Unique loot in Skyrim is still unique, it's just not strong at all.

well it seems that in skyrim, unique = special name

and its good for nothing junk

I disagree.

How many items have an actual unique effect? A couple of the Daedric Artifacts do, but thats about it.

It ruins the game for me, going through dungeons to find nothing but coins and crap.

I even found what appeared to be a hidden area (had to use a dragon shout to get there) only to find about 14 coins and an old sock

It'd be nice to find unique looking weapons/armour and weapons/armour with random stats on them. Im sure thats a main ingredient for RPG's.

Troll? Or joking? What's so unique about an item that You have 20 copies of. Like someone said. In MW there was ONE Daedric set, and You couldn't craft it. Also there were 3 types of Daedric Helmets. All those parts were scattered across the land where You could find them.

Unique items/Artifacts, in Skyrim most of them are not so "special" as they used to be.

If you haven't found unique loot then you haven't been everywhere. Massive game is massive. DLC will probably bolster an already impressive amount of uniques.

Name these unique loots you're finding everywhere?

Remember, they have to be unique. Not some enchantment anyone could enchant.

Azura's/Black Star, Dawnbreaker, Ebony Sword, Ebony Mail, Sanguine Rose, Mehrunes Dagger, and the list only gets bigger and better. There's also that unique Dragon Priest mask.

I mean the reason there isn't a lot of material customization. For weapons you got iron, steel, silver, orcish, elven, ebony, glass, deadric, and nord. What im trying to say is that there aren't any variations of the weapons, that ebony claymore of freezing is going to look the exact same as an ebony claymore of burning. The same goes for armor, yes the enchantments are different but your wearing and wielding the same thing. How cool would smithing be if you could change the color of armour or if there were variations in the armors. There should be custom weapon crafting as well, sort of like borderlands. Im not saying regular bandits should have randomized weapons, they should still have stock swords and armor. Im talking about bosses and special loot , and to be able to customize via money or smithing tree.

I think part of the difficulty in balancing crafting and adventuring loot is that you can think, "I did this quest for a god; I should get a better prize than something I could make myself", but these games are mostly about adventuring and questing, so it's like rewarding you for something you'd have done anyway whereas crafting is something you have to go out of your way to do. If you spent time and perks working up your smithing skill and couldn't make things better than what people give you, it'd feel like a waste.

Still, the rewards seem different enough to make uniques appealing. I can learn crafting and make good sword, but it'd still be the same kind of sword I've already got just with higher numbers. I can't make something that looks as cool as Dawnbreaker or has a unique enchantment like Wabbajack.

@Main Event - Those are all quest rewards from Daedric Princes - it's expected of them. I'll give you the masks though; but when most people mean unique loot they mean items you find and stumble upon. It doesn't have to be all-powerful; finding a Daedric cuirass perched on a near-missable alcove is just as unique as finding Mentor's Ring on a Draugr.

It's the thrill of exploration, like in Morrowind - remember finding Mentor's ring in that seaside tomb? Or plundering an ancient archmage's vault? Or doing some throw-away quest and expecting some cash in return only to get a unique Daedric Dagger.

To a lesser extent, it was also there in Oblivion; like the Dark Brotherhood's unique quest rewards for fulfilling a bonus, or stumbling into learning Finger of the Mountain from a Mages' Guild quest, or stumbling on to the Mundane Ring. Or even discovering Calliban's Retort or the Circlet of Omnipotence.

THIS ^


Oh my I forgot! It was so HARD to get them!

Most of the items You mentioned can be acquired so easily and/or replaced by something better. Just because they might have rare skin or name doesn't make those items truly unique. Skyrim item system made once really rare items/artifacts - not so special anymore. They might just look cool. My problem here is that with each next game there are less and less items that You really need to work hard to get. And it's not just that. It's the lack of Journal, magic Quest Arrows, too bright dungeons and caves that break the immersion.
To make it easier to understand. I once hunted for Daedric, Dwarven, Glass items.
Now I sell them.

Unique - without an equal or equivalent; unparalleled.

I'm also disappointed in that the "rare" loot is usually nothing that can't be crafted by the player. The only difference is the fancy name.

