Lockpicking in Vidya

They really improved it. I wish the original Thiefs had TDM's lockpicking.

Ratchet and clank

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You also need to use the right type of pick

Lock picking mini games are never justified. Just make it a skill check.

Oblivion.
That was the closest to realistic picking I've seen.

In stealth games, lockpicking minigames serve to make the player waste his time which makes the situation more tense when an enemy approaches. You saw this with Thief's and Deus Ex's approach where you click one button and wait for the thing to go open.
Of course that's not any fun, so minigames are added to spice up interactivity.

fugg

I think the original XBOX one works on 360.

And you should be able to get tons of them at any local retro store. Im sure even Amazon or EBAY has tons of them.

A minigame is a skill check.

This.

It was fun to do … but it was annoying to break the flow of the game. And at the same time, too overpowered.

no thanks

If the game is just a stealth game, maybe speeding up the lockpicking could cause more noise. If an RPG, you could increase the chance of failing the skill check.

I have a few ideas for this

Can we just take a moment to discuss how retarded the lockpicking minigames in Fallout3/4 and Skyrim were? If you know anything about lockpicking then they're pretty triggering. It's almost as if the people who designed the minigames don't know how the fuck you're supposed to pick a lock.

Oblivion's minigame actually made more sense, even if it was still kinda silly.

I actually know jack shit about locks and lockpicking, please educate me

I could never fucking ever get the hang of oblivion lock picking.
I could do it but I always managed to go through lock picks like they were going out of style which for me they were as it was only a matter of time before I made a "open master lock" spell or got the skeleton key and never had to bother with getting good with them for the rest of that play through
Call me a casual all you want, I know that I deserve it.

The trick is getting down the timing. You start lifting the spring rhythmically until you can catch its oscillation rhythm, then lock it in top position.

I'l look for the PC version later on.
pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Tom_Clancy's_Splinter_Cell

two second search on tpb and i found a gog torrent
its also on steam

It's not that hard.
All you have to do is never try to set the pins unless they move up as slowly as possible.

yea if youre a fucking retard

Some of those are probably dead though

PS2 Version's on emuparadise.

i thought you meant downloading that torrent would brick your pc (death)

The problem with picking minigames is that lock picking IRL requires sensitive feedback, which a game will never have. If you wanted a realistic minigame, it would be something like:

This, Thief had the perfect lockpicking mechanics. It is simply assumed that your character knows how to pick (you are a master thief after all) and you just hold down the button hoping that no guard comes along.

Lockpicking minigames are just tedious. The first few times it might be neat, but it gets old fast. There is no reason I should have to do it manually, that would be like manually moving the feet of my character instead of just holding down the button and just assuming that my character knows how to walk.

Yes, Daggerfall.

1. Kick the shit out of the door
2. Profit

This is the worst thing holy shit GREAT JOB REMOVING THE TENSION

you'd need to add a mechanic so they player could have a way of sensing if anyone was near or far while picking to take out the time freeze aspect

maybe just some kind of heartbeat tone that increases if enemies are in the area or something

Or how about neither of that since it's dumb

Either have all your focus on picking or not.

Or just the sound of fucking footsteps, you know like in Thief.

yeah or that, i'm retarded

Dying Light doesn't freeze time when you're picking locks. If you don't throw firecrackers to distract zombies or if you don't have a buddy to watch your back, you're pretty much fucked in every hole of your body.

That's fucking casual

DeadBolt had a really simple lock picking mechanic which for the most part didn't add much, but several times you would get jumped while in the middle of it from a delayed enemy spawn.
Cheeky cunts

I just react to the tumbler. The tumbler can go up at 3 speeds: Instant, fast, and medium, but the timing for the latter two are almost the same.

Left stick controlled torque, right stick controlled pin setting.

It was pretty cool, though a little over-simplified. I think the reason more modern games don't go balls to the wall on realism is because a) probably easier to code and b) some moralfags don't want to teach kids how to break into things.

The best way I can think of doing it is to have you able to move the pick up and down via analog input and hit a key when you hear it seat. Then you move the pick in / out to find the next tumbler and repeat.

Im not sure how realistic it was but Still Life's was fun

Like oblivion?
It was actually pretty fun until you got the unbreakable lockpick and just spammed auto attempt until it worked.

You can easily learn how to pick locks via youtube videos.

But the general idea is you need to put tension on the keyhole while trying to pop tumblers out of the "keyhole shaft" so the keyhole can turn. Modern Bethesda games have you perform the tension AFTER you touch the tumblers, and you'll see the keyhole shaft stop rotating if you don't have the "sweet spot" (which is not how lockpicking works at all, you either get all the tumblers and the lock becomes unlocked or you don't and it stays locked)

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I'm thinking audio only with no GUI as such and with analog tumbler input instead of Oblivians "whack it up and press X before it falls".

Alpha Protocol actually had my absolute favourite lockpicking. You pressed the trigger buttons just hard enough to move the tumbler to the right position then hit a button to "lock it in" and move on to the next tumbler. It felt great to do and was one of those in-game skills you actually find yourself getting better at because it's all in fine motor control as opposed to Bethesda's "where's the sweet spot" bullshit.

This is Bethesda we're talking about, they don't know jack shit about anything, especially coding or game design.

Mafia 2 had you picking car locks in that manner.

