Has anyone tried it? I was thinking it would be much better if when you picked a lock instead of a mini-game you started playing a "picking" animation and you had to hold the select button. While you hold it and are picking your character is locked in place but you can move the camera around to see if anyone is coming. While doing this a bar is displayed that is filled but slowly empties to show how much longer till the lock is picked.


The harder the lock the longer it takes. A higher skill (or use of perks) would make picking quicker across all locks. All locks should be attemptable but locks far outside your skill should take a while to pick.


Picks should be very rare but never break. If you are arrested they are taken from you. You can find them but they should be extremely rare in loot tables, rare to find placed in the world and sold by appropriate factions (Dark Brotherhood and Thieves Guild) but should be fairly pricey. Because they never break it's pointless to buy multiple unless your getting a spare to keep at home.

I did this in Oblivion (as I told you already in our PM). I cannot think why this could not be done in Skyrim I just have not gotten around to modding this as I keep very busy with my combat overhaul mod. I would not mind seeing someone else do this mod for Skyrim, it would be nice to get some credit however. With my Oblivion mod the longer you took the more likely actors would be called in from other parts of the cell or spawned in.

I loved the real-time lockpicking in Morrowind (it was also character-skill-based too, another plus). I was greatly disappointed when I discovered Oblivion's locking mini-game stopped time. It felt like a "cheat" to me. Time your lockpicking at the right instant, and you can spend the rest of eternity picking a lock without any danger of getting caught. To me, that's just lame.

So I would love to see a mod introduce real-time lockpicking into Skyrim.