Opinions on the Saerileth mod

There is a review for this mod: http://www.sorcerers.net/community/index.php?threads/bg2-saerileth-npc-mod-review.36475/

I tried it once but the soundset turned me off, the sound quality wasn't as good as the rest of the game.

 

I haven't played with Saerileth in quite some time, so my memory could be a bit hazy.

A trombone voice? That's...odd. Her recordings are slightly too loud, but I don't remember her voice as deep. Irritating throughout, due to the volume, but not deep.

From a gameplay point-of-view, her Cavalier class makes her fairly powerful, but her stats go quite a way towards balancing this. As I'm sure that you will have noticed, getting her a Girdle of Strength is a good idea.

Her first quest triggers rather early on. This leads to an area where it is possible to buy items that aren't available at this point in the game. Additionally, the boss enemy there is quite challenging as you don't have access to magic.

In terms of personality, she is definitely the 'love at first sight' kind of girl. As far as I can remember, the relationship tends to assume that you have fallen for her very quickly as well. Indeed, as I got quite far on in it, I was getting tired of the seemingly-constant 'oh how I love thee' s that she and my PC were exchanging. It started to feel a bit unrealistic. Ok, more than a bit sometimes.

I'm currently feeling the same way towards her as I am towards Kelsey: nice character and a useful companion, but the romance did begin to get sickly. Still, what with being lovesick and lonely, it might be just the thing you're needing!

 

Code Review (personal opinion):
1. watch the forums carefully while playing, and research a bit. The coding is good, but there are some things that are hard to account for on multiple-mod installs, and the modders in question have officially retired from modding, so support if you have troubles is "ask at CoM". If someone knows, cool - if not, start the rounds of all the various forums. Some folks run into oddities with the vampirism/avoidance thing, some folks run into some minor problems at crucial points in the main quest. Some folks have absolutely no problems all the way through the mod. Everything reported so far has been fixable with CLUA I think, but it is worth a look at Chosen of Mystra to see where folks have had things glitch.

2. Not a mod for a large Mega install. Her scripts constantly check for Saerileth to be holding (or other party members to be holding) evil artifacts, at which point she acts like a 15 year old does "eww -icky - drop that right now". It fits her character and age nicely, but couple this with an Infinite Bags of Holding with a bunch of items, and you *will* have stutter as every item is constantly checked and rechecked for. I recommend a smaller install, and not installing the tweaks that add infinite bags of holding.

3. Generally compatibly coded, in spite of being an "old skool" mod developed before the bigg remade WeiDu into a massive juggernaught of modding power and goodness, so probably OK with different combinations of mods, and she adds a "good" path to Spellhold - that could be a plus if you don't mind taking her way. (In fact, true to those early high school relationships, there is alot of "her way or the highway"). Useless to install added content to things like Thieves Guild, evil quests, etc. on the same install that you have Saerileth, as she won't let you visit the dark side without leavinf forevar.

Content Review (personal opinion):
1. Lots of posts back and forth on the pre-move CoM boards about her being 15 and PC being 21. No need to resurrect those arguments - hey, if you are playing a game where the primary object is to kill things that stand in your way, and no one takes any clothes off in front of you, then why argue this? Suprisingly, she stays very close to her alignment and her age, and definitely is designed for a Paladin who takes his alignment fanatically. After all, she is a Child Templar - all blind faith, passion, and with the angst and seriousness only atainable by an adolescent (an age, race, culture). Like her or not, the authors did a stellar job of illustrating her exactly the way they wanted her to be.

Yes, you have to marry her before she will hop in bed. Yes, if you multi-Romance, you will have big, very strange bugs that will probably kill your game at the whole vampire/lover exchange. No, there is no wild erotic content. In fact, by modern mod standards, though you can have multiple children (apparently with an incredible rabbit-like gestation period) in the Epilogue, her flirts and romance encounters are more "sweet, PG-13" than steamy. Some are downright romantic, but none really come close (in my opinion) to Flirtpack content. You don't even get to look down her shirt - basically, it is a Rennaisance Faire Affair, with sighing, demure blushes, and gentle kisses discreetly fading to blackout. You do get to buy her things, get positively Shakespearean in dialogue, and if you love being the strong, handsome, do-gooder with a young demure bride, this is just the perfect mod for you. I think at least once or twice you can actually bow and kiss her hand, Sir Walter Raleigh style, but I could be misremembering that...I do remember that *she* does that to *you* at a certain point, which made my liberal left-wing side stand up and say "whoa - I asked for a partner, not a servant - what was this author really thinking about sex and gender roles in FR" - but then again, I take all this stuff way too seriously

2. She provides a full romance through the whole game, extra-planar travel, and actively engages the PC (and others) in conversation about events. Lots of content, and she will definitely change the course of your game. Definitely designed as a "get her early and play through the whole thing with her" mod.

3. Generally well written; if you like Dynaheir in The BG1NPC Project with her special brand of Renaissance/Shakespearean Old English, then you will enjoy Saerileth's speech patterns. I found her fun at first, on a limited BG2 install, but by the midpoint of the game I was chafing under the restrictions even as a Paladin. And I was developing serious lag. So I stopped playing and just did code review. At that point, I found (since I knew where she was heading, and what the modders wanted to accomplish, I started over, playing with *just* Saerileth and a "canon" party (PC=Inquisitor, Jaheira, Minsc, Aerie, Yoshimo/Imoen [interesting stuff there with this mod in play] , Saerileth) and tried again. Getting into the modders mind, I could make things "flow" more the way they intended the mod to go. It was more like reading a slightly interactive romance novel than playing a game, but I enjoyed it. I might come back to it in a few years, too, but not too soon. Unfortunately, I kept wanting her to grow up, having had a more equal, "mature" romance in Domi/Ashara's BG1NPC Dynaheir (which, frankly, is my standard for a strong male PC romance with equality, intelligent conversation, romance, and Lawful Good alignment roleplaying options).