That's not gonna work for a mouse & keyboard game though; it requires analog inputs with a moderate amount of depth.

i want more games that makes me use brute force as means of lock picking just like Castle Wolfenstein did. it makes you input 3 number combination but you have to do it in the correct order to lock pick the door. Maybe add sounds to hear if you put in the correct number, and maybe in hard difficulty you can add more numbers and/or disable the sound

Man people on this board are very stupid. Lockpicking and other intricate things require too much jostling for it to ever be meaningfully immersive with a simple controller/m&kb. You need full VR for this with no clipping. No lockpicking mechanism is ever realistic or intuitive in games. Just make it an animation.

I bet you think Human Revolution is better than the original too.

Why not both?
Provide a side-view of the lock with a fog of war over everything that isn't the head of your pick, to provide a graphical indication to the player of what the character is feeling

the dark mod style lock picking is the best around.

what a shame

Holy shit, I never tried that. I was such a retard…

Oh jeeze you just sold me on it

watchmen did it pretty good.

but honestly lockpicking is pretty fucking boring. i almost prefer how it is in hitman. wait and look around while fiddling with it, and back off if anyone comes. in an RPG it could just be a time/noise thing that gets better as you level up.

This. Minigameization is stupid.

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Cheeky bastard.

not at all.

like that code cracker game?

Neat.

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So shrinking yourself to enter the lock and to grind over some rails while jumping over mines and shit? Seems kind of inefficent.

Visceral cleanup detail has this for several locked mechanisms.

one is a massive 17-19 digit code

it's random every playthrough

there is no choice but to brute force it

It's a shame those were the only locks the game had
Some of those areas were screaming for retinal/fingerprint scanners

I liked the lockpicking in Alpha Protocol even though it was babby easy

Agreed. Especially the zero G Event Horizon map.

A friend of mine is a locksmith and I was with him a few times when he's opened doors for people, just because he wanted company.

He had this tool that could open almost any lock in a few seconds. It looked sort of like a very small pistol, with a grip, a trigger and a long, thin, flat piece of metal, instead of a barrel. He would insert the metal into the lock and pull the trigger a few times, while gently shaking it. It made a very loud, metallic clicking noise and opened almost any door, very quickly.

He explained that it forcefully knocked all the tumblers into place and only certified locksmiths have access to them.

Off topic, but I thought it might be interesting.

Is he sure? Because most of the online lock tool shops say they only sell to locksmiths, but they don't seem to check.

But that's how you lock pick user.

Now there is a electric thing but otherwise is bumping the tube, let it lock with turning, bumping the second etc etc

Yeah, I guess not.

Oblivion's lockpicking can already be done by audio only. I use to play with a mod that covered up all the tumblers.

I'm pretty sure this is just a more fancy version of a bump key. For all the mystic finesse in silently shifting individual pins in lockpicking, turns out the most practical way is to just use a filed down key to thrash the pins like they owe you money.

In the shitty PC port of Alpha Protocol the locks are sometimes literally impossible to beat in the time limit.

In the PC port of Dragon's Dogma, the QTE are also impossible to beat in the time limit.
It's a problem with ports in general, and with QTEs.

I worked for a summer at a storage facility and got to use bump keys all the time. They're fucking awesome, but they track them like crazy because if even one goes missing the police need to be notified.

i stole one and framed a coworker I hated, but broke it trying to get into a locked hot tub room at a hotel

It's a check of the player's skill, not the character's. This is a problem in games like Oblivion where you can unlock every door from the start, even if your character is supposed to suck at lockpicking.

I like that idea, hopefully there are devs ITT.

Interesting, I haven't heard of that mod.

Lockpicking is the only mini game i find acceptable

I fucking loath mini games, back when the UnrealShit3 was new and every game used that crap i was TRIGGERED LIKE FUK

Then you hate games

I agree that 90% of minigames are shit as they ruin mah 'mersion while being worst than the game I am playing.

You just have brain problems
But i agree they are rarely employed well
Chinatown Wars for example was great, shame it was made for shovelware consoles

Honestly I'd rather have it you need to steal the key from a guard or someone nearby to get through than have some random ass mini-game that doesn't fit with the rest of the game at all.

no shit for brains, you have brain problems, they are always shit, lockpicking being the execption. Lets see if you can grasp that turdbrain

No, he's right, just to autistic to say why.

Playing Morrowind versus Oblivion or Skyrim, one of the best features is how lockpicking works. You use a lockpick on a locked door\container as if it was a weapon, meaning you don't just open some menu completely withdrawn from the world and people can still see you.
It's like when you see an apple and you want to eat it, for some reason you gotta put it in inventory, open the inventory and then eat it. There's nothing similar to "grab and use" in vanilla. At least with mods, I can equip\drink\eat anything by dragging it with Z and then activating. Too bad the FUCKING CONSOLES took that option from Skyrim, since "lol not enough buttons".

In Oblivion you can unlock any door or chest and nobody gives a fuck, only if you take something from inside. It takes away from the tension, something that was pretty great in Thief for instance.

I even got a mod to reimplement something similar to Morrowind for Oblivion but even better. While lockpicking, you'll sometimes hear a "click" sound. If you press your mouse at that time, your odds of lockpicking increase. Failing the timing ruins your odds and not clicking at all doesn't affect them, so it's both a skill check but with player-skill involved too.