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Since the moment I stepped into The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remastered, its sewers have been calling my name. In the same way I imagine goblins must crave deep cool caves and mountainous retreats after a hard day spent ambushing merchants, I've been drawn to all things subterranean for as long as I can remember. I don't know why. All I do know is that there is something about being underground, about tunnels that web beneath the known surface like a secret world, that fascinates a part of my brain that's too primal to commune with.
As a child I fantasized about having an underground den beneath my garden. I considered every manhole a portal to the ultimate form of transport; hidden pathways for psychological rat children who have learned to walk on two legs. As an adult, I still tend to build my houses in Terraria and Minecraft into the side of hills, hold an aching nostalgia for Final Fantasy 12's Garamsythe Waterway, and still think the idea of getting around via sewers (in-game or otherwise) is neat.
All of this is to say: when Oblivion Remastered cast its stinky siren song, it was only a matter of time until I heeded its call. At least, that was the plan. Instead, I made it as far as breaking into an Imperial City shop's basement before turning back, shocked into a stupor by the realization that I've been playing Oblivion – specifically, its lockpicking minigame – wrong for a little over 15 years.
Gimme shelter
Originally, the plan was to spend 24 hours living beneath Imperial City. I had a few goals to achieve in that time: mapping the sewers in their entirety, getting to the root of my dwarflike obsession, and seeing how much money I could make by robbing any houses with basements connected to the sewers. I was even going to enforce mandatory eating and sleeping, in an effort to capture the full tunnel-dwelling experience.
There were a number of false starts. I didn't want to backtrack through the tutorial, so my journey would start via a grate within the city rather than the riverside tunnel you first leave the sewers from. I spent several in-game hours breaking into homes to find a way in, but every basement I searched was woefully lacking in sewer access. By the time I entered the sewers it was already 8pm, and even that proved a dead end due to a lowered sluice gate. Back to the surface we go.
From there I fell into a comfortable – if a little frustrating – routine of harmless burglary, breaking into entire rows of homes in search of the sweet, sweet depths. Streets turned to districts, and I picked more locks than a lifetime of Oblivion Remastered Thieves Guild quests could offer. Somewhere along the way, one of the universe's deepest mysteries began to unfurl. Though I've always wondered how lockpicking works in Oblivion, I've never really tried to find out. My usual tactic – to simply vibe through the minigame – had a pretty good success rate, but it was purely instinctual and relied on feeling the "right" time to click a tumbler in place.
While picking seemingly every lock in Imperial City, patterns formed. Every time you knock a tumbler upward, it moves at a different speed, and each successful click correlates with a specific, slower-moving animation for the tumbler bouncing up. Surely, to save the risk of relying on reaction speeds, you can just knock each tumbler up repeatedly until it moves at its slowest? I test my hypothesis on The Best Defense's front door, and when it works without losing a lockpick, I beeline toward the locked basement door, not even stopping to swipe the shelves of armor. Seconds later, the next door is open. How has it taken me more than a decade to learn how lockpicking works?
To most Oblivion players – long-time fans or total newcomers – reading this is likely the equivalent to watching a toddler puzzle the alphabet together. "No shit," I can already hear, (an aside: please don't say that to toddlers), the more generous among you perhaps politely happy for me. Regardless: when I broke into The Best Defense's basement and finally found one of the sewer grates I'd been looking for, I was too excited to plumb its depths. A whole new world had opened up – not the one of rats, sewage, and dim passageways I'd set out in search for, but one where Oblivion Remastered's Dark Brotherhood and Thieves Guild quests are magically so much easier. The possibilities!
Sewers, my beloved, I'll come back for you. I've even come away with a half-cooked plan to become a vampire hunter, courtesy of the club of Van Helsings I stumbled upon while searching for Imperial City's secret streets. For now though, drunk on power in a way that only someone who's 19 years too late to common knowledge can experience, I'm content being a tumbler-tossing sneak above ground.
Avoid repeating my mistakes with our Oblivion Remastered lockpicking guide, or read about the time I was hunted for eight hours by a killer unicorn in Oblivion Remastered
