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So recently I began playing the 360 version again, for the first time since about 2008. The PC version is objectively superior in every way, but for some reason I am actually loving playing the 360 version again. I haven't played vanilla Oblivion since I got the PC version, and even though vanilla is flawed, I love it. I also enjoy being away from the tilde key for a while (I have a player.resethealth and a player.additem F problem). Anyone else have a similar experience?

Doesn't Oblivion not have proper gamepad support on PC? That means it is not objectively superior in every way >_>

Lockpicking is easier when you can use both hands (in real life as well as in Oblivion) so the PC's mouse-and-keyboard combo really hurts there. Spamming the Speechcraft minigame is much faster with a 360 contoller as well.

I've never gotten a controller to work with PC Oblivion. The right stick won't control the camera.

I also own it on 360 and PS3. I definitely prefer it with a controller.

To be honest, I never remember lockpicking in Oblivion as a thing you did. Getting the Skeleton Key is super trivial, or making a perfect lock spell is really simple.

Roleplay-wise, it's kind of hard remaining surreptitious when you unlock a door with wild hand gestures and a glowing ball of light.

How do YOU unlock things, then? With noisy hand tools and blunt force?

Well, I'd prefer to be able to smash the simple wooden door with my heavy axe, but that's not a thing that has ever been possible in the Elder Scrolls universe, save for that one Nord in the ESO cinematic.

You could in Daggerfall. Just attack a locked object, it will eventually break open.

You could do that in Arena as well. I'm not sure why they ever took it out; being able to bash down a door seems like a pretty basic thing for a character to be able to do. It comes up in tabletop RPGs all the time.

The lockpicking minigame in Oblivion sucked. I could never figure out how to open anything greater than Apprentice difficulty even when I followed the rules, so I basically just ended up wasting hundreds of lockpicks (you think I'm joking) trying to get into a commoner's door. Much different from in Skyrim where you can realistically expect to get through the whole game with one lockpick if you're careful.

You could just do the auto complete button, if you're that troubled. Alternatively, spells or Skeleton Key. Thankfully, Bethesda provided loads of options.

Yeah, the auto complete button, or as I call it the "break a lockpick button." That crap really annoyed me. I honestly miss the days when lockpicking required a skill check and your character needed to be genuinely good at what they do as opposed to the player being able to cheese it if they're quick and delicate enough.

I never had trouble with the minigames, but I always did get annoyed in Morrowind when I failed a lock 50 times in a row. Smashing things really was the best option.

If you want annoying failure conditions, look no further than Daggerfall, where you can only attempt to pick a given lock once every twenty-four hour period, even if it's in the middle of a dungeon, and even the Burglar class which specializes in lockpicking is going to fail about 90% of the time starting out, especially since using the Open spell doesn't count as picking a lock for the purposes of joining the Thieves Guild. The Grey Fox must be a god. This was really annoying because Daggerfall had the same problem as Skyrim where a quest-critical NPC would often be behind a locked door with a timer ticking away in the background. I remember reading that they had patched this at one point, which is a bold-faced lie.

Although at least in Daggerfall the game didn't spawn an army of guards from out of nowhere to kill you on sight if you failed. Fricking battlemages always wrecked my [&@%!] in that game.

How did I not know that about Daggerfall? I can't remember if I actually ever tried to smash a door.

Oblivion breaking a lockpick for every fail was nothing like Morrowind. Morrowind could fail 25 times before a pick broke because it was designed with character skill in mind as a CRPG should. Oblivion breaks a lockpick for every fail because it's designed for player skill rather than character. So the two aren't really the same.