(Edit: lots of folks seem to not like her soundset. It might be fun to play around with the "light" version, unvoiced, if it is still available - I remember playing that one and enjoying it more. Replacing the character soundset shouldn't be too hard if you do that, if it really annoys you.)

 

Very interesting comments.

Could you give a hint on how to change a mod NPC's soundset (let's say I want to use Dynaheir's instead of Saerileth's). Would it break the mod if the ogg files were removed?

 

Yes, it would. If you make an NPC and you give her a soundset along with her lines, you can't really expect to use another soundset for the same lines.

 

Well, I don't think so - but there is more than one way to do this, I think.

Removing the .ogg files won't cause a problem, but won't do anything for you. What you want to do is remove or replace the .wav files from override.

The BG1 NPC Project has "script-hooks" built in that reference character music. If the 'Music Pack' is not installed, the mod plays happily without problems. NI and DLTCEP yell about missing resources, but the game happily ignores the missing sound files.

As far as I can remember, sound references work the same way. The engine looks for the sound in the override, then the game bifs if it can't find 'em there. So a mod adds sounds by unpacking .wav files in override and then setting up references that call on these files. If it can't find one, it skips on merrily on its way, ignoring it. If it finds a *corrupted* one, it crashes your game.

So, look for a whole set of .wav files with her name or portions of her name in the override folder, and you have two options: "safe" and "very safe".

For the "safe" option, simply move those .wav files to a separate folder, and play your game, remembering to put them back into the override before uninstalling (so you don't accidentally have some error crop up in install/uninstall routines. Some modders just say "del *.wav" and some explicitly check for and remove each file one at a time). You have effectively (and literally) just taken the NPC's voice away.

The "very safe" way is to create a single blank .wav file, and copy it/rename it into the override replacing each of the resources with the blank file, so that the resources are present but blank. Then, the engine finds the blank file and plays it instead of the regular one.

If you would rather do this using NI, open Saerileth's dialogue file and BCS and find all the sound references (they will look like [SARI08] or something, I can't remember) and delete them from the actual scripts.

To do this quickly for any character with sound you know you don't like before installation, find the files in the actual mod before installation (I recommend TextPad, because it does really good multiple file/directory searches, and WildEdit because it can mass search and replace across multiple files in multiple directories) and look for [ (because sound references in .tra files look like [SOUNDREF] ).Replace any sounds you want to silence with a dummy entry (like [SOUNDREF] ) Voila, a fully silenced mod.

If you want to modify just the selection sounds, attack sounds, etc., and don't mind a disconnect between the text they say and the sound they make, you can leverage their "string fixer" within mods that provide it. Just go into their hotkey or dialogue files before installation (their .tra files if the mod is set up with translations) and edit the entries at the end of each line;

@27 = ~Die, you horrible beast!~ [C-MYSND8]

becomes

@27 = ~Die, you horrible beast!~ [YRSND8]

and you put the yrsnd8.wav in the override.

In the code, it would be

IF ~~ SkieBreaksNail
SAY ~Oooh... I broke a nail. Heal me, daahling?~ [C-SKIE72]
IF ~~ THEN EXIT
END

and you would edit the [C-SKIE72] to be a clip of Guns n' Roses playing "I used to love her, but I had to kill her...", or simply insert your own line

SAY ~Oooh... I broke a nail. Heal me, daahling?~ [GUNZROZ1]

You save time and energy by only rebuilding the "string-fixer" stuff rather than rebuilding everything. You could even completely revoice her lines by editing the words as well as the sound (but I don't know why you would want to... I'm just saying you can technically). All you have to do then is hit the hotkey in the game, and voila, Saerileth has a new Gins N' Roses voice (or Skie, or whomever you are ticked off with).


To replace a soundset with a new one requires a little more work. The safest way other than revoicing the mod yourself for your own private amusement (using your girlfriend's/boyfriend's/Spouses' voice for added effect) is to blank out all the dilaogue voicings. Then you only have to deal wth the character selecton/attack/etc. sounds. For those, you can blank them, or revoice them as wav files and name them the same as the ones they are replacing dropping them in the override. You could simply edit the .cre in NI and reassign them to ingame strings, or you could rewrite the "string fixer" by changing the sound references to new names (less than 8 letters long, and they must be .wav files).


Hey, last thought - most mods just put these in the override. If you can't find them there, check your sounds folder in your game directory. Technically, a bunch of folders, like portraits and sounds, are min "override" folders. But most modders just go for the top level/first checked/most impotrant override, and don't bother with the secondary folders. And I realy, really hate long Friday afternoons where there is not much to do and no access to a gaming rig. *sigh*.

 

Thanks a lot cmorgan for taking the time to answer so comprehensively. I'm going to give it a try.

 

I really enjoyed the Saerileth mod and would recommend it. I found it to be on par with the other romances that came with the game, unlike others.

 

Frankly I was most displeased with the sounds, so I usually got so annoyed by her that I ended with her untimely death.

 

No problem. And if there is an aspiring voice actress out there with a teenage girl voice, willing to work for free/credit, I suspect that Shaitan, Caradhras, and Decados are not alone... the original authors seriously invested a huge chunk of their life into this mod, and it might be worth checking in at CoM and seeing if they could broker an alternate soundset deal. I just play with the lite versions or silence the mods because I like to envision the sound of the voice myself, but lots of folks like having (matching) soundsets.

 

Does Saerileth have to be in the party in order to take the "good" (Radiant Heart) path toward Spellhold, or is just installing the mod enough? I might be interested if I don't have to make her tag along...