RPG dungeon how big is to big?

I know this is a pretty broad question but take for example Cthulu saves the world on steam 
 

http://store.steampowered.com/app/107310/

Every single one of the dungeons in that game are at least 80x80 with mulitple floors and it seems to flow well enough

So here is my quistion, how big is TO big for a dungeon without losing its feeling and Depth?

I do believe that it really depends on how you design them.

I agree, Even if the dungeon is huge, if its designed well it can still be good.

Yeah, as long as it's not a really barren 500x500 map it can still be good.

It's too big when players feel they're just being made to wander around. I think if you have a HUGE dungeon and there is a point to exploring it and you get something good every time you go in, then it's worth going in and exploring. If it's just a way to get from point A to B, then short and sweet.

I think i understand

There is no one hard and fast guideline here.  If it's a huge empty area, there's no point to it --- even Boss Fight areas are normally empty areas which don't take up the entire screen.  But, it really depends on how you lay out the dungeon.  Is it supposed to be a gigantic maze or tomb, left behind by a lost civilization?  If so, it could be fairly large with narrow, twisting corridors.  A set of underground caverns?  Then it might be wider but very twisty.   A forest?  It would definitely be laid out differently from any man-made structures.

Personally, I don't try to make dungeons larger than 50x50, because it becomes tedious to play through.  But a dungeon with lavish decorations could be larger and feel smaller, so it's very subjective.

The only caveat is if the dungeon gets too big, it may tend to lag more than smaller ones. 

There are two concepts.

A dungeon and... a labyrinth.

A labyrinth is a huge dungeon with repetitive patterns, that has the goal to make you feel lost and disoriented.

If a dungeon makes the player get lost inside it, not knowing what to do exactly... well... this is not good.

If you got a huge dungeon but it is certain what you are doing and where you go... well it is still not big.

For instance... you got an enormous dungeon separated  in 10 sectors. You enter the first sector.

Entering the second sector, a door closes behind you, making the first impassable. Thus you force the player go foward and the dungeon become smaller and smaller.

Now Imagine that you can use decisions. like path A or B? If you go through A you can't go through B/ Both ed in C.

Player always knows where to go. Player never gets confused going back and if that happens, it stops in the last sector entry.

That's an example of a huge but not bad dungeon.

So it's not really how big something is.

It's more like a design issue in my opinion.

Always thing as a gamer. :)   :thumbsup-right:

Also, keep in mind the issue of immersion, especially if the larger map includes numerous doors to smaller chambers - if the players are left with the feeling that the dungeon they're stomping through doesn't have the room to accomodate rooms without Timelord technology, they'll be more likely to complain than if the dungeon has lots of long, twisty passages that allow space for other substructures.

I have, on occasion, found myself twitching when I've wandered around in a dungeon where a door leads to a, say, 8x8 room which somehow fits inside a 5x4 space on the main dungeon map. It just crashes with my spatial sense, y'know...

Like everyone said. It depends on the game mechanic itself.

I will give you a little example from my experiences

If you're using limited visibility where you can only look around 4 tiles away from the player, and your mapping style is very minimalistic which may have so many narrow alleys. 80 x 80 would be too big since players must remember all the paths.

If the visibility is not limited at all, and if you plan to use high-resolution, 80 x 80 is relative small. Players doesn't need to wander around since they already know where is he right now.

Well, players could kinda feels 'is too big' is where they need to explore and wandering around.

Not to mention, even if you're using 17x13 but you have soooo many maps. You can consider it as a 'big' though

I think in general it's better to err on the side of "too small" rather than "too big".  But this is the kind of thing where it really helps to watch a playtester or three play the game, and to see their reactions.  If you can, sit a friend down in front of your game and tell them another one of your friends made it.  Don't ask or answer questions - just let them play it like they would if you weren't there.  If you don't have that available, ask someone to LP your game.  It should be very easy to see in either scenario whether they spend time wandering around lost, whether they "get" the mechanic of your dungeon, and how much time they spend clearly engaged or not engaged.

If I get bored having to run down a path, only to realize it's a dead-end and need to run back up...and it takes too much time, and not to mention too many random encounters for that matter where I'll be spending 10 minutes to recover from a bad turn, that's not good.


It's gotten to the point where I wouldn't mind reloading a game if I didn't want to spend all the time doing a round-trip.

Here's some thoughts thrown out there in no particular order:

When making a "large" dungeon, I would make sure that if you are using random encounters, try to make them infrequent, and keep them turned off in puzzle rooms (big pet peeve, they are very distracting when trying to solve a puzzle). Also having lots of loot is important. If your dungeon isn't just one linear path through it (what kind of dungeon is that anyway?) I'd try and put some kind of loot at the end of just about every dead end, especially if it's a long path to said dead end. The farther you take the player off course, the better the compensation should be.

Generally, players shouldn't feel lost and discouraged when trying to get through your dungeon, unless that is the intent. And even when designing  a maze-like or confusing labyrinth, maybe give the player a little bit of help. For example, if you have a dungeon with lots of branches and intersections, maybe stick a pillar in the middle of each intersection, and if the player finds these orbs from within the dungeon or from monsters or whatever, they can place them on the pillars and it will point in the right direction. This kind of combines the maze, the puzzle, and the exploring to fetch items all into one package without getting the player too upset.

As far as size, I love me a long dungeon, like the later ones in Golden Sun: The Lost Age for example. Some of those would take you over an hour to complete, but they were designed so well that you wanted to explore (even with random encounters! Who knew?) and see where every path led you.

What Shaz said earlier was important, regarding the purpose of your dungeon. If it's merely a way to travel between places, then make it shorter to get from A to B (branching and exploring is allowed, so long as the short path straight through is obvious to the player). If the dungeon is meant to be explored, then go crazy!

Dungeons later in games can get away with being longer, as the player is more used to how your game works, they have more skills to play around with in battle, and they have more field skills to use in puzzles (if your game uses this mechanic of course). I try to keep my first dungeons limited to <20 minutes to get through, without too many crazy twists and turns. But later in the game, I have no problem throwing in an hour-long struggle full of baddies to kill and goodies to collect.

If the dungeon is optional, then all bets are off. Channel your inner sadist and make it as brutal as you like!

A Dungeon is as big as you want it to be... as long as it's fun

A useful question is “How do you measure dungeon size?”

To build off of what TheRiotInside said, I find that measuring encounters is just as important as measuring pixels and tiles. A small dungeon with lots of random encounters gets tedious really fast, while a large dungeon with only a few random encounters can stay fresh and interesting even if you have to cover a lot of ground or backtrack frequently.

Another useful metric might be “time between interesting events”. A big dungeon with multiple cutscenes and treasure chests is going to hold the player's interest a lot longer than a medium sized dungeon where nothing happens until you get to the end.

So it might turn out that a map can be physically as large as you want without losing the player's interest as long as there are never more than X random encounters and Y many minutes between events.