Willow - A Better Companion Experience

http://www.newvegasnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=41779

Willow is a girl companion added to the NV gameworld. She has over 600 lines of voiced dialogue, written and acted specifically for the mod by me. There are other characters involved in the quests in the mod, and they are fully voiced as well, although primarily by game assets. There are five quests in the mod. Two of them make up the foundation of the experience of having Willow as a companion. The others are accessory quests which go along with traveling with Willow. You may or may not ever do them. One is quite simple and small and there purely for the fun of it and the others are there for structure and flavor.

Willow can be found on the road South of Primm between the Nevada Highway Patrol Station and the Nipton Road Restop. She has a backstory and a history that will be revealed to you through conversation and her Idle pvssyr.

Her tagged skills are Speech, Barter and Survival. Her weapon skill is Small Guns. You will receive a perk automatically when you hire her, the Siver Tongue Perk, which will raise your Speech skill by 30 and your Charisma by 1. There are other perks to be earned in the mod as well.

Willow is faction neutral and can wear faction armor. She has no interest in politics and does not care which faction you align yourself with. She also does not care about your behavior from a karma perspective. Her primary concern about your behavior is how you treat her.


FEATURES: These are the highlights of what she can do:

Her features become available at different points in her quests. Some things do not become available to you until you have discussed them with her in dialogue even if they should be available per the quest. Talking to her is very important. What she says gives you clues about how to proceed in her main quest as do quest updates and the notes you receive in your Pipboy. I recommend that you check your Pipboy whenever the quest updates if you are feeling lost about what to do next about her.


When you first meet her and she goes with you (Willow is not "hired" at this point):

- She has an antivenom script so if she is poisoned, and you have put Antivenom into her inventory, she will use it. She will use one no more than every 30 seconds if she is being re-poisoned.

- Willow has a script that keeps her following you throughout the Mojave. This makes sure that when you travel through doors, etc that she stays with you when she is following you. If, for some reason,you have gone quite a long distance and she still has not shown up, you can use her radio(once you have received it) to get her back to you.

Once "hired" (when her rifle is returned to her):

- Her dialogue is handled through the companion wheel. Although the vast majority of her dialouge occurs outside of the wheel.

- She will set up a campfire for you to use. She can also cook a few recipes when it is set up.

- She will sit down when you do.

- You have a "radio" to use to:
-go to her position
-call her back to your location from wherever she is

- Her weapons are automatically confiscated at the casinos and at The Fort.

- She "scavenges" for stuff. She finds caps and various items which are added to her inventory.

- She keeps a container for you that she cannot touch. You may keep anything in it that you wish. For example, she can carry armor and helmets in it that she will not equip.

- You can ask her to guard an area on "alert" (with her weapon drawn).

- If the player takes the Ferocious Loyalty Perk, Willow is affected along with the vanilla companions.

- There are consequences to "firing" her.

- Her idle pvssyr begins. This feature cannot be turned off, but she only comments once every 5 minutes and will also comment in a few locations in the Mojave. You may turn off her singing (or compliment her on it).


Friends

- She will sleep on her bedroll if you ask her to.

- You can give her a house marker to send her to to wait.

- You can give her gifts.


Best Friends Forever

- You will be able to give her commands during combat. These include the ability to tell her to:
-follow you without attacking
-flee the area
-wait without attacking

- She will sleep in a bed if you ask her to.

- She will sandbox if you ask her to.

- She will cook for you. Using her Survival skill of 100, she asks you to bring the ingredients and then you get to choose anything on the menu and she "makes" it for you.

- You can suggest to Willow that she grab a bite to eat. This will get her to sit down (or stand if there is no place to sit) and she will eat for a couple of minutes.

- You can ask her to unholster/holster her weapon when you do so.

- She will unlock her clothes.


Romance (If you choose to pursue this option)

- She will provide you the opportunity to have a fade to black "six" scene with her. It is repeatable.


Extended Friendship

- You can see her collection through dialogue.

Unarmed Training (if you choose to do the quest/meet the objective)

- She will fight with Unarmed or Melee weapons.

- She will loan her beloved rifle to you.

Release and Version Details:

Willow has been out at Nexus for a week. I collected bug reports during the week and yesterday released an update. I initially released a version that was not 1.3 compatible and yesterday's update was for that. Today I released the 1.3 version.

Also, Willow is an advlt file, but her file pictures are NOT NSFW. Her file is quite tasteful.

Sounds good. I think she and and one of my characters will come along quite nicely

What about DLCs?

I'm not clear what you are asking...What about them?

What will she do when entering the DLC areas? Go home or the place where she is recruited from?

Neither. I don't own the DLC's and have no idea how they begin or what they are like. I do know, from player reports, that she will go with you. So if you don't want her to go with you into them you need to take action against that by leaving her somewhere and asking her to wait.

Well, that should make Dead Money more interesting.

