Which do you prefer ?

A combination of both, random encounters can lead to some interesting events but equally things that have been hand placed usually serve more of a purpose.

Random as in encounters (traders, bandits, etc), but not random as in those nameless random towns in Daggerfell. People want real towns, not "nameless hamlet #13".

I agree with Gasket.

Hand placed is no good. I want to replay TES games, and having everything hand placed means you can find stuff only once. After that, you're almost required to pretend you don't know stuff, like locations, NPCs and items.
Fully random is not perfect either. While it's very realistic in TES2, that guilds never run out of work, and there's actually lots of boring and repetitive work, guild quest lines are fun to have. What I love in TES2 is the rarity and randomness of items. If you want a full set of certain armor, you need to go seriously shopping, or raid lots of dungeons. You can't check the locations of each piece in a Wiki, and then proceed to gather them. Or wait for high level and have each enemy drop the full set.

Unique items and artifacts should be placed like this: 100 or so hand picked spots around the gameworld for 10 items. They are randomly placed in start of each game. So you have 10% chance of finding something in a spot you found an artifact last time. A spell like detect powerful item could be introduced, or rumours could be generated in rare occasions that an artifact might be nearby.

Otherwise, items should be handled like in TES2. Some level scaling, with a tiniest chance of finding even the best materials at low levels. Enemies wear less armour, but there is huge amount of clothing to compensate. Used armor should be less pricy, so killing people and selling stuff shouldn't make you a millionare. Something like full set of silver armor should be almost impossible to gather. (I made a poll and some people have managed in it several times, myself never, even if I've played since 1998)
'Cast when used' items should be around, but not as much as in TES3. That was actually junk and you found it everywhere. Trading items and haggling MUST be like in TES3, which was perfect. Merchants should not buy items they already have full stock.

I never liked Daggerfall's Randomly generated towns/people/dialogues/EVERYTHING. But too many hand-placed items ala Morrowind makes re-playability predictable and causes the whole world to feel Static.

What needs to be done is a combination of both: Have some dungeons and caves be randomized, have some Artifacts appear in random spots throughout the game-world (Even the lore states that this is what happens), but keep some Artifacts hand-placed, along with NPC's, and towns.

Leave random generation out of specific NPC Dialogue as it could cause some problems. Having some randomly generated NPCs with generic greetings wander around town would be nice to see though.

Morrowind Had it right.
Artifacts SHOULD be hand placed, preferably with some story to as how it got there (wielders notes etc)

Loot should be generated.

Random missions along with normal missions can be good. cause finding u have to run from town to town chasing fighter guild contracts was annoying. storyline quest with story to them + some random jobs can be good thing.
But on the other hand many new players might feel its repetitive and cheap ass solution. So I guess some kind of hints that random quests are totaly optional in totaly optional open ended world and should not effect one's sense of achievement and completeness of exploration for having ignored them but in a less confusing form than this sentence would be required.

and it totally depends on pacing of the game, in vanilla oblivions fast paced hand guided gameplay any minor deterioration from path was immensely annoying, but with custom mods and much slower paced game with no ruin/settlements indicators on compass (which for me as I discovered while playing oblivion in many different combinations of mods/gameplay changes, was the actual reason why I didn't get any sense of exploration out of game, with them removed quest compass and fast travel stopped negatively effecting much of exploration immersion) even simple stuff like goblin hunting can become enjoyable activity, and positively effect your enjoyment and immersion of your characters development progress. RPG just looses its appeal when you can start bashing epic monsters right away, that period when you can be eaten by a rat and have to explore and understand world what challenges you are strong enough to face, and sense of victory when you level up and conquer monsters you were no match before is just a must for roleplaying game.
and open ended RPG-s were always best at giving you these feelings while playing them. you cant have this feeling in Most liner RPG-s where developers just trow monsters at you that are appropriate challenge for your level. I think Baldur's Gate 2 was only one where you could have your ass kicked hard if you wandered in some dragons lair a bit too early. But it had some kind of open endedness to it.

so beth we want pacing were we can get our ass kicked and have to come back when we are stronger. I mean even in bloody GTA u cant take on everything at the beginning unless you use cheats.

Special artifacts that are a key part of lore should be hand placed and difficult to obtain, they need special attention from the developers or you could end up finding one at a very low level or by opening a random box. Hopefully Bethesda will remove the level scaling so that even at level one we may now where these powerful items are hidden but we can't get to them due to a lack of skills or power. This serves as a motivating force as you level up, finally get the artifact and feeling really good about yourself because of the progression.

I liked Fallout's random encounters, the same thing could be used in the next Elder Scrolls to ensure re playability

I hope the next TES leans towards randomly generated, just because the last two have been heavily hand-placed and I want to see what a daggerfall-like game can do with modern technology.

I think definitely a good mix, where to draw the line I don't know. Artifacts and most high-end look should be hand placed. Stuff like ebony and daedric might have a slight chance of appearing randomly at high levels, but mostly not.

I'd like if most of the dwemer weps/arm were found in dwemer ruins, or bandit/smuggler caves near those ruins. Same for daedric.

Other loot should be random, and only slightly leveled. Obviously, it'd be no fun to be a level 100 whatever and find only iron armor all the time, or 5 gold. But, I wouldn't want to give up the possibility of finding really good armor, weapons, enchantments, and money at earlier levels.

