Music – Original Compositions

Kris Takahashi Music 1 Comment

The next update will feature an assortment of goodies, including four new battle songs for the upcoming quests.  The music will be edited, however, to match the scenes they were designed for.   As such, I wanted to put up Giramor’s and Arisen1’s original compositions in their entirety for your perusal.  They will also be in the sidebar playlist.

Sokhi Munaumi Remas by Arisen1  for The Radiant Dark

Honor by Arisen1 for The Radiant Dark

Muirin’s Dream by Arisen1 for Honor’s Calling

Miserere Mei Meus Amicus by Giramor for Honor’s Calling

When the next update will come, I do not know.  Reading the tea leaves that I’ve placed on my tarot cards I bought to help me with my love life, it says something about dying lonely and my lucky number being 47, so I’d say somewhere between now and the 47th of January.

Before, updates would mean more voiced NPCs, and potentially more silent ones.  I don’t think the experience was compromised by either version, as dealing with NPCs was akin to reading a book.  With quests, the narrative involves a lot more moving parts, and at times it’s hard to direct these aspects without having the voices.  So we sit, and we wait, and hope that it’s worth it.

Creation Kit – Writing Quests After the Fact

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Anum-La Ambushed by SellswordsOne of the reasons I don’t like the narrative of the Mass Effect Trilogy is because I don’t think it was designed to be one.  While I wasn’t in those early production meetings – I was more likely washing the windows – it seems as if ME1 was a finished product that sold well enough to produce two sequels.  That is to say, there was never a plan to write the story in three segments, just as there was never a plan to write quests for the NPCs in the mod.

Fortunately, I did have enough foresight to consider the possibility that a scripter would arrive, although never in my wildest dreams did I expect it to be me.  The point is, the NPCs have enough loose ends to where tying them makes narrative sense, even if – due to the nature of the game – that narrative is not altogether linear.  In other words, there will be no god babies showing up and telling you to jump into the Matrix.  The quests were parts of the story I always had in mind.

At the same time, I also have no qualms about the majority of NPCs being left as is, because it fits the overall motif of Skyrim – cold and gloom, doom and thu’um.  In fact, the one thing I do not want is to have the player solve every problem and create some sort of twisted suburban utopia where everyone owns sport utility horses and their happiness is completely reliant on your ability to fight, fuss, and fetch.  When making any type of immersion based game, it’s a fine line.  You want to avoid the parts of reality that are dull and tedious, while at the same time not straying too far from reality that it ceases to be real.

Either way, I have my reservations about making such large alterations after the fact.  The struggling writer, Jaspar Gaerston, is a perfect example.  As he is, the character works well as a symbol.  He represents everything that’s depressing about winter.  So while there’s a loose end that needs to be tied(Adonato’s odd critique), it was hard devising a quest for him knowing he would derive some sort of happiness and achievement from it.  Jaspar as a metaphor would cease to exist.  In the end, Jaspar the growing, maturing writer took precedent.

Of course, it wouldn’t be much of a quest if it turned out Jaspar was some under-appreciated uber-genius that Adonato ignored.  However, I also didn’t want to diminish that original conversation, and how much the inspiration of his Orc muse meant to him.  Thus, when you play the quest, the conflict addresses Jaspar’s confidence and his technical ability as a writer, as opposed to the emotional epiphany and growth he achieved when he met Gromash.  There’s even a line in his older dialogue that hints at how he will improve.  When time travel is invented, I must thank my past self for putting it there on my way to kill Hitler.

With other quests, like Anum-La‘s, the difficulty comes in the sheer number of lines Lila Paws has already recorded.  Fashioning a quest for her is like playing reverse Jenga; you’re basically sticking a new block in the middle of the tower in a way you hope contributes to its stability as opposed to toppling it.

Again, it helped that I had a plan, albeit a murky one.  The same is true for Zora, were I to write something that involved her sister.  The fact that much of her random commentary would fit in before or after a hypothetical quest will make it so I don’t have to tear my hair out re-writing or conditioning every line.

However, even if something doesn’t make complete sense, the beauty of the Creation Kit is in the power to condition.   With Anum-La, I made a specific string of dialogue a prerequisite to the entire quest.  Other dialogue can be conditioned in the same way.  In that sense, it isn’t like a Jenga tower at all.  If, while playing the mod, you find a block doesn’t belong on the top of tower, it can be easily moved to the bottom, even after the fact.

Character Profile – Sadrin Reloro

Kris Takahashi Character Profiles 3 Comments

Sadrin Being a Creeper

At times, I hesitate to write about my motivations because I worry about what sort of influence it has on how the NPCs are perceived.  I hate watching movies with well known celebrities because it’s impossible for me to divorce the person from the role they are portraying.  And when I describe said movie to others, I will invariably refer to the protagonist as “Celebrity X’s character” as opposed to the character’s name, because I can’t for the life of me remember what it is.

Similarly, when writers craft things that are personal or related to their own history, or in my case, often motivated by things that are completely unrelated to anything, it’s difficult as a reader to distance one from the other. Jadro’Ra, for instance, is a character that was inspired by adolescence, cliques and the social hierarchy.  You know, mean girls, popularity contests, and sitting at the cool kids table. Nerds and jocks, beggars and mages, and everyone in between.

Now what if I told you Jadro’Ra’s story was inspired by more than some common experience, but rather a deeply personal and hilariously embarrassing event.  Suppose I said I wrote Jadro’Ra because I was a male cheerleader who was constantly beat up by the captain of the football team.  Later on, I took up ping pong, earned a scholarship to some esteemed Ping Pong university and subsequently shunned all my former male cheerleader friends.  Immediately, your perception of Jadro’Ra would be ruined by this cringe worthy revelation.  I might have ruined it just now.  It would be impossible to take his story seriously knowing its ridiculously comical provenance.

This is why I typically choose character profiles that enhance the reader’s understanding of the NPC rather than twist your perception of them.  However, in some cases, inspiration and understanding are not mutually exclusive, which brings us to the origin of one Sadrin Reloro. You see, Sadrin’s inspiration mirrors his character.  To put it simply, he was born out of my frustration for not being able to bed Haelga.

The funny part is, I don’t find Haelga all that attractive.  She’s a bit manly.  She has a jaw and a frame that would make her an excellent starting linebacker for the Chicago Bears.  Yet as a sworn pervert, I am not the sort of person to let looks, personality, or an assortment of diseases come between me and sexy time.  So when Haelga, who was by all indications a loose woman, not only refused to bed the Dragonborn, but appeared downright hostile toward him, I was rather disappointed.  Clearly, such behavior was not lore friendly.

Obviously, when creating a video game, there’s a difference between what’s lore friendly and what’s consumer friendly.  In the mod, every time I want to make a reference to genitalia, I have to divine exactly what four letter words Bethesda left out in order to offend less people.  Whether it’s movie stars or pixelated sex acts, the outside world is always influencing and altering the world within.  So if you want to know who it was that really made Sadrin, you need only look to your government laws on censorship.

As for me, I am reminded of that very first day in Riften, and the subsequent frustration that followed.  When I look at that NPC, what I see is my very first character, so much so that I often forget his name.