever it was puzzle. It's a great example of a crypt crawl though.

New Vegas - Vault 22: The sign outside sets the mood for one of the more screwed up places in New Vegas. Great environmental storytelling (gotta love those little plant people near the baby carriages).

New Vegas - Sierra Madre: Nice looking casino, too bad you can't actually gamble. Mandatory maze section with the holo-emitter guards. Decent quests regarding the people you get shackled to and, of course, trying to figure out how to get all of the gold out of the hotel in order to give the big moral lesson a huge middle finger.

Icewind Dale - Severed Hand: No Durlag's Tower? Okay, let's take this one instead. Brutal encounters with ghost goblins and orcs; later on with deranged elven warriors. HoF mode keeps it interesting. Some decent storytelling inside the place and even an area to rest and do a little shopping (a little, since most of the goods have rotted away).

Icewind Dale - Trials of the Luremaster: Handed out for free when fans complained that Heart of Winter was too short. This place is pure challenge and a real load of fun on HoF. It's also really big so you'll get some good adventuring in. Your casters are going to earn their keep by summoning up anything they can to mitigate damage. Your rogues will earn double-pay for all the traps laying about. Final battle is irritating since the boss jumps around. Goes without saying that the rewards for completing it are excellent.

[Valter]

Vordakai's Tomb in Pathfinder Kingmaker was very enjoyable

[rusty_shackleford]

Does the Metro area of the dead city in ATOM count? I enjoyed explorkng it

[Tweed]

Wasteland - Temple of Blood: Up until now if you've followed the game linear the dungeon areas have been straightforward. This one gets a bit nasty with the path puzzle and the wall mounted guns you can set off. The swim through piranha infested water to a major shootout at the end is also a real challenge for a newcomer who's probably using one or two SMGs and rifles at this point. Then there's the hollowed out nuke you need to exit through, hope you remember the password.

Wasteland - Guardian Citadel: Every time you got some new gun or leveled up you've tested yourself against this place and died again. Finally breaching it for the first time is an amazing feeling, but the dungeon is absolutely brutal if you haven't broken the sequence to get better equipment.

Wasteland - Base Cochise: Great final dungeon. The outer area can be skipped if you're a helicopter pilot, otherwise it's a painful slog to breach the front. Once you're in you get to talk to big bad and get the last exposition before getting dumped into the rest of the dungeon. Cameras line the walls that you can smash and there's nothing but deadly robots to fight that need heavy duty energy weapons or missiles to take down. Some pretty fiendish puzzle rooms sit between you and being able to blow the base up and this is one of the few times where you actually have to split the party.

Morrowind - Ibar-Dad: A lot of dungeons in Morrowind are tiny, this one is no exception, but unlike a lot of those boring places this one has a daedric tomb in it. Imagine stumbling across this thing out in the ashlands and finally getting it open to reveal a massive treasure trove that includes Eidolon's Ward, daedric armor, and loads of other various magical goodies.

[wndrbr]

Morrowind - Ibar-Dad: A lot of dungeons in Morrowind are tiny, this one is no exception, but unlike a lot of those boring places this one has a daedric tomb in it. Imagine stumbling across this thing out in the ashlands and finally getting it open to reveal a massive treasure trove that includes Eidolon's Ward, daedric armor, and loads of other various magical goodies.

when it comes to Morrowind I'd pick the dwemer ruins near Balmora (the ones where you need to find the cube), or the Nordic burial site tomb (the one with a ship in a cave).

[Element]

Tower of Latria - Demon Souls. Prison / torture chamber. The layout is not very interesting, but fighting the mindflayers whilst pressed into narrow catwalks between the abyss and the demented prisoners who attack you makes up for that. The screams, the gloom and the enemies thrown at you lend an incredibly bleak tone to the whole affair.

Maharbe - Fear and Hunger. The city has both a daytime (past) and nighttime (present) aspects, between which you can shuttle. You have to hunt down the new Gods, each of which has its own mini area with puzzles or challenges. Lots of new enemy types get thrown in, most of them extremely nasty, together with a bunch of secret areas and optional questlines.

[Fox1]

Lab X18 - STALKER Shadow of Chernobyl. Creepy place with great atmosphere, ambiance and environmental story telling where you encounter never seen before mutants.

Vault 34 - Fallout New Vegas. Really good atmosphere and interesting storytelling. I like the environmental storytelling where you see the radiation turned the inhabitants into ghouls after the reactor failed.

