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Follower Commentary Overhaul - FCO

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Note: this mod currently requires SKSE[skse.silverlock.org] and SkyUI.

If your subscription to the mod didn't download the ESP, you should be able to acquire it here.[www.nexusmods.com] Copy the ESP to your Skyrim's Data folder.

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.



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. Secondly, Follower Commentary Overhaul adds new idles to all vanilla follower voicetypes who did not have their own.

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 all accomplished completely through dialogue topics - the only script MCM employs is a single script that initializes its MCM engine; everything else is accomplished by conditions that narrow down the contexts in which a line will be considered valid.

• Q) Will this work with [my favorite follower mod?]
• A) Yes! Any follower mod that uses a vanilla voicetype will benefit from this mod without suffering a conflict. So this means vanilla followers as well as custom followers added by a mod, as long as that follower is still using a vanilla voicetype. It will also not conflict with followers who use a custom voice-type.

• Q) Will this work with followers from the DLCs?
• A) In general the same rules apply here as for custom followers - if they use a vanilla voicetype, they will benefit from FCO. That said, well-known followers like Serana, Teldryn Sero, and Neloth don't use a vanilla voicetype; however, adding an FCO module for them has been a frequent request, so it is on my radar.

• Q) Will this work with non-English versions of Skyrim?
• A) Currently a dedicated team is working on making translations of FCO into other languages - many of these can be found here.[www.nexusmods.com] Translations not hosted on the Nexus will also be linked through this page.

• Q) Followers are talking while I'm in dialogue, can this be disabled?
• A) I've looked at this problem from a couple different angles but overall I am being lead to the same conclusion; the solutions will be worse than the problem. It is an issue the Interesting NPCs crew has also grappled with, and the solution seems to be either to a) load up each commentary quest with dozens if not hundreds of conditions keyed to specific quests and NPCs in an attempt to pause them during quests, which is still going to not be able to account for NPCs and quests added by DLCs and mods, or b) add an always-on Papyrus script, which is even worse. My final verdict is that this is a bug that simply must be tolerated, yet another problem made by Skyrim's engine that cannot be fixed.

• Q) Followers seem to chatter before they get recruited, is this intentional?
• A) Partly a bug. Early in development, I tried to tie follower comments to being in CurrentFollowerFaction, which would have only turned the comments on while they were following - for whatever reason, this broke links to the audio file in the CK, but PotentialFollowerFaction did not. I have however since discovered why this bug occurs. When I do the major feature update for the MCM, I will add a toggle for whether only Current or all Potential followers should be able to say idles.

• Q) Where should this go in my load order?
• A) I'll be totally honest with you, I'm not sure myself. The fact that it conflicts with so little and reuses resources as new dialog topics means it lacks a defined role or category to go in. My best estimation is that, seeing as its overall design is similar to Guard Dialogue Overhaul[www.nexusmods.com], that it will go near that, and in my load order, GDO is comfortably in the middle. Hopefully the BOSS wizards will help elucidate matters on this front soon.

• Q) This voicetype is saying this line way too much and it bugs me!
• A) I am absolutely dead serious when I tell you to complain about this. Building this mod was time-consuming; so time-consuming I didn't have much of a chance to playtest it in the wild, mainly just functional tests to make sure conditions, lip-synchs and the MCM were working. I sincerely want to hear feedback on comment frequency so I can adjust cooldowns and tweak conditions accordingly, so by all means, leave it!

• Q) I've turned the frequency down and it doesn't seem to have done anything!
• A) First you need to verify whether or not the menu is working. After changing the setting, input "help fco" into the console, and look for a global titled 'FCO_Frequency." If it matches what you've set in the MCM then the menu is functioning. If it doesn't, then something is wrong - if your build has a lot of active, constantly running scripts, then it's possible MCM is not applying settings right away, if at all. Either way, though, you STILL can change the frequency. Use the console command to alter globals to change FCO_Frequency to a level more amenable to you. ALSO, note that if you reload frequently that this probably resets the cooldowns on the various idles