After going from Morrowind to Oblivion this is one aspect of the TES games that I felt wasn't as developed as it could have been, maybe it was just me but Oblivion felt dry and to vanilla with its unique and rare items, armour and weapons so I would like to see a lot more love go in to this with Skyrim. Whats everyone Else's opinions on more rare and unique armour, weapons and items been included in Skyrim??

I want more of it. Unique hand placed loot please.

I think everyone would like unique pieces of treasure, as long as it is not of the dreaded 'leveled' variety. Would be interesting to see someone make an argument for less unique tressure... I guess you could say the more of it there is, the less 'special' each weapon and piece of armour becomes?

But yeah, I hope there is a nice variety of unique weapons and armour sets!

Agreed.

Oblivion didn't have enough unique artefacts in my opinion. They don't need to all be ultra powerful or anything... just unique from the general clutter or the stuff you find in shops.

Yea I really hope they are not leveled based items, that would be horrible

I know right? Only way to obtain unique items was through completing guilds/factions and a small variety of NPCs (like Umbra). Upon first gameplay with Oblivion, it kinda annoyed me when id complete a dungeon/kill an NPC and get a cool item, then later find it for a kind of cheap price at a store.

Unique and rare artifacts that are unrelated to quests, please. They should be either well hidden or well defended, so that you really feel that you've earned them once you get them.

In Oblivion, practically every artifact was related to a quest reward or something else to do with a quest.

I do hope though that they level with the character even after pick up because i dont want to find the (insert epic gear name) and find that my normal armor is better just because i have leveled past the mark at which you are supposed to find it.

Unique hand placed loot is a must, otherwise it takes away a lot of motivation for exploration.

This. Pretty much an obligatory addition as an incentives to encourage your players to go off on independent explorations if you touted your game of having such feature, especially.

add artifacts in dungeons so that they are not just rewards from daedric gods or quests

Something I think that they should do is to add less magic equipment. Make them more rare, sins they are better. Just last night I found a normal bandit with a magic
armor that boosted his health with 97....

They should also add "Treasures" like a flowting blade on top of some stairs inside and old hidden ruin with many undead guarding it.
They could name it " Blade Of The Living Flesh"

WoW has hundreds of low-level, fancy one-of-a-kind unique items. And half of them aren't even good... if Skyrim had tonnes of unique one-of-a-kinds, it'd be pretty kewl.

im all for it. my vision of unique isnt nessisarily awesome stats. i would rather see some sweet new meshes and textures. like that one two-handed blade thing that was shaped like a cresent in morrowind, and it was on some island way out to the east. that is sweet unique loot

With the right technology, it is quite easy to make a lot of rare and unique items, and put them in the game:

If the meshes of the items can have some parts that could change texture/color without the need to change the mesh, so that when designing the item, you could select the mesh for the item, then select a few textures for the specific changeable parts of that mesh to change it a bit, then give the item a specific name and place it in the hand of a specific NPC.

So for instance we could have weapons that could have alterable decoration on the scabbard, and hilt and so on, or armors that have different decorations, and give them unique or rare names and place them in some specific places or in the possession of an NPC or monster, and voila...

I have expanded on the idea in http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1169940-udmto.

Edit:

In addition to visual uniqueness of items, if we could have http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1107940-perks-they-can-make-each-play-through-a-unique-experience, we could make really unique items that could behave quite differently from other items.

Morrowind was much better in regards to rare or unique loot that wasn't centred around the main quest or guild/faction quests. I agree that unique or rare items doesnt mean they have to be loaded with really powerful stats or effects.

What do you guys mean by 'unique hand placed items"? Like in morrowind where you might find some epic gear and it has a journal beside it with the persons story?

Or that you find through snippits of lore to find that hidden cave under a lake guarded by a dragon and Daedric spirits!

I like to see things other than weapons and armour. I like to go hunting for treasure, unique jewels, crowns, statues etc. It does have to just be things like swords etc.

unique = there is only one of that item in the entire game

hand placed = the item is placed in a certain location by the game makers, not spawned randomly from a treasure list or gained by an item-specific quest like all of Oblivion's Daedric artifacts. (Journals are optional and irrelevant)

See: Skull Crusher, Scourge, Fists of Randagulf, and Eleidon's Ward from Morrowind. I'd offer an example from Oblivion...except that's why we're asking for unique hand-placed items to return in Skyrim.

Just to kind of expand on what this person was talking about, I would really love to see more treasure items that aren't weapons, just artifacts. It would be cool to either sell them for money or maybe just keep them in your house.

Oblivion had a lot of unique loot, but most were quest related and were also leveled. So if you came back to receive the reward at level 15 rather than at level 25 you would've got a weaker enchanted weapon.

There is a misconception that Morrowind contains a lot of handplaced loot, and absolutely no level scaling. This is not true.

Morrowind did leveled loot on enemies strictly as weapons. Dremoras would probably start off with dreugh weapons at lower levels and graduate to daedric weapons at higher levels. This effected the amount of damage they could put out, rather than the amount of health they had.

Morrowind also did leveled loot and random loot in containers and barrels. What made it effective was the wide variety of enchantments and effects, making each find in a barrel more unique for a player. There simply wasn't enough of this in Oblivion.

Morrowind had unique loot and leveled/random loot, the only difference is the fact that it was done much more effectively.

^ Definitely.

Just dropping by to say that I'm fully in agreement with those who like to see an appearance of unique non-combative "treasures". Another thing that I want to add is that it would be nice for some of the hand-placed unique loots, that in addition to possessing a unique set of stats, also being unenchanted by default. Just imagine as your magic-oriented character looting a peculiar looking undead-infested cavern on the purlieu of the eastern Skyrim border, you find what looks like a cremation chamber. And behold! There's a sweet-looking Telvanni Chepalopod masque, with good armor rating and lightweight, and no enchantment so you can apply whichever enchantments that suits your will. Not as sweet to behold if it already comes enchanted with a water breathing and +10 to conjuration bonus if your Argonian nuke-o-mage doesn't really need those effects in the first place.

yes there should be handplaced loot but if we are talking about unique LOOKING loot. then i think a one of a kind weapon called strange dwemer warhammer that looks like a musket but your character uses it like a warhammer would be a real hoot. although i think thats more along the lines of an easter egg.