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About this mod
This is a minor NPC Mod that \'fixes\' a detail that always irritated me. As the only Grey Warden survivors of Ostagar, one would think that the first duty of the Player/Alistair should be to report the situation to the Orlesian Warden Army that is on the way to Ostagar.
- Permissions and credits
INTRODUCTION:
This is a simple Mod to correct an issue in the DAO main plot that always irritated me. Since various conversations at Ostagar (pre-battle) mention that the Grey Wardens from Orlais are on their way to Ostagar with another army, one would think that the most important first duty of the only two Warden survivors should be to report the situation to the Orlesian Warden Commander. Particularly since both survivors are novice recruits. I know it is part of the normal RPG quest structure (solo hero saves the world), but it just seemed wrong for the Warden player to just accept orders from Flemeth! The Grey Wardens are supposed to protect Thedas not just Ferelden. And then I thought of a very simple solution. The Warden player meets a Grey Warden Scout in Lothering. When the Orlesian Wardens were stopped at the border of Ferelden, their Warden Commander sent more scouts into Ferelden than just Riordan. The Warden Scout gets a report on Ostagar from the player (to take back to the Orlesian Wardens) and confirms that the player should try to activate the Warden Treaties. And my irritation is solved without breaking lore.
This Mod also replaces that irritating orphan at the Lothering bridge.
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WHAT THE MOD DOES:
This Mod replaces the Lothering Orphan (at the bridge) with a Grey Warden Scout who has new dialogue and "shouts" but does not have a "quest giver" symbol. You will not hear the ‘shouts' unless you have Game Options Subtitles set to "Conversations and ambient dialogue".
The Scout dialogue has three obvious main paths (long, short, and bail-out). The long path includes a full recap of what happened at Ostagar (my interpretation = evil Loghain). The short path uses a fade-out/fade-in to 'skip' the recap for later game replays and still talk about what happened/will-happen with Morrigan. The bail-out path lets you be nasty with the Scout and get rid of her. The Scout dialogue has no effect on approvals or plot issues.
*******************
TECHNICAL NOTES:
The Warden Scout does have voice-overs. They were generated by using a "Text-To-Speech" (TTS) application. While the TTS speech wave files sound good, they use a sampling rate of 22,050 Hertz. The Toolset requires input wave files at 24,000 Hertz. I used the Audacity application to make the necessary 2-step conversion. The first Audacity step was to convert the sampling rate which causes a 'pitch-up' in the 'voice' wave file. I then used Audacity to apply a 'pitch-down' effect as the second step. While there was some loss of 'voice quality', the end result is still much better than the Toolset robo-voice.
One other detail should be noted that is due to the fact that ‘shout' triggers in DAO are hard-coded in the core resources. Leaving out the details, the result was that the new shout dialogue for the Warden Scout had to be exported by itself, and then copied into the Mod folder and renamed with the original shout file name.
********************
INSTALLATION:
Download the RAR file into any convenient "Temp" folder and unpack it. The copy and
paste the "Grey_Warden_Scout_V1" folder into:
"Documents\My documents\BioWare\Dragon Age\packages\core\override"
This Mod will take effect in any game where the player has not yet entered the Lothering area.
*******************
REMOVAL:
Just delete the Mod folder from the override location.
********************
CONFLICTS:
Unlikely. I know of no other Mods that affect the Lothering Orphan (that is why I chose him). If you have such a Mod, then there will be a conflict. If the end-user has a large number of 'voice-over' Mods installed, there is always a low possibility of conflicts between the dialogue Line-IDs used by two different Mods. If this occurs, the probable symptom is that 'expected' dialogue lines are absent. If this occurs, just delete the Scout Mod as there is no easy fix for this problem.
*******************
BUGS:
This Mod has had limited beta testing. Two minor "details" have not yet been fixed. The "shouts" should be even louder, but I believe this involves doing things in the related FSB file that I don't understand yet. The fade-out/fade-in dialogue path that bypasses the "Ostagar recap" followed the Builder Wiki timing recommendations which turned out to be much longer than expected. My first two attempts to 'fix' this made things worse. I am only human (despite some opinions) and something else may have been missed. Report them and I will try to correct them with a new release version (at least for the first few months).