The Dunwich Building - Fallout 3. Another masterfully created location with great atmosphere and an interesting turn of events.

[Hurtyy]

I actually didn't notice you said not to mention the glow I've been up for like 30 hours

Why? Why would you do that to yourself?

[Tweed]

Geneforge - Shaper Crypt/Inner Crypt: Vogel's knack for making good optional dungeons shines in the flagship Geneforge game. This place is balls to the wall difficult and if you made your character wrong, you won't survive. If you CAN survive then you can get great xp killing the stuff roaming around and the loot is beyond anything else in the game.

Geneforge 2- Inner Gazak-Uss: Another optional asskicking dungeon. Fire up those Rotgroths, you're going to need them. Don't linger, there's way too much bad **** roaming around, find the ultimate bad guy quickly and try and kick his *** for OP loot.

[Dorateen]

Grimoire: The Cenotaph to the Abode of the Horror. This was a series of linked dungeons, including the Samhain Underworld, but the exploration feels like one continuous dungeon crawl. The fashion in which the areas connect, the creativity and breadth of content, are satisfying. This includes discovery of a back entrance through a previously inaccessible gate in town.

Elminage Gothic: Ibag's Tower deserves mention. A post-game advanced dungeon slog through 20 levels of god-like immortal enemies.

Dark Queen of Krynn: Fastillion's lighthouse has always been a personal favorite. The Gold Box games were not known for particularly exceptional dungeon design, but there were memorable locations that stood out. This one was eleven levels of monsters, traps and illusionary walls.

[Hurtyy]

Stormveil Castle - Elden Ring, good enemy variety, interesting backstory and environmental storytelling, creep atmosphere in the lower parts and Godrick is one of the best boses in Elden Ring.

[Oyster Sauce]

Blackrock Depths. So many cool ideas. The arena, robbing the vault, everything in the Grim Guzzler, the anvil, the MC portal, the room with thousands of guys, killing a pregnant woman, busting Windsor out of jail.

Take me back to Blackrock Depths.

[methoxetamine]

Blackrock Depths. So many cool ideas. The arena, robbing the vault, everything in the Grim Guzzler, the anvil, the MC portal, the room with thousands of guys, killing a pregnant woman, busting Windsor out of jail.

Take me back to Blackrock Depths.

It really is a **** shame how far WoW dungeon design has fallen, how did it peak so early?

[Oyster Sauce]

Blackrock Depths. So many cool ideas. The arena, robbing the vault, everything in the Grim Guzzler, the anvil, the MC portal, the room with thousands of guys, killing a pregnant woman, busting Windsor out of jail.

Take me back to Blackrock Depths.

It really is a **** shame how far WoW dungeon design has fallen, how did it peak so early?

A lot (most?) of the original dungeons were pretty buns

[methoxetamine]

Blackrock Depths. So many cool ideas. The arena, robbing the vault, everything in the Grim Guzzler, the anvil, the MC portal, the room with thousands of guys, killing a pregnant woman, busting Windsor out of jail.

Take me back to Blackrock Depths.

It really is a **** shame how far WoW dungeon design has fallen, how did it peak so early?

A lot (most?) of the original dungeons were pretty buns

Yeah but at least there was cool outliers like BRD. Pretty much every dungeon in every xpac was a straight line, which is cool for farming them but ends up being uninteresting and not memorable. Though the terrible dungeons in vanilla were truly God awful, **** Dire Maul

[DemoGraph]

I really liked Deadmines in classic WoW. Because it begins with small level skirmishes and mentions of corruption and a noble Stormwind king turns out to be ******* to his vassals and you slowly get down to another level not knowing whose side do you really want to be and then BAM a motherfucking dreadnought in the underground cove. I felt like I just got into Jules Verne's "The Mysterious Island" and found "Nautilus". Teenage me got disillusioned with WoW when he discovered that he can't join Defias. They had those cool face scarves!

Most levels in Thief and Thief 2. They're not the RPGs but their dungeons are top notch.

don't mention Durlag's tower and The Glow, because both are too famous and everybody already know about them

I don't know. I haven't played neither ToSC nor F1.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

I am trying to think of dungeons I liked for their actual game design instead of just the story feel, aesthetics, and music.