Yeah, I prefer things that way; even if I had the DLC's I would set it up that way. You can elect to take her into Caesar's tent if you like as well. Willow will talk to you about going in to the tent the first time you take her there so you get the acknowledgement that they don't want her in there, but then you get to choose, in dialogue, with her whether or not to take her in with you.

hmmm Willow ia also a movie ... and Willow was a male dwarf lol

anyway looks good .. gonna try it out ,,, thanks http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0096446/

Yes, I quite like that movie (especially Madmartigen), but my http://i1198.photobucket.com/albums/aa446/llamaRCA/Willow/ScreenShot790.jpg doesn't look like that dwarf

well that is also the reason why i'm downloading

Great Mod, Very epic if thats the right word for it, thanks for your hard work and for sharing it with all of us

are there any plans for more companions, maybe a male companion?

Thank you! I have no plans to do another companion for NV, although I am thinking about Skyrim already and am thinking about the possibility of a male for that... possibly, I really liked having total control over the creation of Willow's personality, which I had because, since I did her voice, I could fuss with and and change her lines as much or as often as I wanted. There was a huge advantage to writing and voicing it myself, which I obviously wouldn't have if it was a male companion. But, yes, we definitely need an awesome male companion! I agree with you.

Question 1: Is she affected by charisma in a way like Vanilla Companions are?

Question 2: Do you touch any of the vanilla followers or their scripts in your mod?

1. Are you wondering about anything in particular?

2. I don't touch any of the vanillas. I had enough incompatibility issues when I modded Charon in FO3 to last me forever.

I was curious as to why I hadn't seen a release thread here. Glad to see you started one up.

This is a great companion mod. I've used her since her release and it's been an fun experience. I highly recommend her.

-Deep

Hi Deep,

I almost didn't. Companion threads here don't usually get much action, unlike my thread over at Nexus that has over 700 replies already (although a lot of that is me), but I've been around here so long that I felt compelled to do it and a lot of the folks that hang out here don't spend much time over there.

:) llama

Regarding #1: Will she be effected as in she will be a useless to someone with a Charisma of 1, similar to vanilla followers?

I ask because my brother likes to play as a strong armed ignant who solves most of his problems with his fists. I have a charisma of 6 right now and a speech of 100, but I was thinking of trying it his way next character.

That's an excellent question that I don't have a definitive answer to because I can't find anything about it in the esm (it may be there somewhere, but I haven't been able to find it when I've looked). If, like the quest markers for the followers and the FT stuff it's been determined who should be affected by SetPlayerTeammate 1 then she may be affected to a noticeable extent. If it's been done specifically by follower, then she won't be, because it will only apply to the vanillas. If she is affected noticeably I'd like to know about it as I'd like to do something about it to counter it. It goes against my storyline since the player's Charisma isn't used in anyway with her. I confess this is one of the issues that fell off my radar towards the end of the project. I knew about it, but forgot about it and didn't test it.

Wonderful labor of love.

Thanks for sharing.



I'm having a ball waiting for what happens next.

The suggestion to jump in the fountain dropped my jaw!

She is just great to have around for company.



One minor suggestion.

Perhaps an option for a slightly less powerful Willow companion.

She is not over powering , but just having some one to cook for you with a Survival skill of 60 or 75 when you are starting out is a BIG helpl.

And maybe make Silver Tongue a +1o or 15 bonus.

I did note that you offered the choice to take it which was a nice touch.



Looking forward to seeing what you create next.

Thanks!





Re: Her survival skill

I debated about that when I was making her but this is why it's at 100 and it will stay that way. She's been on the road for two years and is a pro at what she does. Willow isn't there to be just an extension of the player, so my concern isn't that her skill level be appropriate for the player's early level experience. What I'm trying to give you is a friend and another character to interact with that complements the experience you have in the game. Not an NPC that you fully control or that is fully controlled by the player experience. Her Survival skills are what she brings to the table in that relationship.

:) llama

I guess asking for an epilogue would be already too much eh? :vaultboy:

Kidding.

The mod features were enough to pique my interest, can't wait to try this out!

On the Survival and Silver Tongue bonuses think it is more of a play style issue than any thing else.

I'm using Arwen's NV Realism Tweaks Hard-Core module and a 30% bonus is huge.
For some people, some one at 75% is an expert while for other it is 100%.
Just a matter of play styles which is why I made the suggestion for an option.




Even before I decided to try out Willow, I was just thinking you know if I have Raul as a companion, I should get a bonus to my Repair skills just for being around him.
Just some good advise and may be borrowing some of his tools, would make a lot of repairs much easier, let along if you could talk him in to giving a hand.
When you are part of a team, you want people who will cover your weak spots.

I know they have to keep game balance and try to keep the system from getting too complex, but it is nice to have someone along who can cover skills you don't have.

If the 30 points is a big issue for you in your game, you can lower that in the console for yourself. That change takes place while she is following you. You could adjust it back up if you wanted to if you ever "fired" her. You could elect to take the Barter training from her and adjust it the same way. In the console.

Player.ModAV Speech -30

would eliminate all of it, so -20 and so on until you got to 0 would change nothing

That's for the Silver Tongue Perk It's Barter for Barter Training and if you didn't want the +1 to Charisma it would be Charisma -1

Unfortunately the Survival skill she has cannot be changed, not the way I've implemented it. Although if you know how to use the GECK I could tell you what to do to make it lower if you like.



@Smert!! lol! Yes, especially if you haven't even tried her out yet!

:) llama

Really well put together companion mod, havent had this much enjoyment from a custom companion since Morrowind.

Thank you!