Trailers and Teasers – Awful Bard Play

Kris Takahashi Trailers and Teasers 4 Comments

TurboDelgado suggested the bard have an option to completely fail at the duet. It was an awesome idea and pretty easy to implement, even without additional voice options. Still all very experimental, but I think it really helps give this feature an added dimension of joy.

I changed the pitch and tempo, then rearranged portions using a cut-paste method to make the tracks. The result is pure, wonderful crap. William S. Burroughs would not be proud. Oddly enough, this would be the first shitty bard in the game, as it occurred to me that Lurbuk the Orc Bard can play as well as anyone, even if his singing is a little off.

Creation Kit – Dragonborn NPC Concept Trailer

Kris Takahashi Other 9 Comments

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Over the past year and a half I’ve learned a lot of tricks. It’s safe to say if I had to start all over again, Interesting NPCs would look nothing like it does now. While I don’t know if that’s a good thing, a bad thing, or no thing at all, what I do know is that with Dragonborn, I essentially have a clean slate and plenty of toys.

With version 3 released, and version 3.01 cleaning up the last of the bugs, I decided to dust off my old follower Alphena Dren and tinker around a bit. I wanted to design her in a way that allows her to interact with everyone in town, and even partake in quest conversations, especially since so many of the vanilla player choices are limited to a single response. So instead of mindlessly clicking on a sentence, why not let Alphena ask those questions? The following is a concept video of how this would work.

In the first scene, Milore and Alphena chat for a bit while the player stands off to the side and picks his nose.  In scene two, we have a quest starting conversation with Glover Mallory that turns into a three-way conversation instead.

It doesn’t have to be limited to a single person either. Using the same techniques I use for the bards, I can take any NPCs in the room and make them have a conversation with Alphena. The one caveat is I have to play Dragonborn first, and frankly I don’t know if I’ll ever find the time.

Trailers and Teasers – Player Bard Options

Kris Takahashi Trailers and Teasers 14 Comments

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One of the things I’d like to incorporate into the next release is more band options. I’ve figured out how to get the player to join in, as well as get your follower to play along with. The only issue so far I’ve encountered is lag, and if one person lags it’ll throw the timing off for everyone. So I think I’ll have to cut up the files into smaller and smaller pieces so the game isn’t taxed. I’ll fiddle with it some more tomorrow.

So while the pictured experiment was a bit of a mess timing wise, duets seemed to go pretty smoothly. Here’s a video of the PC and Alassea playing Tears of the Hist, a cover by Ronja Monto of Arisen1’s song.