Well for instance.. I can open the very hard lock in the pirate ship..-non respawning chest good early housing for player. - At level 1. -Oblivion

At level 1 I can open the chests outside Riften in the Guard towers..Confiscated goods chests With some careful maneuvering.. -picks seem to break easily in Skyrim- I've forgotten the lock level but it is higher than novice. -Skyrim

It is a single player game. shakes my head at insults.

The thing is these locked in levels prevent one from even trying the lock and it isn't realistic imo..

shrugs

Or temporary and rare skill books like Vegas has.

Except if this was the case, everyone would join you and not bother with these perks. Which would mean Bethesda purposefully made two perks to be fairly useless. Some perks are more attractive to different players depending on play style, but making two perks unattractive to everyone regardless of play style? I highly doubt Bethesda would do that.

I don't think the skill system of locks has anything to do with single player saving abilities. I think it's far more likely that the perk ranks/skill are a simulation of your characters abilities and skills based on their growing experience, just like every other perk/skill is/was. You might be a mechanical engineer in real life and want to play as one, but your character doesn't start off like that. You need to show that's the type of character you want to play by selecting the right Specials and perks.

Additionally the inability to even try a lock above your perk/skill level is indeed unrealistic, however necessary to simulate your characters lack of skill without pissing off the player to no end. Think about it. Your character doesn't posses the knowledge/agility to pick a certain lock. You the player gets to try it anyways with your character and you spend how long failing and breaking picks before you give up? Rather than let you waste your time at a task your character can't do, Bethesda just tells you right up front, your character doesn't have the necessary skills to do this, don't bother.

The Stealth Skills Rebalanced mod for Skyrim does all of this, and pretty well, I think. It makes harder locks prohibitively difficult, so that you have to invest at least a few perks if you want to crack them without tearing your hair out. Not sure what they could do to scale up the difficulty of terminals, other than putting more words on the screen, but reducing the amount of attempts we can make to begin with seems like the easiest solution. Try hacking a Very Hard terminal in only two attempts.

As for save scumming, I don't think Bethesda should bother trying to restrict that in any way. But I do think they should try to create failstates where we have a reason not to save scum. For hacking, there was no point in having the terminal get locked down after running out of attempts, since we could just save scum or even better, back out of the terminal on our last attempt. And Bethesda actually encouraged backing out in their hacking tutorial - so in the end I'd rather they just drop the lockout completely, and have the terminal's passwords reset automatically after we run out of attempts. Maybe set off an alarm or a trap if we fail, in places where it's appropriate.

The real gameplay mechanic that encourages (I daresay necessitates) save scumming, though, is pickpocketing. If you get caught pickpocketing, there's really not much to do but reload your save. There are a few things that Bethesda can do, but I'd prefer they just completely overhaul the pickpocketing system to begin with. It hasn't really changed at all since Daggerfall (!).

If the Perception video is any indication, NPCs will have different levels of ease to Pickpocket them. Sleeping targets are easiest, children and elderly easy, etc. Hopefully, this means you can reliably limit your Pickpocketing by Perk Level to targets you can be pretty sure won't notice.

What I'd love is if Pickpocketing was more automatic, so that we have a limited number of dips on an NPC at a time and whatever we pull is based on our Pickpocket rank and some Luck. Maybe even one of those "hold the action button for this long, but not too long" mini-games, too. Being able to thumb through NPC inventories is a little weird (although I wouldn't mind if that was enabled by a perk), although reports from Quakecon indicate that container menus appear in real time, so maybe we have to pickpocket in real time too.

At any rate, it's less of a big deal for Fallout since the game isn't asking us to level up our Pickpocketing by constantly doing it. If you wanted to get 100 Pickpocketing in Skyrim, you would either spend a lot of time in jail, or a lot of time reloading saves.

I'll correct your misperception..

It's a single player ROLE PLAYING game. It is not an action game, nor is it a puzzle game. Outcomes of attempted actions in an RPG must be dependent on character ability, not on player ability. Otherwise, you do not have an RPG in the first place, but rather an action-based game (i.e., player skill versus character skill).

Since BGS games are claimed to be RPGs, people want them to actually be RPGs, not action games. Locked levels are very realistic because the entire point is that your character cannot even figure out how to begin to attempt to open the lock in question unless your character has sufficient skill to do so. This is exactly the same as real life, of course, so it is very amusing for anyone to claim that it is not realistic.

It's really very simple, especially since there are plenty of action games on the market already.

Except that Bethesda's RPGs are and have always been Action RPGs - so their challenge is to balance player skill with character skill in such a way that it still gives you the visceral experience of an action game, while still giving all of your character stats significance.

I mean think about it. If you handed me a lockpick and a padlock and told me to pick the lock I would have no idea how.

This is very true and in many circumstances, like combat, can be applied quite well. However, sometimes you can't really find a solid balance and either rely almost entirely on the player's skill (Lock picking in Skyrim) or almost entirely on character skill (Fallout Speech checks, Lock picking, and Hacking). Too heavily weighted on player skill, and character stats stop being significant. You might as well not have the character's perks/skills in the game. Too heavily weighted on character skill, and it feels less like an action game.