The exception are the daedric quest rewards and the masks, which I collect. I like that Sanguine's Rose is a....rose and not just some staff with a unique name.

Since my Nord makes most of his money from selling alchemy potions, most dungeon loot gets left behind.

+1

Agreed, The value of random enchanted items has gone down, there not even rare and don't even really take that much effort to get.
after your first play through you basically know where anything good is, because it's all basically scripted rather than random loot.
and if there was still available enchantments for loot such as Fortify Attributes, Water Walking, Detect life, Night Eye, Chameleon, Reflect Physical and Magical damage in addition to Enchanted loot being decently rare then it'd be put back to it's original value.

What's more awesome then finding a pair of Jesus Boots?

with the smithing system being overpowered as it is, it really takes out from the value of unique weapons. You are able to craft so much more better weapons with the smithing perk that its almost useless to use daedric artifacts and unique items. But in skyrim there seems a shortage of unique items compared to oblivion and morrowind.

There is a cool helmet that I really like in Skyrim. Helm of Yngol. Despite the obvious that I didn't have to work much to get it ( master difficulty ) it's an really unique armor piece, something rare in this game. Problem is that I started to feel the "thrill" only after few months of the Skyrim's release ( I already got nearly every special item ) when modders created such mods like, Toughter Traps, Darker Dungeons, etc. and when I edited my .ini file to remove the compass which (my mistake) I should have done much earlier. However we are talking about vanilla game. It should have been there from the start.

Now imagine with all that in mind. Wouldn't it be cool to get a full set of Yngol? No quest, nothing. Just random location across the land where the devs it's parts.

Good points. Not only do smithing and enchanting kill the value of random loot, but the removal of several popular spells from the past doesn't help things either.

In addition to Jesus Boots, I'd like a pair of Night-Eye goggles.

Ring of Khajiiti. But only if they would put in some corpse drowned in Blackreach waters. No quest of course, maybe a small note that would indicate a special item in hands of an adventurer that was last seen in one of the Dwarven ruins leading to this Underground City. I can already imagine the frustration, the loss of faith and finally the joy of finding it.

To be fair, I think the only interesting piece of armor i found was the Helm of Yngol. But thats what, 1 helmet out of 1 dungeon, out of over a 100 "unique" dungeons and caves in Skyrim. It's kinda pathetic. In Skyrim, they figured most kiddies don't want the element of actually working to get a good item. It really is quite annoying to think about how much Skyrim watered down.

Couldn't say this anyway better.

I have 100 in smithing, enchant, and alchemy and with 200k+ septims, I don't need money any more. This means that I no longer look in chests or peek into every crack and crevice. There's no need. Nothing I find will compare with items I can make. This makes dungeon diving mechanical and unrewarding.

one of the things that drew me into morrowind was how great it felt to find a hidden unique item.

skyrim really blew it as far as economy, unique items and loot finding.

and, for a rpg-type game, that's not a good quality to have.

I feel the opposite if I understand the Original Post.

In Oblivion it was way waaay too easy to get high level enchanted loot. After a while a high level item like a Mundane Ring was just something to throw on the pile.

At higher levels every dungeon and enemy was cram packed with very high level loot. It was so common that finding it meant nothing. Worse than nothing, because I feel an obligation to haul it back to sell. And although all these enchanted items were obscenely common, they still cost a lot, and so you couldn't get anything near full price from a merchant -- which also didn't make sense.

I'm glad enchanted an higher level loot is much rarer in Skyrim.

sigh. this topic again. i will say it again and again and again : YOU ARE CORRECT that skyrim has nearly zero thrill of exploration. but it DOES NOT MATTER if you are correct or not.

why ? because Leveledthesda (thats what i will call them from now till forever because they deverse it for making even vendor inventories level based and thinking it is a good system just because they are lazy asses) does NOT CARE.
they will never ever get this point. they dont want to see it. they just want moar money. so they go mainstream (the players that dont think when playing and want anything handed over to them without doing a [censored] for it) and they will continue doing this and nothing will stop them.

the gaming industry has gone the route of GREED and will continue like this. we will never see a game with morrowinds feeling ever again in the next ten years. sad but true.

you can already bet on elder scrolls VI : mainstream of money.