Remember in Morrowind, where you accidentally stumbled upon Ibar-Dad, a random cave near a Daedric Shrine with no purpose seemingly? But then as you fought through and finally came back with a master or grandmaster lock pick to open that final door and beat the Golden Saint that came out of it, you were welcomed by amazing items in the game, something you didn't expect. There was Eidon's Ward in there, several Daedric weapons, and even the Daedric Face of Inspiration. This was lost in Oblivion. Where were those caves where I could go into and have a hard battle and find amazing loot until I was level 20 or so (but even after that, the good items were quite abundant, making the whole looting process in Oblivion quite useless)? Skyrim needs places like Ibar-Dad, where those who could meet up to the the challenge got their reward.

I agree, stumbling into amazing stashes of loot made Morrowind amazing. Ibar-Dad being a great example.
I also loved knowing places have great treasure. One of my favourite days playing MW was breaking into the great houses' treasury vaults in Vivec.
Amazing feeling to be rewarded for breaking in, or in Ibar-Dad's case exploring.

Wth, this makes me think of FONV's unmarked quest http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Cajoling_a_Cudgel where you have to get a key (which is hard to find), fight through the sewers, unlock a door and fight several ghouls including a Reaver and get a quite nice reward. A Fire Axe, high level ammo (12,7 mm, etc.), The Humble Cudgel (A unique lead pipe which is pretty good) and some other things.

I totally agree! I know exactly the cave you are talking about even though I haven't played morrowind in 2 years (my gaming computer died a while back. On my laptop right now).

Ask me the name of one dungeon in Oblivion and I can't do it even though I spent upwards of 800 hours playing that game. Why? Because there were so many and they all felt exactly the same! Every time you left a city you expected to find at least one ancient alyied ruin or old castle full of vampires. When you found something like that in Morrowind you thought "OMFG there might be some loot, but i'll probably die... hmmm... loot or death..."

Also, the loot system in Oblivion was garbage, and I'm not hating on Oblivion, it was an execellent game, it just seems rediculous when every random npc once you get to higher levels has at least one piece of glass or daedric armor.

In vanilla Morrowind there was one complete set of daedric armor in the whole game, and you had to kill a vital npc to get it, AKA, in Morrowind 'rare' armor was actually a rare find.

I can only pray they don't screw up the loot system and make every random person be decked out in full daedric in Skyrim.

I can actually say I have never discovered this place.

I love you Morrowind. You're so huge. :wub:

But yeah, I would really like to see the random stashes of amazing loot. I would actually like to see more akin to the House Vaults in Vivec.

Oh, yeah, I remember that Golden Saint... I met him on a low level and spent a ton of time to beat him... But that was worth it. The biggest concern about Oblivion after the level scaling is that there was NO really unique loot in not quest-related dungeons. So even if they make EVERY cave unique as a snowflake, it will be pointless if they won't make dungeon crawling rewarding, and I don't mean only the dragon shouts, I luv surprises :hubbahubba:

I just hope that items are not affected by level scaling. I can understand NPCs being level-scaled when you first meet them and then stay there (similar to Fallout) but the weapons placed need to be unique. It just ruins dungeon crawling when if I'm level 2 I can only find iron armor, but then when I'm level 22 I finally find Daedric, which essentially was as good as iron because enemies scaled with the PC.

Ibar-Dad is also a good example of mixed dungeon types (cave and Daedric.)

Yeah I love it when they do that. Or the one that goes from ancestral tomb to cave to daedric shrine in cave...

Great example too.

And yes, the Ibar-Dad is a great posterchild for "Rewarding Exploration" though honestly, loot need not be the only reward.

What I liked even more about many of the caves in Morrowind, especially ones with bandits, is they felt "Lived In", I mean sure, occasionally you'll find a tent or a fire in an Oblivion cave, but some of the caverns in Morrowind were tantamount to cities themselves. It really sold the whole underbelly of Morrowind, particularly Smugglers, since they even communicated that through randomized loot considered contraband, like Dwemer Armor/weapons, Skooma and Alcohols.



It's somewhere West of the Ashlander Camp in Northern Vvardenfell. There's a Daedric Ruin there too, Just check your compass for the dungeon markers and follow them brainlessly like a drone. Explore!

I made a topic about this a few months back. Almost everyone wanted to see this aspect of the game return.

I have faith in Todd and his team. Bring on November.

Let's hope so.