I liked the sewers underneath Grancel in Trails in the Sky FC. They have have multiple entrances, making it not just a dungeon you go through to kill things, but an alternate route to different places across the city. It is also utilized in the story as a key part of the protagonist's plan, making it feel like it is indeed a place and not just an arbitrary video game level that is ignored by the story.

Seconding Blackrock Depths from WoW. Again, they don't feel like an arbitrary videogame level, but like an actual place in the world, filled with people. filled with people. It is a city with bedrooms, storage rooms, kitchens, breweries, armories, prisons, colosseums, etc. Populated by NPCs you talked to and remembered, rather than simply killed and forgot about. You returned there several times over the course of twenty levels, rather than just being a hallway you ran down AoEing mobs down and getting loot at the end and then never see again after you outlevel it.

Barheim Passage in FF12 had a unique gameplay mechanic. The lights help keep monsters away, but Mimics are eating the electrical wiring, draining the limited amount of power from 100%. You can kill mimics to stop the power drain and restore some power back. If the power reaches 0%, the lights turn off and the monsters come out in full force.

I don't have Warframe screenshots anymore, but I quite liked the revamped Uranus levels, which were set at any underwater facility. You spaceship would fly down and drop you off on a floating platform on the surface of a turbulent ocean, and then you would enter a facility and go down the long elevator shaft to reach the facility at the seabed floor. There were lots of glass windows showing you views outside. Sometimes sections of the level would be flooded with water, or would begin rapidly filling with water which would cause you to panic and try to escape. There were also sometimes sections where you would go out an airlock and swim around.



Otherwise, I am just thinking off of visual/story/spectacle:

► Show Spoiler

WoW: Throne of Thunder was great. It is set in a ruined, grandiose Asian palace with steampunk technology. At first you are running through ruined, overgrown courtyards and on crumbling bridges. Here, you get to fight Zandalari auxiliaries who are allied with the Thunder King, such as their dinosaur beastmasters. Then you fall down into a humongous cavern where you face wildlife, who have been twisted and malformed by the chemicals that seemed down from the Thunder King's experiments above. Then you find an entrance into the palace's basement, and begin seeing his abandoned chimeric creatures or robots collecting dust. Finally, you reemerged back onto the surface inside the grandiose palace, climaxing with you ascending the tower and fighting the Thunder King in his steampunk observatory where he uses this weird lightning rod mechanism to zap his enemies. By the end you have felt you have gone on a long journey traveling through multiple different areas, and you fought a wide variety of enemies.





The green demon dungeon from the Dragonborn mini-expansion for Skyrim was pretty neat with the baroque, organic looking hallways that extended as you ran through them.

FF7: The Northern Cave was unique. Typically final dungeons are grandiose fortresses or megastructures or LSD acid trip end of the world stuff.

FF9: It was cool climbing that huge tree with the sand falls to reach the kingdom at the top.





The final dungeon was trippy as each time you go through a door you are entering a completely different scene or flashback.





FF13: the final dungeon of Oprhan's Cradle looked cool.




Trails into Reverie: did a good job hyping up the threat of the Retributive Tower. This was the first final dungeon in the series since CS1 where I was really invested in the actual final dungeon (the last one being the Realm of the Great Power at the end of CS1, since you had the mystery of the old schoolhouse subplot woven throughout the 90 hour long game and you were finally getting to see what was at the bottom). You also had Yukihiro Jindo's climatic music playing which hyped it up as if people were going to die.









Trails Through Daybreak 1: the lots of floating platforms and connecting bridges and stairs are interesting to look at. You also had Yukihiro Jindo's music playing that made it sound like it would be one last ride.







The many layers of floating platforms and stairs looked so neat that they decided to rehash the idea but with more scenic outdoor environments for the sequel's dungeons.





Lots and lots of FF14 dungeons look and feel spectacular. It is unfortunate that these visuals are confined to 15 minute long corridor dungeons rather than the regular overworld zones.

[Humbaba]

Any Baphomet dungeon in Wrathfinder is great and one of the game's greatest highlights. Blackwater is anudda very good dungeon because of its aesthetics and great, if brutal, encounter design.

Grimrock 2 has many fantastic little dungeons with very good puzzles.

BG2's Irenicus dungeon is still the best tutorial area to date. The beholder cave is also very cool and let's not forget Watcher's Keep.

[Tweed]

Everquest - Castle Mistmoore: Getting inside is a nightmare considering how much yard trash is in the way. Buggy walls mean that getting too close to the tower in the entryway can pull almost the entire castle in massive trains, but the design was great. Secret walls, pit traps that made corpse recovery almost impossible, and lots of dark elf vampire sluts.

