» Tue May 17, 2011 3:42 pm
Oh, joy! We get to keep going back and collecting loot that's locked at 15 levels below our current level.......won't that be exciting?
At the one extreme, Morrowind's caves and certain other locations NEVER respawned, aside from a few vermin. That left you with either a long trek and search for someplace you hadn't been to before, or a few locations such as those around the outsides of Daedric Shrines, which did respawn new creatures, but no other loot. Some players loved that, others hated it. It did allow you to "claim" a cave as a makeshift home, just as the bandits were doing.
At the other extreme, Oblivion's automatic 3 day respawn of nearly everything, coupled with the excessive levelling and scaling, meant that there was no point in going anywhere new; just keep walking back into the same 3 or 4 caves every third day and "milk" the loot, which kept getting better and better as your level improved. It was a quick way to generate combat encounters and cash, but wasn't "interesting", in my opinion. It also prevented you from leaving anything unattended for more than 3 days, unless you bought a house. It was "stupid" from almost any perspective: pure grinding for the sake of grinding. Of course, there are players who want that, as well as those who find it annoying and absurd.
I'd like to see random "limited" respawning, which becomes more likely over time. That way, you don't know for certain that it's reoccupied, or if part of it is, or how much trouble the new residents will be, if there are any. By the later stages of the game, enough of the original locations should have respawned (with a mix of levels) so you could still have enough to keep you occupied fighting instead of searching the far corners of the map for someplace you had missed. Aside from a realtive handful of players who just want to fight the same fight over and over every three days (sleep or wait for 2 days, then fight on the third) until their character is at level 999 (and then complain about the level cap), it should keep everyone at least reasonably satisfied.