Will the shops in Skyrim have all of their products somewhere in the shop? Or at the very least in the shop owner's inventory? Because in Oblivion, you could see some fancy 20,000 gold weapon when you were actually buying stuff, but if you looked around the shop, it was nowhere to be found and if you pick-pocketed the owner, it wasn't even in their inventory. They apparently pulled their store's inventory out of some magical portal.

Probably buried vendor chests.

Actually it's from a chest underneath the floor which is completely inaccessible.Not kidding.

I think it's called suspension of disbelief or something.

This

It would work if it was balanced. I mean, you could pick very hard locks at level 1 without even having the Security skill - if shopkeepers actually stored all their high-level gear then you could be covered head to toe in epicness 20 minutes after starting the game.

The solution would be to limit lockpicking (like they're doing in Skyrim) to make it impossible to pick hard locks at a low level or to simply only sell standard, non-magical loot in stores and rely on dungeons and quest rewards to distribute the epic stuff.

It's better than having a level one running about with super powered stolen loot.

I'd love to see that! :goodjob:

That makes alot of sense from a design perspective, it was alot easier to pick a lock or steal a key and then steal the items than it was to earn the cash required to buy an item worth 20K.

The chest is either under the floor or in a separate cell, both Fallout 3 and Fallout NV placed all the vendor chests in a separate cell that could only be seen in the GECK.

actually in Oblivion they got all there stuff out of a vender chest, sometimes the vender chests were hidden but other times you could actually steal a shops invintory, in fact the person in hackdirt was their own vender chest so you could pickpocket all the stuff you sold them

When you become an honest Merchant you get access to a magic spell that pulls items out of the ethereal world but the drawback is you can only pull them out if someone is interested in buying them. Its a well kept secret among the merchants that even advance lore doesn't have records of it.

Hmmmm...tcl

There probably will be a little bit of "Magical Inventory" for the sake of the random leveled item slots.

But there will also be some static items available to steal as well. (Static may be the wrong word)

If you watch the Quake Con Demo, and the E3 demos, you'll notice Alvor (The smith) has his inventory change each time. Things such as Dwemer Helms and Elven Maces are right out in the open, albeit perilously close to the smith himself, who wouldn't take kindly to theft I'm sure.

intresting topic. i hope so