I just thought I'd throw this out there and see if I'm the only one that feels this way, and maybe if someone might've heard some tidbit of information that I've overlooked on the matter.

I adored playing as a stealth/mage in Oblivion, and one of the most appealing aspects of said character to me was sneaking around in the towns during the late night hours. Breaking into shops, homes, you name it. It just had its own atmosphere that nothing else in the game could really be compared to. Not saying it was better, but certainly a feeling unique to the entire stealth side of gameplay.

One thing that always irked me however was that if you went into someone's house and stole a bunch of stuff from them.... It never got replaced. You could practically rob a person blind, then come back in a few game weeks/months and the house was still empty. The truth of the matter is that it made me not want to steal from people at all, as over time the houses in a given village/town would become almost completely barren. I always sat around grumbling about it and wishing that items would respawn. Maybe not necessarily the same items, but something really similar. Steal a book and a different one appears after some time, for example. There were many variations of different household items in Oblivion and it just kills me that the stuff never came back once you took it.

And it's not like this would be some sort of immersion breaker. After all, I'm inclined to believe that in a realistic setting, people are going to go out shopping and replace things that have gone missing from their homes... I'm just saying. Of course I could then bring up the point that items going missing from homes often in a given town would make the number of guards at night go up too if we were being realistic.. But that's off topic and a can of worms to open on another day. ^.^

Anyway, respawning items.. Or having NPCs buy things to replace what you steal, however you wanna look at it.. What do you guys think? And have we heard anything at all about this? I doubt we have, but hey never hurts to ask right?

Excellent idea, and it's simply realistic. I know how you feel, I have the same gripe when playing thieves.

I remember the first few days that I played Oblivion I spent sneaking around the Imperial City trying to steal stuff.

I'd imagine that leveling static items would be difficult, if not impossible to program (at least with the current oblivion engine). You can do it with containers because loot isn't generated in a container until the first time you enter the cell, so basically if you're level 15 and go into Vilverin, you'll find elven armor and other similarly leveled stuff in containers, but you'll still see iron weapons and armor lying around as static items.

Terrible idea.
It would be a HUGE waste of memory for the game to use.

Respawning items (not in containers and therefore easily goverened by leveled lists) would take a lot for the game to constantly to have to be calculating.

Besides, if the cell just resets itself back to default, then any changes you have made will be ignored. And TES games have always been about the changes you make to the world around you.

I'd like a system like this but limited. For example is a silver plate would be respawned it would be based on the money of the owner and be tranported form an npc selling plates. If the city imports silver you could attack a caravan tranporting it. Doing things like that could destroy a cities economy and stop the respawn.

Well, you could dream. Though maybe the radiant ai [or whatever its called] could be applied in this way to items.

Why bother? After the second time you robbed them, the guards will have set up a "sting" operation and you would be in jail. Nobody would re-buy all their stuff more than once anyway.

Either way I don't care about robbing from houses! Its so last gen!


Now that there are children in Skyrim, I want to rob Orphanages! :tops:

I agree that the lack of items after playing for a few hours kinda got annoying. I would love to see some sort of system for replacing stolen items, but not sure how feasible it is from a technical point of view.

Terrible idea? That's your opinion, and I don't share it.

I think it's an excellent idea, and I further believe there ought to be a reasonable way to implement it. Replenishing the contents of a room in a computer game isn't an insurmountable goal. It would take developer time and effort to accomplish, but then that's true of anything and everything that will be included in the game.

It should be quite possible to program several "states" for many houses and buildings in the game. Each of these states would contain a different distribution of items. Every game month or so, whether the house has been robbed or not, the house would "refresh" its contents, by changing to a different state. If the house had been robbed blind beforehand, the items would, in effect, seem to have been replaced; if the player had visited the house previously but not stolen anything, it might seem that the owner rearranged his or her items.

As for memory usage, I'm sure there are ways to make this very efficient. For example, perhaps the game would only "check" to see if a building (or interior cell, whatever) is due for item refreshment when the player actually enters it, determined by a random seed set for every building at the beginning of the game. It needn't be an ongoing process for every building in real-time.

Obviously, I'm no programmer myself and have to wing it with the terminology I'm using, but I'm absolutely sure this guy's idea is reasonable, doable and would enrich the game if implemented properly, without trashing performance, memory or anything of the sort.

How come when I take a spoon, while sneaking, in the middle of the night, I get 4 guards up my butt, and this guy is breaking into every house twice and getting away with it? Or maybe it's because of the over-prosecution of spoon related crimes that leaves windows open for other thieves.

Useless stuff would be fine I guess but stuff of value, no.

Why's that? There are plenty of infinite sources of valuable items in Elder Scrolls games. Is there a compelling reason why thievery should be an exception?

Exceptionally valuable and/or unique items I can understand, but only useless ones?

Because if valuable stuff just respawns like that it won't be rewarding any longer.

It'd still increase load-times when transitioning between cells. Containers are easy to generate leveled loot through because it's just one unchanging static object containing 4 or 5 pieces of loot. Static pickup objects are harder because you'd have to go through and have each and every one set to level up with the player. That means loading a different model, mesh, texture, and item data for every random pickup every time the cell resets.

