Another "old" idea from TES is a lack of respawning everything. In Morrowind, murdering or.. displacing the owner of a house, removing they're things, and replacing with you're own items, effectively meant the house was your's. Very few interior containers respawned. Even further, when you cleared a bandit cave or dungeon, and looted the usually unique loot, that was it for that particular dungeon. If you went back in 117 hours, it was still in the condition you left it.
I enjoyed this system, it allowed me to change the world how I felt necessary, and set up shop wherever I needed to. Yes, its true that if I cleared every dungeon in the game, i'd be out of places to explore - thats a fact of life in the game, however I never reached that point! I never played a character to the point that there were no longer places to explore, loot, and take over.


In Oblivion, if I went to take a home that I liked, I could remove all the loot, (and trash most if it - see http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1164057-junk-items-have-value/) and place all my own items. This was fine, until I happened to be away for 73 hours - at that point every item in the house would respawn where it used to be, even if it meant spawning on top of and displacing all the other items. Strangely, the NPC who was "displaced" never respawned, meaning the house was entirely useless and empty (minus junk goods) for the rest of the game.

In Skyrim, my alternative would be, at least for NPC owned homes, that items do not respawn and, if they do, the items only respawn if the NPC/NPC's living there are still alive. I do not want to touch on dungeons respawning, because it seems Bethesda has some interesting plans to recreate the dungeon experience as it is, and i'm more than willing to give this a chance.


I'd also like to add here at the bottom something thats been discussed on the forum: No red hand next to stolen goods. The player should be able to determine if they are stealing or not - and if they are unable to, they're going to have to deal with those consequences.

They fixed this in Fallout 3 so I can't imagine they'd let this problem arise in Skyrim.

Whoa, whoa, whoa. You mean I could have been living in ANY HOUSE I WANT?! I knew of a few "safe" houses where the stuff doesn't respawn, but I wasn't aware every house was like that. :mellow:

What did they do in Fallout 3? I didn't play it enough to ever feel the urge to set up a home anywhere, nor did I feel a sense of roleplaying as much.

I know they mentioned that if shop keepers get killed, a relative--if alive--will take over the shop for them. This might be similar for houses, but I don't know. Honestly, I can't say I expected anything different with Oblivion. You kill someone and that doesn't mean you now own their house. The Imperial Guards and the other civilians wouldn't be too pleased about that. In Morrowind, however, that type of behavior isn't entirely unfounded, especially in areas under Telvanni rule. In Skyrim, well, I don't really know how the Nords run things specifically, so we'll see!

Yep, in Fallout 3 you can do what you can do in Morrowind- making any container your own- and not have to worry about it respawning. There are a few types of containers you shouldn't put stuff in just in case (such as Metal Boxes, which occasionally respawn), but other than that if you store stuff somewhere it will stay there. The difference between it and Morrowind is that killing an NPC doesn't allow you to sleep in their bed and their containers will still be marked as red, but you can still use them. So hopefully Skyrim will include the Morrowind system in full, including claiming a house and bed as your own.

Having played Fallout 3 before Oblivion, I actually learned about Oblivion's respawning cells the hard way. I thought it'd be like Fallout 3, so one of the first things I did was kill somebody and store my stuff in his house. Sure enough, in a short while everything had respawned.