Though we've already gone over how to get a basically infinite amount of Lockpicks in The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remastered, the topic of lockpicking in general is certainly worth a second look, too. You see, this is the single most important mini-game in the entire experience, and you will keep doing it over and over (and over) again as you progress through Cyrodill. Crucially, Oblivion's lockpicking is also much different from that of Skyrim and even the Fallout games, so your muscle memory doesn't apply.

If you find yourself continuously breaking all the Lockpicks you hoard, this is absolutely the place to be. Though Oblivion's lockpicking isn't art as such, it isn't too far from it, either, and there's a trick to getting it done no matter the lock difficulty.

How to properly lockpick in Oblivion Remastered?

Believe it or not, the simplest and most straightforward way to lockpick in Oblivion is to carefully listen to how the lock is behaving. Using your mouse, you need to nudge the Lockpick itself left and right from one tumbler to the next, then push them up and lock them in with left-click. This is quite easy when you only have one or two tumblers to work with, but as the difficulty of the lock goes up, so too does the number of tumblers you've got to contend with. Further, if you mess up one tumbler, all of them come crashing down (unless you're an Apprentice in Security, but that's a different can of worms).

Back on track, the trick is in listening to the noises the tumblers are making. When it's just the right time to lock a tumbler in place, you'll hear its clicking noise increasing in pitch. It's a slight difference, to be sure, but it's absolutely there, and you will inevitably start making the distinction, now that you know what to listen for.

There's more, though: a different trick that might be handy for those who just cannot reliably discern the tumblers' noises is to look for the way they are falling. There are varying speeds at which they drop down from the locked position, and in our testing, the drop after the very fast one will always or almost always be slow. It is much easier to lock in the tumbler when it is slowly dropping, so this is something to look out for.

Alternatively, if you've got a healthy enough supply of Lockpicks or an actual Deadric Skeleton Key at hand, you can just go ham spamming the 'R' key during the lockpicking minigame. This will eventually open the lock for you, but every failure destroys a single Lockpick, so that's something to consider.