My friends and I used to pick cheap Chinese padlocks when we were kids for fun. We knew the general idea from movies and TV shows, and it wasn't too hard to figure out. We used to race each other to see who could pick their lock the fastest. Of course, in real life those would be classified as Very Easy locks. Really, any lock that can opened by a 9 year-old with two straightened paperclips deserves that title. I'm pretty sure they only had 1 or 2 tumblers.

Never achieved any success on a proper padlock like a Masterlock though.

I see what you mean, but I'd still rather see it in-game as prohibitively difficult rather than "you aren't allowed to open this yet".

It might be that the actual perk isn't a 5-ranked thing like other "skill" perks, too, since locks and terminals may not need that amount of investment if they're going to be somewhat simple. I wouldn't mind a 3-rank perk for each of them that ultimately nullifies any challenge from the mini-games. I wouldn't say Lockpicking was worth an entire skill tree in Skyrim, but it definitely deserves a few perks at least.

I still dont know why i cant shoot a lock open

I dislike the insult. I am NOT a scum!

I like your idea.

I don't either ..

Yes Bethesda, why can't we? hmmm?

I know everyone hates it when I bring realism into this, but you can't shoot off a padlock with most calibers of handguns and rifles. Even with multiple shots. Because lock makers aren't stupid, and plan on people that watch too many movies shooting their locks. I'm guessing lock manufacturers in the Fallout world took the same precautions so that locks don't melt under the blast of a plasma shot.

.50 caliber rifles and anti-material rifles ... sure. They could blast open a lock. And everything for some distance behind it.

In terms of lockpicking, I always felt the generic bobby pin / lockpick was missing some opportunity in terms of crafting or item hunting in the game. Lock pick kits of better quality that gave some actual mini-game use bonus would be a nice thing to hunt for / craft. I'm not talking about the crazy OP Skeleton Key in Skyrim, just some better lock picks that last longer or even give you some chance to start nearer the sweet spot of the lock. Perks let you craft better ones maybe?

I've always felt the hacking mini-game would benefit from changing the starting # of tries and possibly a change in the replenishment (either only renewing a limited number, or increase/decrease the chance of it happening). The variables for these changes would be associated SPECIALs (perception / agility?), perks and terminal difficulty.

For Elder Scrolls, I always felt they should just dump Lockpicking as a skill altogether and replace it with a few perks in the Sneak tree and a wider variety of Lockpicks, as well as alternatives like bashing the lock open or open spells (both of which were only cut to make Lockpicking a more worthwhile skill, and it's still worthless in Skyrim).

For Fallout, I'm completely fine with it just being a perk (although if lockpicking is as open and as easy as Skyrim, I can't imagine the perk having many ranks). Am I the only one who thinks it's a little weird when RPGs have Lockpicking as a full skill, next to stuff like entire schools of magic or proficiency with a type of weapon? Just seems weird to have an entire skill based on one simple action (that in some RPGs is nothing more than a dice roll). I dunno.

I can understand that. If the next Elder Scrolls game suddenly switched over from their player-skill-focused lock picking method to something like Fallout's "You can't open this yet" method, I'd be quite disappointed. I also agree that with that method, an entire skill tree is rather a bit much, but some perks/skills would still be welcome. If they reduced it to only 3 perk ranks in Fallout 4 (which were still very useful) and changed the method to being much more focused on player skill, I'd be fine with that. I have a feeling they didn't, but I could easily be wrong. Also in reference to your other post, I did miss my Open spell.


As long as some of the harder locks and computers would be quite time consuming/difficult to break into without any associated perks in lock picking / hacking, these ideas sound quite good. I'd certainly welcome a little variety in how the mini-games could be beaten.

If there's levels to the lock pick perk, I would like that each level is a different type of lock to pick.

rather then just considering the lock is suddenly more difficult or have more pins.

Padlocks (can be busted)

Inbuilt locks

Dial locks

Button locks

etc.

This should be in "Thief's" alley, but sadly they didn't take that opportunity... to have multiple kind of locks,

iirc there's only two types.

If the leaked gamescom footage is to go by, its the same lock system as Fallout 3/NV (and I mean exactly the same, down to how the lockpicking "minigame")

I'd love multiple lockpicking minigames, but yeah I think it's just the one we're familiar with. The mini-games supposedly happen in real time, though, which is something I've wanted ever since there were minigames - the extra pressure of getting caught by NPC patrols will add a lot on its own.

As an aside, Fallout probably has my favorite hacking minigame.

I think it could be something like this. Or maybe the length of the passwords just decrease with your increased perk levels, like they did with the level of the computer terminal in FO3.

I think the lockpicking is going to be very similar to Skyrim. I have a feeling they've done away with the level lock so you at least have a chance to open every lock and terminal. The danger in that, though, is that when you (the player) gets good enough at the game, you can open even the hardest locks with no skill in lockpicking. That's what happened in Skyrim at least.

Edit: Come to think of it, how come ALL locks in the world are tumbler locks? If I was a corporation and really wanted to secure a certain area, I'd probably put an electronic lock of sorts on my door, rather than a tumbler lock...This way Science could play into Lockpicking too and a Bobby Pin wouldn't the the answer to all your prayers.

I hope they at least let me attempt to pick locks out of my league. Its one of those feelings.
picking a master lock when your level 25 in lockpicking.....you know 300+ lockpicks later