Hi Todd,
Something that always irritated me in Oblivion was that at the start of the game all you ever found was weapons like rusty spoons that were as much use as [censored] on a bull, and conversely, towards the end of the game you were Cyrodiil's Bill Gates because every time you killed a mudcrab you got his uber-expensive glass armour. Any info on whether you can "strike it lucky" a bit earlier (even if you need a minimum skill to use it - you can either flog it or squirrel it away till you can use it)?

Agreed.

There should be some rare and powerful items that can be found regardless of what your level is. And once you've reached a really high level, you should still find junk quite a lot and face oppontents carrying low-level weapons and armour.

Levelled-associated loot is toned down a lot in Skyrim, supposedly. But for some reason I can't understand, Bethesda is insisting that a "little" bit of it still needs to remain.

You know what I loved about Morrowind and hated about Oblivion?

In Morrowind, there were people who were already Bill Gates just after you got off the boat and you could find amazingly powerful weapons at level 1, JUST LYING AROUND.

In Oblivion, there were not people who were already Bill Gates just after you got off the boat, and all the random weapons lying on the ground/in houses etc. were either useless and looked useless, or were useless and looked powerful.

Morrowind felt more like the game world wasn't designed for the player's benefit, and yet the player could be smart and take advantage of that game world... Oblivion felt contrived.

What I can understand from this google translate of the interview is:

Loot is place level centric, and not player level centric, so in a dangerous place, you would usually find better loot, and in a newbie areas you would usually find low level loot.

But it is randomized, and might vary a bit, and sometime they manually place specific loot that fits the area theme and difficulty, so we have a mix of random and manual loot that would generally fit with the difficulty level of the area, and not the character level of the player.

This is Great!

Edit: corrections.

No worries, level scaling's been much toned down for Skyrim. They said it'll be similar to the Fallout 3 level scaling this time around, which is pretty much good enough for me... I got my butt kicked goofing around at early levels in Fallout 3.
And hopefully they'll have improved the system even further for Skyrim. With the Radiant Story thing, they should be able to create a very nuanced scaling system.
I'd rather they didn't have any, but I guess beggars can't be choosers.

I think in general from the interviews they learned alot doing FO3 and hit a bit of a stride concerning levelling and loot. I thought it was far better in FO3. I still run about in lower level armour at high levels. I'd imagine the choice to need power armour training is so that you couldn't nail a few BOS off the bat and be running around like a level 4 tank. I'd imagine something similar will be implemented here maybe as a moderate to high level armour perk.

Sounds like Fallout 3, actually - there's hand placed loot (like the contents of town armories, or unique items in certain people's safes/etc), but the gear that's on enemies & in dungeons is based on their level, not your level..... i.e, if Bandits spawn somewhere, there's a maximum level of gear they can have - they're only Bandits. But the spawning of Bandits is somewhat effected by the scaling system.