[WIP] - Companion Mod - Malia

[FlashyJoer]

Malia is a next-gen companion modification for Fallout 4 that poses a very simple question: What if the player was not the only survivor of Vault 111. Malia is a game start ready companion that can be found before the player ever leaves the vault, so she will be with you right from the start and could be, right up until the end. What sets Malia apart from other mods is that she has a wide range of autonomy built into her systems, be it interacting on her own accord with other NPCs or making observations about the changing game climate due to story progression. Malia features a knowledge base that allows her to track her interactions with people, places, factions, even with creatures and stories or rumors heard while traveling around. Malia is not capable of commenting on things in a knowing kind of way until she actually knows something about what she is observing. For example, when first encountering a deathclaw, Malia will not know what they are and her reactions to it will reflect this fact. However, following that initial encounter, she will know what deathclaws are going forward and her reactions will reflect that point. This holds true for many NPCs you will encounter in the game, as well as locations, and so on. The knowledge base is driven entirely by events in the game, be it combat, quest stages, holotapes, dialogue she is in range of hearing. There are many ways her knowledge of the Commonwealth can grow. Malia also features her own survival mode type systems, where she requires food, liquids and sleep. She also has her own custom built health and radiation damage system that is mostly independent of the base game system (where the game does not allow NPCs to accumlate rads). As part of her needs system, Malia also has autonomy in finding her own food and water, should conditions arise that warrant her scripting to kick in. If not and she is running low, she is set to let you know that she requires a top up and she will indicate what she is low on, be it food, water, stimpaks or radaway. Part of this needs system is also a need to use the bushes to relieve herself. All of this autonomy may be enabled and disabled via the included MCM.

 

Malia has a multitude of affinity quests, unlike vanilla companions that have one only. Malia on the other hand features 15 total affinity level quests! That doesn't include the negative affinity dialogue quests or her side quests. Malia has a lot of content crammed into her esp file, more so than any companion I personally have ever played with. Her affinity system does not use the standard vanilla game rules and she has a custom affinity system that uses a weighted and sliding scale to determine her day to day feelings about you and your actions. Her moods toward you can shift quite often between hatred and friendship. It all depends on your actions within the game. Ultimately, the progression of her affinity system has the potential to reach a romanced stage, where you can pursue marriage, a player home, children and so on. All of this is encompassed in her affinity system. As there are positives, they are also negative quests. These are more reactionary to very specific events between the player and Malia. Key among these are her dislike of player infidelity once they hit the romanced state. She also is programmed to not want physical contact with the player until in a romanced state and any animation that plays upon her via AAF, where the player is the partner, prior to the romanced state, will be considered a violation and she will react accordingly. In all cases, Malia is programmed to provide the player with a series of warnings before she will leave the player. And for the record, once Malia leaves, she is programmed in a way that prevents you from ever unlocking her again, short of rolling back to an earlier save or starting a new game.

 

Malia is still under construction, but at this time features nearly 4500 lines of dialogue and that is only going to grow because I am not quite done with her affinity quest systems. Malia has been inspired by Reginald's work on Ivy to have random chatter events while you are traveling with her. This random chatter encompasses many things, be it her life before the bombs fell, or her observations about your current location. They could reflect her feelings for the player. They may be nonsensical or comical. They may reflect current quests the player has running for the various factions. Time of day, weather related, even commenting on her clothing, armor and weaponry. Its all possible. Malia is also heavily injected directly into all four factions' quest lines, as well as the main story quests and most of the side quests that the base game offers. In some cases, I have created whole new branches within those dialogues to give Malia a little more room to breathe than a normal companion interjection would normally have. The easiest way to express how this feels when playing the game is that it feels as though Malia was always a part of the game, in the same way the vanilla companions are, just implemented and integrated better.

 

This said, Malia has a LOT of form overrides in her ESP for these quests she is injected into. Extreme care has been made to not touch the core game scripts such as the Followers, WorkshopParent, etc. These remain free of any overrides in Malia's ESP file. However, due to the overrides present, in order to enjoy her integration as made, you will need to consider a low load order for Malia once she is available. Malia also has a few cell edits in place due to alterations to various game cells to integrate her into the game world a little more realistically, so this too will need to be a consideration.

 

Although Malia does have these sorts of form overrides to consider, they were not done simply for the sake of doing them. Each edit was carefully made to serve the story and the character and is not done just because it could be done. Everything has a purpose, as you will discover as you explore the world with her. The key thing about Malia that I would try to impress upon you is that Malia is not just a companion. She is an experience and every such mod that provides an experience can only do so with modifications to vanilla forms, if you want the experience to be seamless to the game world.

