6 April 2013: I have released http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/downloads/file.php?id=11450! Over 400 lines of new dialogue in this update, including commentary on Solstheim. Please give it a try if you meet the requirements and let me know if you encounter any issues.
SOME SCREENSHOTS:
http://static.skyrim.nexusmods.com/downloads/images/11450-1-1330353743.jpg | http://static.skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/images/11450-1-1339261382.jpg | http://static.skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/images/11450-1-1333651228.jpg | http://static.skyrim.nexusmods.com/downloads/images/11450-1-1330389031.jpg | http://static.skyrim.nexusmods.com/downloads/images/11450-1-1332014596.jpg | http://static.skyrim.nexusmods.com/downloads/images/11450-1-1333646316.jpg | http://static.skyrim.nexusmods.com/downloads/images/11450-1-1330371050.jpg | http://static.skyrim.nexusmods.com/downloads/images/11450-1-1333772259.jpg
Enhanced Skyrim Followers:
Aela the Huntress
"I don't know how those cozy lords manage to drag themselves out of bed every day. Why bother if you're not living?"
1. Introduction
2. Core Features
3. Release Plans
4. Requirements
5. Compatibility
6. Likely Questions
7. Contact Info
8. Credits and Thanks
1. Introduction
The character of Aela the Huntress impressed me from the first encounter with the degree that she felt like her own person, living her own story. Aela had her own opinions, her own expertise, her own family history, her own plans and goals. She wasn't just waiting around to assist my character--if anything, my PC had to prove himself worthy of assisting her. It made for a refreshing change in a game that's otherwise so focused on how special the PC is. I was quite disappointed, then, that after Aela became available as a follower, most of her personality and individuality vanished. This woman whose years of hunting and questing had given her extensive knowledge of Skyrim, who had a vested interest in its fate, was unaccountably silent as I went about shaping her land's history. Enhanced Skyrim Followers: Aela aims to change that discontinuity.
ESF: Aela will improve Aela's follower functionality and expand her dialogue. The goal is to create a traveling companion with more personality and utility, and to add character commentary in a way that increases the game's atmosphere and highlights the stakes of the game's situations and themes. There will be new dialogue centered around most of the main and faction-related questlines in the game, as well as various sidequests and environmental situations. There will be game avenues that Aela will now refuse to follow you down; there will be avenues where her following may be contingent on the PC's race, qualities, skills, perks, quest progress, and dialogue choices. There may be situations where she will take action against you, if your actions bring dishonor to the Companions, or to her personally. But there will also be increased opportunities for rewarding situations with Aela, as a shield-sister in the Circle of Companions, as a friend, and as a romance partner.
Please do note that this is a work in progress, so consider everything mentioned here to be tentative.
2. Core Features
Enhanced Follower Functionality (Nearly Complete)
- Better inventory management (separate "treasure sack" which she won't equip from)
- Tactics management (melee vs. ranged weapon choice, aggressiveness, follow distance, torch use)
- Improvements to AI and behavior packages to increase immersion, including a Serana-like wander mode
- Sandbox mode ("relax here" vs. "guard here")
- Wardrobe management (unlockable, configurable outfits for combat, exploration, and in-town use)
- Beast form on command, or when the player transforms
- Teleportation: Aela to the PC, or the PC to Aela
- Optional map marker
- Realistic set of perks (including avoidance of traps)
- Rides horses and other mounts
- Increased maximum level, including optional support for skill uncappers to increase level over 81 and skills over 100.
- "Move out of my way!" command
- Won't get lost: will quickly catch up if she falls too far behind the player
- Her own bedroll and tent--or use Frostfall-added bedrolls--plus she can alert the player to nearby campsites and lead the player to them
- Mostly silent/unvoiced, but with some lines voiced by re-purposing other game dialogue spoken by the same actress
- New variety in voiced greetings and farewells
- Extensive branching conversations tied to Skyrim's key quests and locations
- Shorter context- and location-specific commentary for many quests and situations
- Banters between Aela and other vanilla followers
- New dialogue choices and follower functions that become available based on your statements and actions over time
3. Release Plans
An initial version has been http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/downloads/file.php?id=11450.
Future releases will come in stages, improving the functionality and adding new quest commentary. I hope to release stages every 2-3 months. But working in all of the ideas that I'd like to include--expansion of the Companions questlines, refinements to vanilla quests such as the civil war's Battle of Whiterun, more with werewolves, more with friendship, romance and marriage tracks, personal quests for Aela, support for popular quest/companion mods and DLC, etc.--will likely take years, if the game holds my attention that long. The multi-year development of Emma's Vilja companion for Oblivion is the most likely model for the path this mod will follow.
4. Requirements
You must be using Skyrim version 1.9 or above to use this mod. The version number is displayed in-game when you view your Journal. Also, this mod has several conversations presented without voices, so you will need to have both dialogue and general subtitles turned on.
Before installing this mod, you must have a saved game ready that meets the following conditions:
1) Aela is not currently following you (just dismiss her before you install this mod).
2) Aela is not your spouse.
3) Aela has not been inducted into the Blades.
4) Aela has not been made a steward (if using the Hearthfire DLC).
5. Compatibility
- Mods that alter all Nords, all female bodies, all faces, and so forth, should be compatible. Mods that alter Aela specifically--that remove her warpaint or otherwise change her face, or that give her new perks--will conflict. Make sure ESFAela.esp is lower in your load order than these mods, or not all of the features of this mod will work.
- Mods that alter all followers (UFO, Amazing Follower Tweaks, Extensible Follower Framework, BDO, etc.) should be compatible; however, any improvements they try to make will not impact Aela. To be safe, position ESFAela.esp lower in your load order than any of these mods.
