Creation Kit – 353 Days, 125 NPCs, 1 Minute

Kris Takahashi Other 1 Comment

It Takes a Village and a Ton of Dwemer Spiders

Whenever a razor manufacturer adds an extra blade to their product, people immediately react with jokes and scorn. You can only shake your head and wonder who the target audience is for an 8-bladed chainsaw that is illegal in 48 states. I used to wonder myself what kind of deranged lunatic resided in a place where such a razor was acceptable.  Now, I live in one of those states – the state of perpetual motion.

When I see these monstrosities of engineering, I think only of the precious seconds those extra blades save when gliding the razor down the side of my face. I think of how an additional blade would cover an even larger surface area and still avoid slicing my carotid artery, while trying to deduce whether it would save enough time to justify the petition to BIC and Gillette.

This is how I spend my days. I’m brushing my teeth in the shower, clipping my toenails while taking a shit.  If I can save enough seconds, 60 of them to be precise, I can save a minute. If I can save 60 minutes I can save an hour, and so on and so forth.

I may not have time, but I can do my darndest to make it.  After all, they say a minute saved is a minute earned.  They mostly say that about pennies, but they also say time is money.  By my math I am well on my way to being the only person who can afford to have a 48 hour day. It all makes perfect sense if you don’t think about it. And I don’t. I mean, I could go back and proofread this paragraph, but there just isn’t enough time.

As we approach the one year anniversary of the Creation Kit and the release of Interesting NPCs, it seems appropriate to talk about the importance of that most diligent of taskmasters, the inexorable, swaying pendulum we call time. It is the single most critical factor in the development of the mod, and I realized from day one that the more I devoted to it the better the end product would be.

To make time and still be a functional member of society, it requires careful management. This involves not only finding ways to be efficient but prioritizing its use.  From life hacks to life interrupted, you are constantly fiddling with the clockworks of the moment.  You do it all even though it’s mostly pointless, just on the off chance you can squeeze out a few more seconds to slow down the day. And right now, I want to cash in sixty of those seconds and take a minute to say this, for I can think of no better use.

Over the course of this past year,  I can imagine many have had to make decisions where they had to sacrifice not just a weekend or two, but a consistent portion of their daily lives to help the mod’s development. Whether it’s voice acting, writing, composing music, bug reporting, suggestions, or simply helping other users on Nexus, this mod couldn’t have been built without the hard work of a community working together.

To everyone involved and those who’ve helped along the way, I say thank you.

3DNPC v2.22 [Beta]

Kris Takahashi Other 2 Comments

If I am going to utilize a torrent, I might as well drive traffic to the blog.  This is the main version of the mod and an optional version for better compatibility with follower mods.

3DNPC v2.22 Beta MAIN DOWNLOAD 
This is the Main file. It has a combination of voiced and silent NPCs and over a dozen quests.

Follower Mod Compatible v2.22 Beta 
Followers will work like Vanilla, act like Vanilla, and occasionally, talk like Vanilla. Only the regular dialogue will be chocolate.

UPDATE: Both these files are now available on the Nexus page.  The torrent links have been removed, as it is recommended you use Nexus so people are not forced to seed.

Quest Profiles – On Antagonists

Kris Takahashi Character Profiles 2 Comments

The Evil and the Evilish

The NPCs in the mod come from all sorts of places.  There are traditional archetypes, personal stories, specific philosophies, or just random people I’ve met in my life.  Then there’s Nelos.  Nelos was inspired by bacteria.

When we talk about drug-resistant bacteria, the word resistant is a bit of a misnomer.  There are no armies of bacteria parrying blows from white blood cells, slowly leveling up to Final Fantasy victory music as they move inexorably toward your vital organs.  No, resistance is a handful of bacteria who happened to be born with just enough of a mutation to make your medicine ineffective.  Even the term evolution implies a modicum of strength.  When in fact, it’s really just dumb luck.

You would be hard pressed to call Nelos’ resistance the same.  Inside his personal Tamrielic Petri dish, greater and greater magics are developed in order to fight off the armies of darkness.  Whether your aim is to harm or heal, the urgency is what drives progress, and there is nothing more urgent than life and death.

When crafting a villain, I find a realistic motivation to be the most important factor.  Nelos (Corey Hall) has a bit of god complex, but his objective is ultimately magnanimous:  he wants to usher in a new age.  A utopia.  Somewhere, at the end of this dark, vacuous tunnel, is a septim of light, a day when spells are made that will make all roads lead to Aetherius.  After all, we’re past the days of making baddies who are evil for evil’s sake.

Or so I thought.  Then, about a week later, I decided to make one.

Marigoth, the witch, who was voiced by Lila Paws and will be featured in v2.22, was inspired by Nelos. Or rather, she was a response to all the moral ambiguity and realism that I instilled in the previous antagonists. When I found myself traversing down a similar road with A Children Fair, I screamed a couple expletives, clicked CTRL+A and pounded my fist on the delete key before wiping the cookie crumbs from my screen.

The original Marigoth was too wise, too sympathetic, too…believable.  Just as fashion and music comes and goes in cycles, so does fiction. We may crave realistic villains now, but we are a fickle species, and tomorrow we may want bell bottoms and big hair and villains that are both irredeemable and cartoonish, just like we did before we changed our minds the first time.

As such, I made Marigoth a caricature. A Disney villain. And it turned out far better than I could have envisioned, given my only goal was to be different.

Which ultimately has been the way I’ve approached every NPC after the first one. By constantly comparing the new characters to the ones I’ve previously made, I think I’ve been able to achieve some measure of originality.  Which is all originality really is. Taking the old stuff and adding a slight mutation, and praying to Darwin the text survives the antibiotics.