Technically, you can't buy a chest. However you can buy a home that has chests in it. What the dev was refering to is just like Oblivion, if you put items in a chest that is not yours, you can either lose ownership of the item, where you are stealing if you take it back out, or, the chest re-spawns at some point. Re-spawn is unlikely as this was not really an issue in past games as there is no reason for most containers to re-spawn. Only the supply chests in the guilds did this. Now, it could mean that in this game, NPCs will in fact go through chests and take what they want, that is a more plausible answer. In fact, I would prefer that to happen as it means the NPCs are more independent.
Agreed, in Oblivion, FO3 and FONV, the majority of the containers did not "reset" unless there was a special script that triggered it, which makes sense because people would be wasting time farming containers and waiting the requisite amount of days for a cell to respawn instead of actually playing the game as designed. This opened up the possibility for players to "squat" in various locations, although you did not technically "own" the house/shack/cave/campsite or whatever place you rest your head, you can stash your gear and role play like it's your own place.
The only risk to squatting, is the aforementioned NPCs grabbing food, ammo and/or better gear from wherever you chose to stash your stuff, so places where hostile NPCs respawn is the worst places to stash gear, and places where friendly NPCs frequented were very iffy. Hopefully in Skyrim, there the first player purchasable house is cheap and easy to obtain, either that or hopefully, picking an out of the way container to store your gear is feasible in Skyrim, because I do like hoarding goods...
» Tue May 08, 2012 11:39 am 
