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.

Creation Kit – Limitations and Development

Kris Takahashi Other 6 Comments

One of the fondest memories I have of watching football with my dad was a meaningless regular season game.  It was a minute before the half, and the quarterback had just tossed a 40-yard touchdown with pinpoint accuracy, just over the defender’s fingertips. I leaped into the air, looking for a willing partner to high five, and turned to dad as the replay was showing on the screen. His face was stuck in a grimace.  I said, “Did you see that throw?” And he said, “Yeah, but the receiver on the other side was wide open.”  It was dad in a nutshell.

It’s easy to be critical of athletes. I’m guilty of as much.  Yet armchair quarterbacks like me don’t know what it’s like to try and make a split second decision while 300-pound behemoths are flying at you spitting glass with full intent to do bodily harm.

So I thought I’d take a post to help explain some of the characteristics in the mod, and how more often than not, they are influenced heavily by limitations, and how you can help improve it.

First, the voice acting.  I think it has been phenomenal, and will only get better as the available pool of actors grows.  There may be slightly different recording qualities, but I think the videos show they blend in well when conversing with vanilla actors.  These people have volunteered their time and effort, borrowing mics from neighbors, getting feedback from friends, working tirelessly in the dead of night in hopes that their recording will have one less click, a bit less noise, so your experience is more immersive.  Knowing how much they’ve sacrificed to make this mod happen makes me feel warm and tingly, and it pisses me off when some drive-by commenter says something along the lines of:

Yeah, but it doesn’t sound exactly like a studio.

To that I say, then mods are not for you.  However, if you feel a particular voice could be improved, don’t be vague and overstate the problem.  Find the specific NPC’s name and tell me directly.  If I get enough feedback, perhaps I can see if the actor can re-record. I may have already asked him to do so.  If the actor is unwilling, I might consider making an optional version.  Version 2.22 will feature a revamped version of Eldar, which James worked diligently to provide while juggling responsibilities with school and being a Resident Adviser to what is likely a rowdy dorm, when he could’ve easily told me to go fuck myself.  And if you’re the type of cynical, unfeeling bastard that still feels the need to pick nits, then I can’t help you.

Second, the development of characters. When I started this mod, I wanted to make nothing but quests.  I wanted to take all these ingredients and make a full course meal.  All of this had to be scrapped the moment I opened up the CK.  I had to pare everything down to what I could do, and that was essentially make stories.  I separated them into 3 acts, introduction, conversation/role-play interaction, and finishing with a personal anecdote.  This was the best compromise for proper progression.  For most of the mod’s existence, I couldn’t spread anything out over time, I couldn’t do much of anything.  Life gave me lemons, so I made lemonade.

Yeah, but I hate lemonade.

Fair enough.  Now that my skills have developed, I can make quests.  I can have the player involved in the narrative.  The question is whether I should go back and make alterations. Yet those conversations all have a distinct flow, from A to B to C, and interrupting them would mangle the dialogue.  For instance, Zora‘s story with her sister is something I considered moving to the inn or some other location, to use space as a substitute for time. Yet all the other dialogue that was built upon that limitation, the assumption that story was already told, would seem out of place.  That isn’t to say these things can’t be addressed, but they will have to be done with care.

For other characters like Wander-Lust, I think they’re much better as they are – living, breathing storybooks – and if a book is interesting enough, I’ve found many players don’t mind reading it cover to cover.  Moreover, some NPCs may not have even been conceived if not for these limitations.  As for the others, I think the best course of action is to do as I did with Zora and Anum-La. To turn the monologues from a period to a comma, to have the player turn the page and write the final chapter.  So when I say the goal is 100 quests, it’s no boast.  Every NPC that has a loose end, or doesn’t work as well as a standalone character, will have a quest, as long as the quality and substance is there.

Lastly, I don’t want this post to imply that criticism, suggestions, and the like is not wanted.  Last I heard, free speech was legal and generally a well-liked concept.  I just want to clarify some of the choices in the mod, and how my programming limitations and the financial/time constraints of all the volunteers has influenced the current product.  I also want to stress that as far as products are concerned, what is there now is by no means a final one.

So send me your feedback, your suggestions, and criticism, and we can debate it.  All I want to do is help you understand why it seems I didn’t see the receiver, even if he was wide open.

Character Profile – Hjoromir

Kris Takahashi Character Profiles 7 Comments

Riverwood Blues

When you first arrive in Riverwood, you’re presented with a choice of followers, and the distinction is rather clear.  On one side you have a titan with a warhammer stained in blood, a mountain whose very breath tumbles through the sky.  On the other is a callow but eager weakling, who struggles to polish your boots as he daydreams of better days.

Perhaps the choice is easy. For practical reasons alone, the brute would be the one. He would stand tall against the waves of bandits and beasts, while his counterpart would spend half his time getting stomped, and the other half getting trampled.  Combine the brute’s size with a bit of charm, and the poor errand boy doesn’t stand a chance. In fact, it only gets worse when he opens his mouth.  The boy talks of being a hero, of saving the world and becoming something bigger than himself.

He talks as if he were you.

Hjoromir is the very first NPC you meet for a reason. As we embark on this journey to become a person we’re not, we inevitably leave behind the person we are.  Hjoromir is the embodiment of the person at the keyboard, every gamer who’s ever immersed themselves in a fantasy world because the real one wasn’t up to standard.

Still, we don’t play games to be ourselves.  The last thing we want is our avatars to be the common man.  As great heroes, those are the people we ignore.  At times, they’re the people we resent.  They want us to fetch this or resolve that.  Their menial, everyday squabbles mean nothing when compared to the scope of our destiny.  And the boasts of someone like Hjoromir will only look foolish as we attempt to fulfill it.

Yet Hjoromir is also a follower for a reason.  Maybe when we set out on this great and tireless odyssey, we don’t have to say goodbye to the person we were.  Maybe, when you make your choice of companion, you’ll see a fellow traveler, a fellow dreamer, and take him along for the ride.