Just some cleanup of Edwayne‘s lines and recording with Jay’s new mic. Should be a lot more bookmarks, fluid responses, and more songs in the next update. Which is less than a week away. Brace yourselves for impact.
Jay33721 was one of the first actors to sign up for the mod, and by far one of the most diligent. Unfortunately, a lot of his early work did have some audio quality issues, and we’ve often discussed going back to them once he could got his hands on a new mic. Well, that day has finally arrived. Now the man is going to lock himself in the lab and start re-taking his lines. All of them.
As an added bonus, this also provides an opportunity to modernize Orondil‘s dialogue tree, so there’s more role play options, more conditioned dialogue (when I first made the NPC, I didn’t even know how to check if the Stormcloaks had taken over), and more bookmarks. You can stop by for a chat or have an extended conversation, but the choice is yours.
The one thing I couldn’t do was take into account NPCs added by other mods, simply because him being abandoned is central to his story and the Way of the Nine quest. I did try to make the player questions somewhat vague to allow for less immersion breaking dialogue in the event those mods are activated.
In any event, v3.04 should be on track for some major upgrades to old NPCs, as well as a couple new quests, and Meresine fully voiced. With the holidays, it might take longer than expected for the recordings to get done, but I plan on waiting for at least Meresine’s lines before uploading the new version.
If the mod had a stomach, it would undoubtedly be Gorr. Zora would be its heart, and Qa’Dojo would be its mind. If the mod had a soul, however, it wouldn’t be any of its signature characters. It would be a quiet, stuttering girl roaming the empty halls of the Winking Skeever, begging for a chance to be heard. Asteria may be its lungs and Gnives its toes, but Fironet will always be its soul.
Fironet is life imitating art, and art imitating life. She was inspired by some of the early auditions I received for other characters – every stuttering, uncomfortable person wanting a chance – partially annoyed with the sound of their own voice. Fironet is performed by an actor, alienslikechocolate, who had never voiced a character before. Fironet’s song is the one bard tune that is unoriginal, which Jay33721 tirelessly constructed without having the musical background of Giramor or Arisen1. Fironet embodies everything about the mod’s infant stages, and perhaps modding projects in general. Made by amateurs, but made with passion.
That’s what we all are, until someone with money says otherwise. Amateurs. Dream chasers. They say this generation more than any other is obsessed with celebrity. And why not? I imagine being a celebrity is awesome. Yet I suspect it has nothing to do with a generational shift or a rewiring of the universal consciousness. More people chase fame for one simple reason. Fame is no longer whizzing away in a high powered Italian automobile. Fame is overweight, has cheetos on his breath and is riding a segway. In the past, the amount of talent, opportunity, and dumb luck required to make it was astronomical. Today, becoming a celebrity, even a temporary one, doesn’t seem so unrealistic. Fame is accessible. Fame can be caught.
Like Fironet, many of us aren’t sprinting after it. We aren’t buying new sneakers and training every day to shorten the gap. It’s just there, in front of us, so we might as well reach for it. And when our fingers sort of scrape at its back, some of us may get enough courage to jog.
Perhaps some of Fironet’s aspirations were my own, as well as every actor, writer, or sound guy who auditioned for this mod. Still, even with the mod’s limited success, it didn’t take me long to figure out that I couldn’t go to a restaurant and demand their finest table, no matter how many times I showed the maître d’ a printout of my Nexus page. Listen Pierre, I am someone important. What do you mean you’ve never heard of Interesting NPCs? Do you even Google?
That is to say, if I didn’t believe this was something of substance, I would have quit the day the police dragged me out of that restaurant. While celebrity and substance are not mutually exclusive, few ever achieve both. Most learn to stomach having one without the other.
If she had to choose one, Fironet would choose substance. For someone as demure as she is, achieving fame without recognition would be an interminable nightmare. Her biggest fear is that she’s just good enough to get attention, and just bad enough to embarrass herself. Yet with every endorsement, her voice gets a little crisper, a little louder, to the point it begs to be heard, even if she isn’t a fan of her own voice.