I can't say whether or not it's possible with Skyrim's engine because we know next to nothing about it. However, if the engine is anything whatsoever like Oblivion's, then it just wouldn't be feasible from a technical standpoint.

Plants respawn. Historically, Alchemy potions are extremely valuable when brewed at high skill levels... so valuable, in fact, that Alchemy is universally considered the most abusable skill in both Morrowind and Oblivion. Containers and monsters also respawn, and these too are sources of items of value. Soul gems respawn in shop inventories, and quickly become extremely valuable when filled with powerful souls.

So again, I don't see why home thievery should be an exception, or how it would become unrewarding. Actually, every house eventually running out of good stuff to loot in an open-world game seems the opposite of rewarding.

Your last point is pretty true so alright. You are right. But I mostly agree because I want to *ahem* abuse it.

If Radiant AI has developed to the point it should have been at in Oblivion, this could be possible and interesting. A woman comes home, notices a missing book, searches for that book, and purchases another when the book is nowhere to be found. If only Radiant AI worked correctly... :confused:

You misunderstand the point some of us are trying to make. I'm not opposed to thieving being actually worth doing this time around. However, leveling static pickups is not the way to go from a technical standpoint.

One thing that would be more feasible would be something in a mod I used to use a long time ago (I think it was Modular Oblivion Enhanced or Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul, can't remember which), that added chests to houses that contained various loot depending on that person's status. For example, a person on the Imperial City Waterfront might just have some clothes and a few gold, but a noble would have jewelery, gold bars, etc etc. And to prevent abuse, the locks would not be pickable until you reached a certain Security level (a la Morrowind's locks), and may even contain traps.

That approach would be more feasible than attempting to adapt static item spawns to player level.

It was never my intention that the spawns should adapt themselves to player level, though, because I'm a proponent of static, hand-placed item distribution. In Morrowind, if you knew where to go, had a high enough level in certain skills, and a bit of luck, you could steal amazing items fairly early on in the game... such as the Grand Soul Gem from the Mage's Guild in Balmora, if I'm remembering correctly. Actually, that one required little or no skill to get if you distracted the Bosmer female who was "guarding" it first.

The only difference here is that the developers would create several different item placements for each home, with the exception of unique or exceptionally powerful items that could only be taken once. If your Lockpick and/or Sneak skills are high enough to access the items, then you can obtain them, regardless of level.

Actually, the majority of "home" items that sit on shelves and the like (which is what we're talking about here) were static even in Oblivion. How valuable they are should probably depend on lock difficulties, any guards present, and the like, not player level. Of course, at very high player levels, home thievery is bound to lose its profitability, whether the OP's idea is implemented or not. So does manually picking Alchemy plants, though.

If item leveling is in the game I'd be seriously annoyed. its elder scrolls, not wait to unlock everything scrolls.

If item leveling is in the game I'd be seriously annoyed. its elder scrolls, not wait to unlock everything scrolls.

If item leveling is in the game I'd be seriously annoyed. its elder scrolls, not wait to unlock everything scrolls.

It is very possible, as you say, if implemented correctly. I am a programmer and your suggestion of states would work well, as pre-configured setups require much less memory at runtime to instantiate, than actually generating at runtime. And to add a random factor to it is simple.



But if theft was made more difficult (example, a mod for oblivion (I think it was TIE) added guards to all of the lucratively stocked stores), then the respawns of valuable items would be justified.

Truth be told, when I made this post I wasn't even that worried about weapons, armor, or anything of an expensive nature. I was more concerned with the simple things in life. Plates, forks, baskets, fruits, books, etc. Don't get me wrong I think it would be cool if the more expensive items would respawn as well, but I'd more than understand if they didn't want to do that because of some sort of balance issue.

Granted, I realize a lot of people might find that to be a lot of work for something that admittedly a bit trivial at best. And I assume the programmers aren't going to be too worried about setting up such a system in the game just for the sake of ensuring that people in a given village are going to always have plenty of forks and fruit baskets. I don't know, it's just an atmosphere thing for me. I don't care about making money from the stealing, in a sense. I just hate the idea that every time I steal something, the game world becomes just a tiny bit more empty.

I don't really know jack about programming so I can't comment too much on that side of the idea. My original thought would be that maybe they could just find some way to flag the interiors of houses as a specific kind of region where all items just naturally respawn, drawing what new item spawns there from some generic household items table. But again I'm ignorant to the technical side of things, I'll admit that, and if this respawning items idea as a whole is just too burdensome to implement then I can understand and accept that... I might not like it, but I can accept it.

Just wishful thinking on m part, really.

Edit: And you know, the pre-configured setups thing is a way better idea than how I was stating it anyway. Makes it seem way more possible. Well, I'll cross my fingers.

I agree. After playing the same character for several months of stealing everything not nailed down, there is nothing left to take. If they could be replaced occasionally it would be nice.

Now I don't see that as being an effective use of game resources, though. As an alternative perhaps there could be a chest in each building that fills with the appropriate clutter that we could loot, allowing us to leave the decorations and food where it sits.

I also think that a small percentage of the homes, palaces, and merchants have a unique or rare item tucked away some where that could be rooted out, much like they did in morrowind. These items could be randomly placed as the building is entered the first time, using an un-leveled list of items ranging from weapons to jewelery.