As part of my ongoing quest to make the mod perfect, I’ve decided to expand some of the older NPCs as well as check in with actors to see if their mic situation has improved. As I couldn’t get a reply from DutchDude, I went ahead and got J.T. Decker to voice the revamped version of Hagravi.
Being one of the original five or so NPCs, Hagravi had a pretty shitty* dialogue tree. It wasn’t so much a tree as it was a goal post. This, of course, is my fault, because when I started I had no idea what the fuck I was doing.
Now, like most other NPCs in the mod, those posts will branch out into secondary role playing options, and he won’t seem so ancient. Of course, all the new branches will make it a lot harder to kick field goals, but the point of the mod is not to play handegg, but rather to give starving children free ice cream or something like that.
*Of course, when I say shitty, I don’t mean the internet’s definition of shit, which is “imperfect.” I mean the simulated ingestion of feces.
Oh my gods, this is an original voice? He sounds -exactly- like Eorland Graymane and the male Guard voice. I mean that as a compliment, very good for blending into the game :)
Thank you! I appreciate that coming from you – I am a fan of your work.
There is a certain drag factor for players when they come across long winded characters that have no quest. I would normally avoid them the next time I played, but might enter into a conversation knowing the mod had been upgraded, only to find more drag related dialogue rather than a tie-in to a new quest. I thought the beard fetish guy in Dawnstar was great the first time I heard it. Very nuanced voice acting, but it was mind numbing the second time I heard it.
Enhanced or lengthened quest related dialogue on the other hand seems desirable. Of course, for players who only try this once, maybe something more lengthy adds to story depth. However, I never want to stop the game and disable dialogue and I enjoy replaying INPCS.
The value of talking to an NPC on multiple playthroughs is via the role play options. Most people don’t choose the same reply, which is precisely the point of upgrading Hagravi. The player can now respond in different ways, when he was previously on rails.
As for “long-winded characters” you’re typically referring to a single monologue as opposed to the conversation as a whole. If you got 10 one-line responses, you would perceive the conversation as shorter than 1 seven-line response, even if one is mathematically shorter than the other. Part of this is having something to click, and being actively engaged in the game, which is why the vanilla game splits up longer monologues this way, and they don’t even provide role play options. The mod does.
In other words, the length of the conversation rarely matters, provided you have a good backstory and lots of role play options to choose from to keep you interested the 2nd, 3rd time around(of course, even then there’s a limit to the novelty of something). Generally it’s the length of the replies that bothers people. Frik just needs to have his longer replies split up. I see a couple 6-liners, I’ll just split them into them sets of 2 or 3.