★ Background ★
When Bethesda announced Fallout 4, players around the world immediately noticed two major departures from the traditional dialogue system:
- The player character was now voiced.
- The list dialogue system had been replaced with a four-option dialogue wheel.
While Fallout 4's four-option dialogue system made for a great narrative experience, it was also extremely restrictive for modders. Every player dialogue scene required exactly four response options - the game would not accept any more, nor any less. The system also shoehorned most dialogue into one of four types: Yes, No, Neutral and Question. As you might imagine, dialogue doesn't always fall neatly into these categories.
There was also, of course, the issue of modders not being able to record new lines for the player.
Some heralded this as the death of the expansive quest mods that have long been a staple of Bethesda game modding. You could hardly blame them for thinking so - frankly the odds that a hobbyist modder could hire not one, but both the male and female voice actor for the player character to voice-act new lines for the player are nigh-zero.
There were many reasons why an unvoiced player didn't work in the vanilla game. First, an unvoiced player still took the same amount of time to speak as a voiced one (often even longer) - which meant long periods of unskippable, awkward silences before NPC dialogue could continue.
To add onto the issue, the game's new dialogue camera system always panned to the player when a dialogue selection was made. Cue five seconds of the player's unmoving face every time a dialogue choice is made.
This is where XDI comes in. XDI removes the hardcoded limitation on four dialogue options (yes - there is a very explicit check on player-selected-option < 4!) and expands the internal systems to accommodate additional dialogue options.
Perhaps most importantly, XDI provides a solution for the unvoiced player. We know the dialogue system worked for Fallout: New Vegas and Fallout 3 before it. It was a matter of eliminating the inconvenient long pauses of empty player dialogue. In an XDI-enabled scene, NPC responses occur immediately after dialogue selection with no awkward pauses. The dialogue camera system is also hot-patched in a XDI-enabled scene to place focus on NPCs, not the silent player.
We couldn't bear seeing Bethesda's dialogue decisions sound the death knell for quest mods in Fallout 4. Whether you're a modder or player, we hope you find XDI a useful framework to create and experience new, original and unique adventures in the Fallout 4 world.
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