Hello everyone, for those of you that played my recent first mod, http://www.nexusmods.com/morrowind/mods/44336/?, and found my hidden Thank You note, you read that I would be working on a dialogue project, and as I worked on it I mentioned it a couple times on the nexus (not that anyone noticed or cared lol) so now that I'm almost done (60% so using "almost" very loosely) with Seyda Neen I think it's enough into development to justify a WIP thread.

So what's the mod? First, let's take a look at Fallout's dialogue system, no not just the Bethesda and Obsidian ones I'm specifically talking about Fallout 1 and 2's dialogue, not the dialogue itself but the system and how it made the games rpgs, it used a great choice/option system, giving the player the choice of being nice, a [censored], caring, or just wanting that buck, back in the 90's. Fallout 3 was the second RPG I ever played, and I didn't touch the older Fallouts till a year ago, but when I did I was reminded what makes a game immersive (although I beat the first one, my saves and I mean all of them, my saves on the second one were corrupted so I'm taking a very long break), and I am very influenced by the games' dialogue, both the words and the system.

After playing them and going back to Morrowind, the very first RPG I played and still my favorite, I noticed how unimmersive the topic styled system was for dialogue, you're missing out on parts of the conversation by just clicking on a word and having the npc react to you clicking that word, that's not a conversation at all. Everyone knows this, everyone who has made a quest mod specifically knows this as they use the choice system (almost everyone) and not the topic system.

As great as it makes quest mods, the choice system has not been used to improve the base game in large scale. That's what this mod does, it's what it is, it makes as much vanilla npcs as possible use the choice system before the player has to use the topics to get the info he/she needs.

Ex. You want to know where the local bar is. Maybe where to buy a sword too. What you'd do in vanilla is after activating a npc you'd scroll through the topics and click on "Specific place" or "Someone in particular", and then you'd read through walls of text trying to find where you're getting that flin, or sujamma, or cyrodillic brandy if you wanna start a barfight. With the mod, you speak to the npc, and instead of having to scroll through topics and walls of texts, you look at the choices available that are attached to the npc's greeting, "Where can I get some gear", "Do you know where the temple is", "Where can I get some food, or a drink". Bingo, you click on the choice and the npc tells you in a lorefriendly and realistic fashion (not the wall of texts).

"But EK, what if I want to access the topics to do quest mods that use topics?" There will be a "*Topics*" choice allowing you to access the topics at any time, the mod doesn't get rid of the topics.

Obviously this mod is going to take FOREVER (I have senior year of High School in two months) for me to finish, that is why I'm developing in phases. The phases are:

1. Civillians in towns and villages

2. Civillians in cities

3. Faction quests

4. Side quests

5. Main Quest

6. DLC's (if I'm not crazy by then)

I am releasing a BETA on the nexus when I finish Seyda Neen (I'm aiming for end of July) where I will constantly update it as I make progress towards the end.

It will probably be ultimately incompatible with LGNPC, I don't 100% know how that mod works though so some parts could be compatible.

Thanks for reading what sounds like a very awkward sales pitch if you read it out loud (go ahead and say the words.)

Enjoy your summer.

This is an ambitious project, and I wish you luck in putting it together! It will definitely be something unique once released.

On an ancillary note, I actually find Morrowind's dialog system MORE immersive than in the later Fallout and Elder Scrolls games, mostly because the topic system allows for a wider variety of interactions between the player and NPCs. Sure, the player needs to fill in the blanks with their imagination, but they ultimately get a wider variety of subjects to discuss. I could be in the minority though.

This sounds like a pretty big project, and I wish you best of luck on it. One thing that I think you should consider adding is some sort of skill check for some choices. Like for example, in Seyda Neen instead of having to wait for Fargoth to store his loot in that stump, you could walk up to him and either persuade, itimidate, or trick him into giving you the money, by checking if their personality, strength, and intelligence to see if they're high enough.

Sure, I could use influence from Fallout New Vegas's checks when I get to the quest phases. Might be an optional add on-plugin though since I know a lot of vanilla beans would be turned off by it since they're used to just having a high disposition, we'll see. (I could also make it the other way around, which probably'd be better)

A more interactive dialogue like that you propose would be quite welcome. Because of the number of paths a conversation could follow I expect these are intended as generic responses for the residents of a particular town. Since you intend for the official topic list to remain accessible there is no reason to think it would conflict with LGNPC mods. The worse that could happen would be a possible clash of personality or speaking style.

Official quest content might be accessed through special greetings filtered for the active journal index. How you go from there is your business. You could link the official quest topic or just recreate the quest dialogue for your system.

If you are using new greetings to accomplish this, there could be incompatibilities with mods that introduce new quests. A work-around could be to create an empty journal of the same ID as the mod in question so you can create a filtered greeting to access it. You could test the approach with your own Mysterious Hunter.

So far, the only new greetings I've used are choice attachments to the original greetings, naturally. I haven't really thought into detail of how I'm going to accomplish the bigger quests, but I will try that method when I get to that bridge. What I'm thinking of doing is just taking the quest dialogue in the topics, translating them into greetings, and then modify them to my liking in the choice system, that's completely a theory though and I'm still a noob so anything can happen. Unfortunately in order to prevent the player from repeating quest dialogue and rewards I'd have to delete the quest topics, which may be a bad idea. Also thanks for the LGNPC info, I can live with irregularities in behavior, the player can just do what I do in RL and assume everyone is crazy lol.