Follower Commentary Overhaul - FCO

FCO 1. 3 MCM Pre-Update released! Current users: no special action should be required for this update.

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Skyrim followers have a problem: they're boring. Once you've recruited them, 99% of them turn into mute robots whose entire purpose is summed up in three directives:

• []Kill the enemy[/] []Look cool[/] []Carry my burdens[/]

Follower mods, such as the superlative Inigo, are an exemplar for the way things should be - they react to their surroundings, to your actions, to what you're wearing or even just dragging around in your inventory, and what you do. It makes them feel more like companions with you on a journey. What these mods don't do, however, is fix vanilla followers in the same fashion.

So that's what I set out to do.

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Follower Commentary Overhaul does two things: first, it goes through follower commentary as originally added to the game and "unlocks" it for the use of the whole voicetype. My Anska mod already works the same way: it takes lines that, before, were "locked" on to Mjoll's NPC specifically, and made them valid commentary for any follower NPC using the FemaleNord voicetype. Follower Commentary Overhaul blows the doors off by doing the same for most of the existing idles.

Secondly, Follower Commentary Overhaul adds new idles to all vanilla follower voicetypes who did not have their own in a fashion similar to my Nazeem mod: I comb through the audio for each voicetype and pick and cut good comments, and then attach them to the voicetype in the game when they have been picked up as followers.

In total, over 1,000 lines of dialogue for the 18 vanilla follower voicetypes were added in; some exactly as they are found elsewhere in the game, others with minor edits, cuts or recombinations where this could be done without ruining the audio quality. This is also done in such a fashion that each voicetype in a sense becomes a personality: for example, the FemaleCommander will call out hostile archers and mages as targets in combat; MaleKhajit pines for his homeland of Elsweyr; FemaleEvenToned will notice if you're infected with a disease and exhort you to get treatment. Other idles are conditionally bound to only occur after certain points in your's or your follower's development - they'll only start talking about dragons after Mirmulnir lets the cat out of the bag, or will begin reveling in their growing mastery of the arcane, or marksmanship prowess.

This is all accomplished completely through dialogue topics - the only script MCM employs is a single script that initializes