Something that niggled at me about Oblivion (and to some extent Fallout 3) was 'Item Respawn'.

When I found out that items would 'reappear' (or randomise) in there container, and flowers/plants would regrow from there stem every three days or so, I would just keep coming back again and again and again, rotating different areas to maximise the loot 'harvesting'.

Now that was fine if you were a casual player, but I, like so many fellow ES invested hundreds of hours into the game and found that this respawn mechanism to be rather boring and repetitive. It destroyed some element of immersion since the respawning was predictable and felt artificial. You were Guaranteed to have an item there if you came back at the alloted time!

The problem is, is that I can't think of a more realistic option to put forward to deal with this issue short of getting rid of item respawning or together, I certainly wouldn't want to see that. Surely there must be a more practical way of 're-laying the table' without it being so predictable and artificial.... hmmmmm.

Maybe make some of it random instead of a regular timer? Plants would probably grow back on a regular basis, but dungeon loot would rely on new people moving in, which might happen in 3 days or 3 weeks.

hmmmmm.... /think..../sigh

I got nothing

Its a toughie.

Sadly it was more evident in Fallout 3 for some reason. It felt even more artificial in that game, maybe it was because FO3 didn't drag you into to its world as much.

I see nothing wrong with this. I rather enjoyed it as a matter of fact. Picking graqes from the vinyard. It was pretty realistic that plants and such grow back. I neve rreally went there intentionally... but whenever I past by areas like that, I always enjoyed havesting.

I never went through the same "dungeon" twice unless absolutely necessary in either game.

Make everything come back in later months like the loading screen in Oblivion says they do? I would expect about 3 months in-game to be a good time for an entire dungeon to respawn, maybe about a month in-game for an ingredient to respawn.

They could also make it so when you pick something, the actual plant disappears, but when it "respawns" it grows in a different area nearby or in a different way. As for dungeons, different enemies inhabit the dungeon upon respawn, with matching loot. For example, if bandits made the place their home there would be torches, food, gold, and some leveled loot found in containers. Likewise, if beasts inhabited the area, one wouldn't expect to find anything that a person put in the containers, if there are any containers at all.

Meh, I don't know. I can't really think of anything else to make it really varied or fluid :confused:.

You could have a system in which a random number say 1-10 is selected and you must enter and loot containers in that many dungeons in able to respawn previously looted dungeon containers.It would keep you from looting the same dungeon over and over buy useing the wait feature.Or pick so many flowers of the same type,stop baseing this stuff on time and it will make it harder to exploit,It would be hard to figureout why they spawned first off second if youre gonna make a ten dungeon rotation youre gonna find a way to do it any how.

My problem was saving outside of a cell and restarting over and over again til the container had something i just couldn't pass up.Sometimes it went on for hours. Now i tend to do this in whatever game i can. It becomes addictive, "just one more time", over and over and over again. :banghead:

Sounds like me with Sigil Stones. Well how else am I supposed to get my game breaking 100% chameleon armor? Or my 125 resist magic armor? Seriously, a mix of that and item duplication gave my Nord 117% resist magic and 85% reflect spell. I deserved it after putting that many hours into that save, though . At least that's what I keep telling myself.

I agree. I used to spam the 'wait' option to harvest stuff. If it became more random and unpredictable, then it would put a stop to this

Which is why you dont use time which a charicter can manipulate as the controling factor for respawn.

The alternative involves an aspect of the system I've proposed for respawning dungeons, but the problem is that it would use a fair amount of system resources to implement it - rather than having a set point at which things respawn, you have a chance (varying by item and location and any other factors that might apply) that the thing in question will respawn. Then, rather than immediately respawning everything in the area because 72 game hours have passed, the game does a check for each item to see if it meets the threshold required for respawn. If it does, it does - if it doesn't, it doesn't. Handle common and sensible respawns by making the chance relatively high and uncommon and rare respawns by making the chance relatively low.

But, again, doing all those checks for all those items every time you entered a cell would be quite a load on the system resources, so I don't see it happening. They might do it on a few select things in a few select cases (and I would if I were them, just to test it out and see if it works well), but I don't see any chance that they'd do any more than that. So, for now, I expect the respawn mechanic to work much as it has in the past.

I guess I never noticed much... I am a bit of a wanderer in these games and I never stick around one area for very long. I also doubt I ever returned to the same dungeon again.

No respawning, very limited level scaling, multiple hundred hours gameplay.
Pick two of tree.
you will probably get 30 dungeons level 40-50, if we are real lucky we get around 50 high level ones.
No respawning and you have cleared them out you are done, yes you probably use some time fooling around doing level 20-30 dungeons getting more and more bored.
With no respawning you run out of stuff, Fallout 3 was pretty stupid here, outdoor enemies respawned but not their containers and not the base the guard was guarding. Worse you ended up farming hard to get stuff like gateling lasers as some outdoor locations had them but they was rare in random encounters.

Now the main problem in Oblivion was the strict three days away rule. For plants it should be a fixed time say a week, then if you are away some hours it regrows., yes it takes a year between harvests, however if you are gathering some places are earlier than others. A week sounds good.
In oblivion owning a farm was totally pointless you had to stay away to get new harvests.

For dungeons say 10-14 days away, yes if you take over a bandit lair and make it your home the bandits might come back if you are away for weeks.

You mis-understand. I don't want the item respawn got rid of. Just a different respawn mechanism/system.

The 'staggered' respawn idea sounds good. Anything that would stop the the predictability of it.

That was a brilliant idea:

Loot should be reassigned by "Radiant Story", so whenever it filled an area with new population and events, it should the containers according to the population that moved in the area.