I bought and played NWN back when it came out. Then I bought the diamond edition and played the other campaigns/modules. Now I've purchased the NWN:EE and am replaying the OC for the first time since way back when.

All those years ago, I didn't enjoy the OC but I wasn't sure why. Yeah, the story is meh. Yeah, the characters are meh. Even back then, I didn't enjoy the blandness of the 3D art compared to all the 2D rpgs I'd played. But none of this explained my opinion. Now I know...

It's all the damned crates, boxes, and trunks one has to open. Normally, finding a chest is awesome in an rpg. There's some measure of anticipation involved. Not here. They are freaking everywhere. Walk in a room, there are six crates. Do they contain great stuff? Nope. Moderate stuff? Nope. Each one has either 2 gold or a crappy stone. Or a few arrows. Or a few normal bolts. Garbage. Six crates of garbage....instead of one. I would have been fine opening 1 crate and finding two stones, 10 gold and 14 arrows. The result is that finding treasure is more like cleaning up someone else's mess. And worse, half of them are locked or trapped. So it takes even longer.

I didn't realize it before because it's not something that jumps out at you. Well, it didn't jump at me. However, all that pointless looting slowly saps the life out of the whole game...not just the looting aspect. It makes exploring chore-like.

Me: "Let's avoid that room."
Tomi: "Demons inside?"
Me: "No. I can see five chests inside. And that's just looking through the keyhole."
Tomi: *shudders* No thanks. I washed the dishes this morning."

I'm sure someone else has complained about this. So have I now.

You are partially correct. The real reason you see this is because of the randomness of the loot. You can open a container and get 1 arrow piece, load the game, open the same chest and you can now get a +1 shield. They tried to mimic Diablo 2's randomness success but they did it poorly in my opinion.

I got used to it quickly tho.

I enjoyed breaking every barrel/chest/whatever to mark which ones I've looted. :)

Even weirder, what's inside of the chest depends on who opens it. Try doing chapter 1 with a 20th level character you'll find epic weapons and armor just lying around in a crate in the middle of the street.

I suspected it was level-determined random loot. Brings to mind that loot in NWN's OC is somewhat boring. It's probably a side effect of the random gen. I just finished the plague cure and I've seen 5 gloves of discipline by now.

We'll see.

Lootable items depend on three things:
1. Some are predefined and are always the same.
2. Level and campaign progress of your character.
3. Class of your character. And it matters what's the starting class, as well as what was the class that you took at the last levelling up.