This is a simple Mod to correct an issue in the DAO main plot that always irritated me. Since various conversations at Ostagar (pre-battle) mention that the Grey Wardens from Orlais are on their way to Ostagar with another army, one would think that the most important first duty of the only two Warden survivors should be to report the situation to the Orlesian Warden Commander. Particularly since both survivors are novice recruits. I know it is part of the normal RPG quest structure (solo hero saves the world), but it just seemed wrong for the Warden player to just accept orders from Flemeth! The Grey Wardens are supposed to protect Thedas not just Ferelden. And then I thought of a very simple solution. The Warden player meets a Grey Warden Scout in Lothering. When the Orlesian Wardens were stopped at the border of Ferelden, their Warden Commander sent more scouts into Ferelden than just Riordan. The Warden Scout gets a report on Ostagar from the player (to take back to the Orlesian Wardens) and confirms that the player should try to activate the Warden Treaties. And my irritation is solved without breaking lore.
This Mod also replaces that irritating orphan at the Lothering bridge.
*******************
WHAT THE MOD DOES:
This Mod replaces the Lothering Orphan (at the bridge) with a Grey Warden Scout who has new dialogue and "shouts" but does not have a "quest giver" symbol. You will not hear the ‘shouts' unless you have Game Options Subtitles set to "Conversations and ambient dialogue".
The Scout dialogue has three obvious main paths (long, short, and bail-out). The long path includes a full recap of what happened at Ostagar (my interpretation = evil Loghain). The short path uses a fade-out/fade-in to 'skip' the recap for later game replays and still talk about what happened/will-happen with Morrigan. The bail-out path lets you be nasty with the Scout and get rid of her. The Scout dialogue has no effect on approvals or plot issues.
*******************
TECHNICAL NOTES:
The Warden Scout does have voice-overs. They were generated by using a "Text-To-Speech" (TTS) application. While the TTS speech wave files sound good, they use a sampling rate of 22,050 Hertz. The Toolset requires input wave files at 24,000 Hertz. I used the Audacity application to make the necessary 2-step conversion. The first Audacity step was to convert the sampling rate which causes a 'pitch-up' in the 'voice' wave file. I then used Audacity to apply a 'pitch-down' effect as the second step. While there was some loss of 'voice quality', the end result is still much better than the Toolset robo-voice.
One other detail should be noted that is due to the fact that ‘shout' triggers in DAO are hard-coded in the core resources. Leaving out the details, the result was that the new shout dialogue for the Warden Scout had to be exported by itself, and then copied into the Mod folder and renamed with the original shout file name.
********************
INSTALLATION:
Download the RAR file into any convenient "Temp" folder and unpack it. The copy and
paste the "Grey_Warden_Scout_V1" folder into:
"Documents\My documents\BioWare\Dragon Age\packages\core\override"
This Mod will take effect in any game where the player has not yet entered the Lothering area.
*******************
REMOVAL:
Just delete the Mod folder from the override location.
********************
CONFLICTS:
Unlikely. I know of no other Mods that affect the Lothering Orphan (that is why I chose him). If you have such a Mod, then there will be a conflict. If the end-user has a large number of 'voice-over' Mods installed, there is always a low possibility of conflicts between the dialogue Line-IDs used by two different Mods. If this occurs, the probable symptom is that 'expected' dialogue lines are absent. If this occurs, just delete the Scout Mod as there is no easy fix for this problem.
*******************
BUGS:
This Mod has had limited beta testing. Two minor "details" have not yet been fixed. The "shouts" should be even louder, but I believe this involves doing things in the related FSB file that I don't understand yet. The fade-out/fade-in dialogue path that bypasses the "Ostagar recap" followed the Builder Wiki timing recommendations which turned out to be much longer than expected. My first two attempts to 'fix' this made things worse. I am only human (despite some opinions) and something else may have been missed. Report them and I will try to correct them with a new release version (at least for the first few months).