Biggest rule should be, the loot should match it's envrions. Good loot should be guarded by strong NPCs and monsters. When you're strong enough, you'll get it. Whether that's because you're a level 20 warrior who can fight it out, or a level 15 thief who can sneak it away undetected.

Random quests would also help extend replayability. Just set up the right parameters. You could get many interesting twists with a few simple brackets of possibilities. As in, go find/kill man/monster/item in cave/town/wilderness. This book/person can help you out. Then kill/help/realize person or object was killed/taken by third party. Find/kill third party. Etc. This was just a brief list, but it could go on and on and on and on.

Hand placed - Enough said.

No, nothing said. Hand placed for very sought after artifacts, but everything? The game would have no replay value

Hand Placed, random is too generic and souless.

Towns,special places, terrain, key characters, should be hand placed.

However random encounters is a good thing.

Mixture of the two. Quest-based rewards obviously have to be hand-placed - and that includes artifacts. Random loot can be, well, randomly generated. Really, only unique items have to be hand-placed.

As suggested by an earlier poster, having some of the non-quest artifacts "randomized" slightly would mean that you wouldn't necesarily know where to head to get "item A". You might find "item B" there next time, or you might find a random "moderate to high level" non-artifact item there instead. Rather than shuffling all of the top "goodies" randomly, each item could have 2-3 spots where it could be, so you'd have a passable chance at finding it again with a later character, but no guarantee. More importantly, some "fitting" defense of those items would prevent beginning characters from just waltzing in and picking up some of the best pieces in the game without even much of a struggle: a combination of a levelled and an unlevelled defender would make it challenging at any level, because the unlevelled defender would be too tough for a low level PC, and the levelled defender would offer a suitable challenge to a high level character.

A few things really need to be hand-placed for quests or lore reasons, such as where lore states that an item belonged to a specific ancient hero and you stumble upon their tomb. Having some unrelated item there, and their "personal" artifact somewhere else, would make little sense.

Some things really should be purely random, and others need some measure of "levelling", but a combination offers the most promising option. It's possible to include a reference to a levelled list within another list, so you could have a mid-level loot list appear as an entry in a low-level loot list. One item in that mid-level list would be a reference to a high-level list, so it would be unlikely, but very possible, for a low level character to get an entry from the mid-level list while checking a crate, and even more unlikely, but still possible, for that entry in the mid-level list to be a high-level item. Your fresh character COULD find a powerful artifact in a small local cave or tomb, or a low-level opponent could have an amazing piece of armor or weapon, but the odds would be stacked astronomically high against it. Most would have what you'd expect them to. Your overpowered super-character at extremely high levels should still find at least a certain proportion of low-level "junk" in crates and barrels, along with a few "nice" pieces here and there that were extremely rare, but not totally absent, at lower levels. When either everything is levelled, or nothing is, you either get a situation where there's no point in advancing because everything around you just advances to match, or else you quickly learn where all the "goodies" are and the next playthrough is too easy.

In short, you've got to toss the dog a bone every once in a while, but you don't want to overdo it and make him lazy.

Dungeons should be randomly generated each time you start a new game, much like Diablo. Oblivion had everything hand-drawn and look how dull and empty the dungeons felt.

It was dull because there were no artifacts there, and game was paced on a "lot of fighting" ofcourse it would get boring.

and what difference random generated would do? I mean its not like u will know the difference when u enter it. only difference would be that generator might make one of those impossible to figure out two hour crawling daggerfall dungeons.

Both random and hand-placed design are what I want. One of the things that I loved most about Daggerfall (hell, who am I kidding, I loved everything about Daggerfall) was that you could play it over and over and it was never the same twice. Sure, sometimes the randomly generated dungeons had flaws. But that wasn't a failing of the random-generation concept itself. It just meant that the code needed a little more refinement. There was no reason to have just scrapped it like that.

And obviously, sometimes, especially for main quest elements, layout should be artistically done and not left to random chance.

So really, the only way to get the best of both worlds is to work hard on hand-crafting the parts of the game that really matter, and then filling in the rest of the world with random generation. Combine the latter also with what Daggerfall had intended - where your actions actually affected regions and factions, and you've got yourself some pretty fierce replay value.

Unlike Oblivion, which was barely even fun the first time, and certainly not worth playing again and again.

Both as in hand placed towns events rare loot artifacts.Even some special dungeons and key plot twist.Random encounters and the like.Oh and a better loot system that regenerates

Why a mixture of course

Morrowind had some of both...unique enchanted rings and things hidden on obscure shelves or in corners behind mushrooms, and randomly placed loot on a rotating table in boxes, chests, kegs etc. I prefer that system. Oblivion uses it too for some quests, like the suit of armor in the one tomb, the unique light armor.

Mixture! Significant Items should be hand place whereas others should be random.

Agreed agreed important items should not be tossed around.

I like the hand crafted dungeons. It enables some really cool things like well placed traps.

I like random loot. I think that some really rare artifacts should be in the random loot. Then it's really fun because you never know where to find the Mage's Ring of Unstoppable Power and Destruction (fake name).

I think that Oblivion actually had the right mix of stuff, it just needed more variety of high powered random loot.