Everquest - Lower Guk: Cursed city where the trolls used to live now it's populated with undead frogloks and living both. Lower Guk was divided into two sides and while they were linked, it was much easier to take the proper entrance from Guk to get to your preferred side. Guk had fun stuff like slippery floors with sheer drops into loads of trash mobs and very few safe places aside from the appropriately named "safe hall".

Everquest - Veeshan's Peak: Do NOT click the crystal. Back when Brad and Verant were still running things they weren't above total **** moves like these.

Everquest - Kael Drakkel: This place is great, it's a city, it's a dungeon, it's a raid zone. Although, most of the time people were just running through (literally) to get to the other side.

Honestly, most of EQ's dungeons had great designs.

[Xenich]

Didn't Might and Magic World of Xeen have some interesting Dungeons in them? I also remember Wiz 7 having some interesting areas, but I guess those skirt the line of being pretty much "dungeon crawlers".

[Tweed]

Didn't Might and Magic World of Xeen have some interesting Dungeons in them? I also remember Wiz 7 having some interesting areas, but I guess those skirt the line of being pretty much "dungeon crawlers".

A lot of WoX's dungeons are pretty boilerplate, but it had a few decent ones.

Darkside of Xeen - The Dungeon of Lost Souls: Get ready to believe in the power of positive thinking, because if you doubt yourself, you're never getting all the way through. Minotaurs and Gorgons pack the hallways and hit like semi-truck, they also have a tendency of breaking your stuff. Use implosion and mass distortion. Every level of the dungeon ends with a questionnaire asking if you really want to go down and asking if you completed all the objectives for the level. The last one before the hallway with all the stat boosting birds and the songbird you're looking for goes like this:

"Do you want to go down?"

"Well, since you've been so positive, how about giving up 500 gold?"

"Okay, how about 5,000?"

"Okay, how about 50,000?"

"Good, that should pay for all the minotaurs you've killed and the mess you made, go ahead and enjoy yourselves."

World of Xeen - Dungeon of Death: Optional ultimate dungeon. The first level is a gigantic crosswords puzzle, no monsters. After that though you'll be fighting the most powerful things in the entire game. The last level is kind of amusing with a pointless, but funny award if you get it right.

[J1M]

The top 2 dungeons would have to be:

The Water Temple in the RPG Zelda 64.

Xen in the RPG Half-Life.

[Tweed]

Everquest- City of Mists: I'm a stickler for abandoned/cursed cities and this place is both. Undead, slimes, and golems roam the city and the guys at Verant did a good job making it look like one. The place is hard because a lot of stuff hits above what most other mobs do for their level. There's a really neat skywalk above the city as well, just waiting for you to fall off of it. Because it was an actual city, you could bind people there too.

[rusty_shackleford]

Everquest - Castle Mistmoore: Getting inside is a nightmare considering how much yard trash is in the way. Buggy walls mean that getting too close to the tower in the entryway can pull almost the entire castle in massive trains, but the design was great. Secret walls, pit traps that made corpse recovery almost impossible, and lots of dark elf vampire sluts.

Everquest - Lower Guk: Cursed city where the trolls used to live now it's populated with undead frogloks and living both. Lower Guk was divided into two sides and while they were linked, it was much easier to take the proper entrance from Guk to get to your preferred side. Guk had fun stuff like slippery floors with sheer drops into loads of trash mobs and very few safe places aside from the appropriately named "safe hall".

Everquest - Veeshan's Peak: Do NOT click the crystal. Back when Brad and Verant were still running things they weren't above total **** moves like these.

Everquest - Kael Drakkel: This place is great, it's a city, it's a dungeon, it's a raid zone. Although, most of the time people were just running through (literally) to get to the other side.

Honestly, most of EQ's dungeons had great designs.

They were meant to be experienced in first person tho so they seem wrong if you play it now

[orinEsque]

I liked the The Severed Hand in Icewind Dale. The whole melancholic, haunted feel to the place was very memorable.

[Vergil]

Pretty random choice but I love the underwater dwemer ruin hiding the dragon bone armor in Morrowind.

[MrTwinkls]

► Show Spoiler

I liked almost every dungeon in Lineage 2 prior to The Kamael update.
If we don't count MMORPGs then my favorite is probably Caed Nua in PoE.