morrowind had hand placed loot which meant that after a few play throughs you knew where everything was and it took the mystery out of hunting. oblivion was the exact opposite with generated loot that was mostly useless and was levelled with a very few quest exception.......even then the weapons were themselves levelled. ive been playing a mod for STALKER CoP which randomizes the locations of the toolkits at the beginning of each game so that they are not all in the same location everytime. im not sure if its entirely random or they have 10 possible different configurations and then you get one of them at the begining but it adds back the randomness of the game.

i hope they put something similar in the next game....a hybrid of morrowind and oblivion. each game has handplaced loot of certain items but they have different locations at the start of each game.

also, i would love to see a diablo style enchantment system with weapons and armor. that would make scrounging 1000 times more fun that just gathering loot to sell. there was a mod being worked on a while back for it but i dont know if it ever got finished or not.....ARES i think it was.

I actually like hand placed loots...there's a sense of belonging and effort, while randomly generated loot feels pretty random. If you don't want noobs getting the epic weapons then make it really hard to get. :shrug:

I'm all for handplaced, randomized loot just felt so useless and stale there was never a point to look in chests i just ran in and killed everything took the weapons and armor and left

Another, unique, hand placed, non leveled loot fan here. I don't mean get rid of randomization altogether, but more hand placed items would be nice (and I'm not talking about misc. clutter items).

maybe im not clear.........what i meant was there are a fixed number of weapons, armor, items in game that will always be in the game somewhere but just in different locations. say there are 50 items that will always be in a container in every game.......just that it might be in one dungeong one game and in a castle or another dungeon in another game. this doesnt effect quest items obviously since you get those at the end of quests. this is the best of both worlds..............there will always be that special weapon you like........you just have to hunt for it.

the mod i played also gave you the ability to ask other npcs for clues to its whereabout and if they knew they would tell you the general area. you could also buy the exact location from the trader guy in skadvosk but it cost you a fortune to get the info. so in skyrim if you want the really long pole of penetration named Viagar you could ask npcs around and if that npc was in a town that was nearby the location they could give you a clue like "i heard someone talking about a rumor of such a weapon inside of a nearby cave."

I think I see what you're getting at.

Say there are 50 "epic level" items - Scourge, Daedric Crescent, etc.

There are 100 "epic loot locations" in the game. At the start of the game the items are randomised into one of the 100 locations. That way there isn't even a guarantee of finding any epic level item in the same location in different games.

Of course, items which have their own shrine etc would still need to be handplaced, and it would be nice to have these rather than just all randomly placed.

yup exactly...........and the shrine idea is actually pretty good. it would be a visual indicator so that you arent forced to look through ever barrel in the room. once you enter the room you see the "shrine" and know something important is on it. great idea.

this would increas replay value 1000 fold.