People comment from time to time noting that there are several "Save Your Spouse" mods out there and the question comes up: Why add this feature to AFT when it has already been done. Is there anything special about AFT's mod and ultimately which is better.

1) Why include spouse rescue in AFT:

Mods don't happen overnight. They take months, sometimes years to create. When I started creating AFT in July of 2016, there weren't any spouse rescue mods. It is not uncommon for multiple authors to tackle the same feature unaware of each other. Three Spouse rescue Mods came out before AFT was released in September of 2017.

Bottom line: it wasn't because I was unhappy with the other mods or felt I could do a better job. It was a capability I wanted that didn't exist at the time and thus got added to my plate of features.

2) Is there anything special about AFT:

It is safe to say there is something special about every spouse mod out there. For one thing, every mod has its own take on how your spouse came to be traveling with you and that has repercussions. But what really makes AFT stand out in my opinion is the technical solution. Lets talk about both of these:

Plot differences:

With AFT, I wanted to actually rescue my spouse. I wanted to have a hand in their survival and get the chance to feel like a hero; not someone who simply woke up too early or too late.  As I developed my story line, I noted in the kellog scene that they shut your spouses pod instead of leaving it open. People don't die instantly and your spouse was immediately frozen. It occurred to me with the right help, a rescue was actually quite feasible. But to be realistic, it needed to be fast. Transporting the spouse to diamond city or goodneighbor wouldn't cut it. And while the institute was an option, you would need to be 3/4 of the way through the game before you could rescue them. So I decided that Curie made the most sense. Prior to becoming a synth, curie is basically a floating hospital complete with surgical laser, bone saw and stimpacks.

Finally, there is the amnesia. I didn't want my partner to be too easy to obtain. I like challenges as they make the relationship progress more rewarding. You are still saving your spouse, it is just not as easy as you thought it would be. You have to earn their affection by spending time with them, and I think that is a good thing. In a future addon I may even allow their original memories to come back (depending on how you play), but it will likely be after the main quest is concluded or possibly a part of the conclusion.

Technical Differences:

a) Fewer Mod Conflicts:

As of this writing, some spouse rescue mods have scene interjections sprinkled throughout the game to make the spouse feel more integrated. This is great and really contributes to the immersion. But every vanilla scene is owned by a quest line. To edit a scene and add a new camera change to your spouse, you have to checkout and reserve the entire quest line. Any other mod that wants to edit those quest lines will conflict.

AFT uses scripting to accomplish most of its capabilities instead of checking out and reserving vanilla resources. This means you will also get interjections with AFT, but without all the mod conflicts. This is particularly important to users with massive loadouts (200+ mods).

b) Reused Audio

AFT re-uses the games original audio.Every line activates a script that goes off and plays a portion of a line that came with the game. Typically an entire line and occasionally only part of a line. This allows AFT to ship without any audio and that is why the mod is under 1 MB compressed (compared to other spouse rescue mods). If AFT did not use its audio re-use tricks, I calculate it would be close to a gig in size.

But it isn't just about mod size. What this means to users is that you can rescue a male or female with the same mod because all of the audio files for the games protagonist already have 2 genders recorded. Unlike other mods that focus on a single gender, AFT supports both Nora and Nate. And while unconfirmed, it is also possible that the mod may automatically translate to other languages besides English. A mod less than 1 MB that has fully voiced support for both male and female spouse companions possibly across languages, no one can deny that is pretty impressive.

Ironically, I originally did this because I was confused. I honestly though PS4 would allow scripts since .. I couldn't imagine otherwise. I figured PS4 would reject other resources types like textures, audio and models, but I never dreamed they would reject scripts. (It is hard to make even the most basic quest without scripting to complete the quest or change objectives). So I invented the audio re-use system actually because I wanted to deploy to PS4... but alas, they don't allow scripts. If that changes in the future, AFT would be compatible, but as of today it isn't. I'm still glad I did this though. In the end, the re-use approach was a lot more bang for the buck.

c) Evolving Spouse

And of coarse I save the best for last.

Many people know that fallout 4 tracks affinity. But what many don't know is that it tracks a lot more than that. The game monitors every choice and action you make and labels it using categories like "generous", "nice", "mean", "selfish", "peaceful", "violent", etc... These acts change the affinity scores of your followers, but they are not discarded. Each companion remembers the total number of each act witnessed. Bethesda built in this statistical monitoring framework and could have used it to create amazingly evolved companion interactions. Interactions that not only revealed they liked or disliked you, but interactions that also revealed they were watching you and knew the kind of person you were. (or at least the impression you left from your interactions with them).

Bethesda built this giant infrastructure and then... didn't use it. Out of about a dozen tracked attributes, affinity was the only one the game ended up using. It appears the idea of versatile companions was abandoned probably about the same time they decided to limit the player to 1 companion. Instead of being able to influence your companions, your companions are set in stone. They have a pre-canned set of idles and reactions you will hear every time you play the game with them.

When I saw this, I decided to incorporate that unused framework into AFT's spouse. Unlike other companions who have hard coded opinions, AFT's spouse makes use of the full spectrum of statistics to watch you and evolve with you... If you are consistently violent or selfish or mean or generous, your spouse will mirror your personality and their comments and reactions will reflect the type of person you become. In this regard, AFT's Spouse isn't like any other companion in the vanilla game or DLCs. (Don't know if there are any custom companions out there that make use of the framework)

3) Which is better?

AFT's spouse may be more advanced technologically, but does that translate into a better experience? How many users are going to play the game start to finish with AFT's spouse multiple times and notice that their comments, idles and even some lines in the cut scenes are different based on how they played. A gig of audio seems like a lot, but when you consider how much AFT slices and dices it : Every line for 2 genders. 3 to 6 lines per idle event, 3 to 4 lines per interjection. All those lines to account for all the various statistical models. It quickly breaks down and may in fact be less played audio in a single play through than the other Spouse Rescue mod options.

In the end, I can't tell others which they will like better. But I can tell you that I created what was important to me: A spouse that is actually evolving with and influenced by me..