How much randomized loot do you guys think there will be?

I'm thinking Fallout 3/NV quantities. Enough that you get excited about random containers, and invoke a sense of "Omg lucky!!", but also enough statics that exploration doesn't become formulaic and a battle of statistics.

If you enter a really hard cave, a lot of loot
Easy cave, some loot.
Insane grotto with 3 dragons in it, I hope that daedric armor in that box is golden.

Deathclaw Promintory, and Bloodborne Cave come to mind! It was funny, because the first time I found the Promintory on the Arizona side of the river, after battling some 20 deathclaws, I couldn't stop thinking "There better be some Tesla armor or something here." While not exactly Tesla Armor, not far from it!

As for Bloodborne, let's just say it's fitting Veronica fell near her fellow Paladin. Fisticuffs with the Legendary Deathclaw, what could go wrong?

I think radiant story should be applied to random caves and give them large sums of loot. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-oZ3RCWZsNk&feature=related.

I really hope that with handcrafted landscapes and dungeons, handplaced loot returns as well.

Radiant Story could be applied to randomized loot, if it's based on your highest skills, it might be able to adjust variables so that say, you stumble upon more Longbows/shortbows if your Archery is flagged.

Like, most of the time, at least in Oblivion, there's one "Super" chest per dungeon. While these chests do have some place when using sparingly, over-use is not a good idea. With that disclaimer in place, it wouldn't be so bad if they could use radiant AI to deliver more loot relative to your needs.

yeah ibar dad not only had the loot.. it had LORE. there was a nice little story going on in that place... somethin' about scamps mining in the wrong place.

Oblivion did svck at that, but bethesda had improved, you could definitely see that with fallout, also Oblivion it kinda made sense, there was a huge influx of deadric artifacts becuase of he gates, so every bandit/maurader had one, also it caused the price to decrease

You won't hear me disagreeing on this note, I'd like to have some places in Skyrim which have high quality, hand-placed loot which you would not expect to find there (Unless you already knew it was there, of course.) and would not find easily, if at all, anywhere else. It's when I find things like this that it really makes exploration feel rewarding, far more so than when I find a high quality item in one dungeon that I know I could easily find elsewhere.



It's impossible to be certain, what we've been told is that the level scaling is more similar to Fallout 3, but this I think is mostly referring to the actual mechanics of level scaling, not how widely it's used, however, if it is like Fallout 3 in that regard as well, then we can still expect to see random loot in containers and on some enemies, but we would also see a fair amount of hand-placed items as well, both unique items and non-unique ones. Fallout 3 had a fair amount of both. I suspect that Bethesda saw that people didn't like Oblivion's level scaling, so they decided to change it in Fallout 3, and I guess they liked the system enough that they want to apply it to Skyrim as well.



I really don't think the two had anything to do with each other, even if Oblivion's dungeons were't hand-crafted, which I'm not sure if they were or not (I know the landscapes were procedurally generated, but I think the dungeons were probably hand crafted.) they were still static, they were created before the game's release, rather than being generated when you start the game, so it really wouldn't have been unfeasible to go through every dungeon and drop whatever loot Bethesda wanted to put in it. The lack of much worthwhile hand-placed loot was purely a design choice, I wouldn't say it was the right choice, but it was still a choice, and Oblivion could easily have had lots of hand-placed loot if that was what Bethesda wanted to do at the time.



That doesn't explain the large amount of glass and ebony items. And the price reduction can't be explained like that as equipment in Oblivion as a whole costs less than Morrowind, it's just that the general balance of the sums of gold that will be exchanged at one time shifted towards smaller numbers, so whereas in Morrowind a high level item might easily cost over ten thousand, in Oblivion, one thousand was a pretty high price.

The lack of "Hand Placed" Loot, more accurately, powerful hand placed loot, was a direct response to the pointless crying about the difficulty curve in Morrowind. This complaint actually came from veterans, who had learned the game so well, they would start, and immediately grab something like an Ebony Longsword before even their first level-up. So in response, Bethesda completely destroyed a play-style (Effective Thief), and ruined exploration to a painful degree.

I can just imagine there being this one uber-cave that was really difficult and has lots of epic loot, but there is only one, no one knows where it is and your only clues to existence is maybe a book or rumour. So you'll be forced to go through all the dungeons in the game.

Of course it will be the last one you enter.

Yes, this is infact very much what Skyrim needs