DUNGEONS, LENGTH, AND YOU!

"should" last?

There's no standard time, it just depends on the style of the game in question. FF is based around linear dungeon diving, so having length dungeons between the story is what they aim for, and it works for them.

But some games are based around much shorter dungeon runs, and others based around extensively long or repeatable dungeons, because it suits them.

Any work in the end so long as it fits. All that matters is that short dungeons don't feel unsubstantial, while long dungeons remain interesting.

It really matters on how much content you have in your dungeon. If you continue to provide interesting bosses, puzzles, and dungeon design, you could go up to 4 hours and have quite the epic experience.

But DO NOT have dungeons with tedious content. If you find yourself padding a dungeon -- stop. If this means the dungeon is 15 minutes long, that's fine. Probably 15 very sexy minutes~

Hmm. Let's make a list of things that confining the player to a single dungeon actually means:

- A single setting or visual motif
- A particular set of enemies
- An unchanging party
- Puzzles are mostly of the same style? Sometimes? Depends on the game I guess
- No access to shops or other upgrade systems that are in towns
- No access to inns or other unlimited healing
- No major cut scenes, except at the beginning and end
- Non-linearity is put on hold in favor of a single clear goal: finish the dungeon

Now, these limitations can obviously be subverted by the designer to make one dungeon feel like several or vice-versa. Dungeons can bleed into each-other. Things that aren't usually in dungeons can be put there. The player can be allowed to leave a dungeon halfway through and come back. You can have a non-linear dungeon, if you want.

By subverting these limitations, you can easily make the player feel like it's more than just a single really long dungeon. It'll become a diverse experience. That's the goal, right? Not just to put the player on the world map for a few minutes, but to make them feel like the game is moving forward and to keep them interested in what's happening and where they're going.

There was a section of FF7 with three dungeons directly in a row, after snowboarding out of the town of Icicle Inn in the northern continent. Great Glacier took forever and was a fucking awful area with either an intentionally incorrect map or a bunch of one-way teleport errors, depending on how much credit you give the area designer. But! If you pretend Great Glacier was a decent area and only look at the sections after it, it's a pretty good example of how to make an extremely long area keep from getting stale without a single cut scene (which is kind of remarkable for a game so heavily dependent on its plot).
1) Starts out with a freaking snowboarding minigame, hellz yeah, moogles & moguls
2) Land in a section of the Great Glacier, an outdoor tundra maze. Where you land is determined by your snowboarding. Please pretend the maze is coded better for the sake of discussion
3) Moves the player to a spinning blizzard overland section where they have to mark their trail. This is extremely different from any normal area and is basically a minigame with random battles
4) The player reaches a log cabin with an old man who gives them climbing equipment and allows them to rest and heal hp/mp
5) Scale the Gaea Cliffs, they are extremely vertical. You have to reach ledges and mash the square button to stay warm. No battles in this part, just the cliff-scaling minigame
6) Weave through caves in the cliffs, progress through by causing icicles to fall in the right places, you must scale the cliffs several additional times while doing this
7) Arrive at the Northern Crater, where winds blow from different directions and you have to avoid them at the right times to keep from getting blown off the path. Random Sephiroth clones are scattered throughout this dungeon, falling to their deaths as you get near them because they're too dumb to time their movement right. Plus the crater looks completely different from any of the earlier areas (which also all looked completely different from each-other, by the way)

So the only line of dialogue in this whole set of dungeons is by the old man in the cabin. BUT. From the time you look up the Great Glacier maze exit on GameFAQs to the time you give Sephiroth the black materia at the end, it never feels like it drags on. Even though it's like three and a half hours between Icicle Inn and the end, you're not itching to get it over with and get back to a town, except when you're lost at the very beginning. The gameplay is varied enough that two and a half hours in, you're not sick of being there - because where you are is extremely different from where you were an hour ago.

So yeah, it's totally possible to not actually bring the player back to a town. But you can't just keep everything the same. The player will be bored silly after like 30 minutes of it. The maximum number of times I'm willing to fight the same random battle before I get bored is, like, maybe twice. I don't want to keep looking at the same cave, especially if there's nothing interesting about it. I want the game to move on. That doesn't have to mean a new dungeon.

But, well, it usually does mean a new dungeon. And a new dungeon is probably the simplest and most complete way. So if you're not Hironobu Sakaguchi, you might want to just stick with the plan that definitely works: getting me out of your fucking cave ASAP.

Honestly, if you want some feedback on your dungeons, give the game to someone who isn't a friend to go through (friends, as much as you want to think otherwise, are notorious for being too harsh or too easy and, honestly, don't give the best feedback re: design). Give it to someone who's never seen the dungeons before - if they've played a previous version before you 'fixed it,' find someone else (for this step - at some point, it's always good to give the dungeon back to someone who ran it before to make sure their problems with it were fixed). Let someone with absolutely no experience with the dungeon run it, and look at their feedback. If a dungeon is too long (or even, possibly, too short) when playing through it fresh the first time, you should probably do some resizing. Even then, they should have a chance to see some of the game outside the dungeon to see it in context.

Find people to specifically critique the dungeons - all story and everything aside, ask them what they think about the dungeons, ask them to focus on the frequency of encounters, the difficulty of those encounters, etc., etc. Hell, once I get my proper internet set up (sometime next week), I'll do that very thing for you - I'll run through as much of the game as you're willing to show off and test the dungeons out for length, confusion, all that fun stuff.

It's quite possible that, even with your perceived dungeon length from just your explanations of how long they are, that your dungeons are balanced to the right length after all.