- Mods that alter werewolves (Tales of Lycanthropy: Werewolf Overhaul, La Femme Lycana, etc.) should be compatible, unless they change the race that the player transforms into, to something other than the werewolf race. There were some minor glitches with the old version of TOL's monthly forced transformation, but these seem fixed by the new modular TOL 1.5.
- The "Kingthings Petrock font" mod by DarthBehemoth does not work properly, causing some dialogue items to not be available. Using Kingthings Petrock in combination with the EZ2C dialogue mod appears to fix this. Other font mods appear to work without needing EZ2C.
If you are a mod maker and want to talk about interoperability between our projects, feel free to PM me.
6. Likely Questions
Is this mod voice-acted?
Not yet, in the sense that you probably mean. The existing voice actress for Aela, the talented Claudia Christian, also voiced several other characters in the game. This gives me a sizable library of voiced dialogue that I can sample from. You will hear re-purposed extracts of these sound files sprinkled throughout Aela's added dialogue, where I could work them in seamlessly. However, this mod includes over 1000 new lines of dialogue, and they are mostly silent; you'll need both Dialogue and General Subtitles turned on, in the Settings section of the game menus. If you hate reading text and need voice acting, you should avoid this mod for the foreseeable future. I do hope to find a voice actress to work with me, but even if I do, voicing a mod of this size will take a long time.
Can you add feature X, or dialogue about Y?
Maybe, eventually. I'm learning everything as I go, and also I have my own feel for the right balance between number of features, frequency of dialogue, and amount of complexity. I've used a number of stock and modded followers/companions for various games, and believe I am aware of the best practices. And I have a large number of ideas of my own that I hope to implement, that will take a lot of my time. That said, if there's something you'd like to see, feel free to leave a comment and let me know.
What is this Aela like as a follower?
Things to bear in mind when choosing whether to use this mod and have this version of Aela as a follower:
- Like many Nords, Aela is something of a racist. She doesn't think that non-humans should be banished from Skyrim; it's more a chauvinism. Nords come first in her thinking, and she believes that given the chance, Nords will always come out on top.
- As a direct descendant of one of the first Companions, Aela hopes to be remembered as doing honor to her family name, and for bringing honor to the Companions.
- Because of the mystical elements the Companions and their inner Circle are involved with, she is more tolerant of magic than most Nords.
- Because she grew up hunting across the land with her father, and because of her induction into the Circle and what that entails, she can be very primal, practical, and down to earth. She's not feral, but she can be anti-social, especially among those she does not know well.
- At the same time, because of her long family history with the Companions on her mother's side, the stories she's been told and the books she's read, she has somewhat romanticized--and thus uncompromising--views of honor and heroism. When her pragmatic and romanticized perspectives align, she can be self-certain, commanding, and judgmental. However, the perspectives do not always align perfectly. In those cases she may be extra commanding and judgmental, if only to hide her lack of certainty.
I disagree with your ideas about Aela
Fair enough. This mod is based on ideas that I thought would enhance my time with the game, playing of hints that Bethesda offered about a character and the world she lives in, and also with a concern that the mod enhance gameplay by offering a fairly strong, distinct personality that forces the player to make the sorts of consequential choices that I think will add to the game--in its aesthetics, drama, and replay value. Other people may read those hints about her character differently, or have less patience for the consequences I've imposed. You are free to edit your copy of the mod in any way you see fit, so long as you do not distribute your edited version.
I'm making a mod and would like this Aela mod to be compatible
Excellent; I would like this, too. Really, this is the main reason I made this post while the mod is still a work in progress: to let other modders know it is being worked on. As a player of Skyrim, who is making this mod primarily to enhance my own gameplay, nothing would make me happier than to see Aela interacting with other modded followers, commenting on mod-added quests and situations, and so forth. I'm not sure there's much to be done at this point, but when your mod gets to a stage where you want to talk about compatibility, please feel free to PM me.
7. Contact Info
You can PM me as DreamKing on the official Bethesda forum.
8. Credits and Thanks
- Anyone who has used follower mods in previous Bethesda games will quickly see that very few of the ideas I'm implementing here are original: I'm combining features from follower mods that I enjoyed. Most notable influences in this release are Emma and CDCooley's Vilja for Oblivion, RickerHK's Brisa for Fallout 3 and Wendy Gilbert for Fallout: New Vegas, and llamaRCA's Willow for Fallout: New Vegas. Much thanks and credit to these modders; if you play those games, I recommend those mods.
- Thanks to Alek, whose "Auto Unequip Arrows" mod for the player provided the inspiration and basic method for Aela unequipping her quiver.
- Thanks to Wrye, whose "Summon Bed" mod for Oblivion supplied the basic logic for placing the bedroll and tent.
- Thanks to Ethatron for the BSAopt extraction tool, and Agnahim for FUZ Extractor, which together allowed me to begin editing the voice files before the Creation Kit's release.
- Thanks to Oranges13 and crash_oxide for their campsite suggestions.
- Thanks to Michael Kirkbride, for inspiration and a few specific sentences on Nord culture that I adapted into dialogue.
- Thanks to the SKSE and SkyUI teams, who have enabled so many great things.
- Thanks to the members of TES Lore area on the Official Bethesda Forum (http://www.gamesas.com/forum/16-elder-scrolls-lore/) and to the maintainers of the Imperial Library website (http://www.imperial-library.info/), for many interesting ideas backed up by lore sources.
- Thanks to the Unofficial Elder Scrolls Pages (http://www.uesp.net/) for being a frequent and valuable reference.
- Thanks to the Nexus Network (http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/) for providing a platform for mods and the community that exists around them.
- Thanks to the users of this mod, for their encouragement and ideas.
- And of course credit and thanks go to Bethesda Softworks, for releasing and supporting modding tools for their games--without which this mod could not have been made.