 

Malia also allows, without external mods being required, to have Dogmeat along as a second companion, by means of unlocking Bethesda's code that allows a humanoid companion and the dog at the same time. It is not strictly speaking multi-follower, but it is more aligned to what was originally intended for the game.

 

An Important Note About How Malia Has Been Written: As said, Malia is an experience and she has been written in a way that mimics how companions are used in Doctor Who. I'll baseline this so everyone is on the same page as to what this means. The Doctor travels all of time and space and has for many thousands of years. He's seen it all. He reacts to very little. And when he does react, it is seldom in a very human sort of way. Hence the companions that travel with the Doctor, who are very much human. Their purpose has always been to give the viewer the human emotional reaction, to be the foil by which we can empathize. Where the Doctor may see something and be blase about it or completely ignore situations or elements within his immediate environment, the companion would have that reaction, of experiencing something new, something wonderful, something terrifying. This is how Malia is written. She is the foil by which you can experience the world, as observed, by someone who went to sleep when the world was one way and woke up hundreds of years later to a world that was very much different. Malia reacts to things and says things that the player never does and probably should have. It always bothered me that Nate/Nora never reacted, not in an appreciable way, to just how different the world is. I hated how the death of the spouse and the kidnapping of the child rarely played any role in events. Enter Malia. She comments on differences in the world. She laments all that has been lost. She talks about how it all affects her, reminisces about her life's events in relation to specific locations. She talks about the fact that the player has lost their spouse and their child. Malia is meant to extend the rapport you should be feeling for the player character. Her creation is nothing short of my attempt to correct the oversight in the player's complete non-reaction to the changes in their life and in the world around them. Further to this, Malia has been crafted to resemble, as closely as possibly can be done in a limited game engine, an actual living person that feels and has needs, be they physical, emotional or health related. In short, I set out to create the sort of companion I always wished to have along for the ride while playing through the game and by incorporating some of RSE's technology and being heavily inspired by LlamaRCA's work on Heather Casdin and Reginald001's work on Insane Ivy, I was finally able to do just that.

 

• Malia features her own unique body mesh and body texture so you can make her stand out from all other NPCs and the player. She is fully SLM usable.
• As stated above, Malia features thousands of lines of dialogue, most of which play randomly via her chatter events.
• Malia is somewhat script heavy. She has quite a few core scripts, but none of them are very big by filesize, so lag is not expected nor has been experienced in my tests.
• Malia is fully AAF aware. In and of herself, she doesn't force AAF functions, but through the Animation Monitor, she is capable of commenting on AAF actions.
• Malia fully utilizes the Story Manager to drive many different layers of autonomous or randomly occurring events.
• Malia has an included MCM that allows you to tailor her to your desired play style, within context of her autonomy, needs and personality.
• Malia's ESP file alone currently sits at 2.5 megs, which is VERY large for a companion mod. This is expected to grow quite a bit before she is ready to deploy.
• Malia is able to interact with mod added companions such as Heather and Ivy, if they are installed. No other companion mod out there does this!
• Malia features her own wakeup beside romanced player functions, so she does not require an external mod to facilitate this.
• Malia has a comprehensive companion dialogue wheel that includes tactics such as travel distance and stance. She also includes romantic partner options.

 

1. One question that invariably is always asked is how Malia compares to other companions, so I will address it right here. Malia is different than other companions. While she shares a lot of similar functions to mod added and vanilla companions, that's about the extent of how she compares. She has an introduction to the player. She has a recruitment phase. She has a travel and affinity system to get her into a romanced state. She gives the player an item occasionally. And honestly, that is where the parallels end. This is not to say that Malia is better than another companion available to play with. Simply that she is different; she offers a different player experience. All companions, when you get right down to it, are like comparing apples to oranges. Malia is an apple to companion X's orange. She might not be for everyone - that is to be expected. So yeah, the answer to that question is just that she is different.
   
2. Another question that's been circling Malia's development is how she will function within a multi-companion mod setup. I personally do not use them so I have no functional knowledge of how they work. This said, Malia uses the vanilla follower system and companion slot. If your multi-follower mod breaks that, well, Malia's quest level interjection dialogue will likely no longer function. As to the question of how a multi-follower mod will work on her AI and packaging, again this is not something I can answer. The bottom line is that I don't use such mods and thus cannot account for them, nor will I support issues that arise from them. It really is a case of "caveat emptor", let the buyer beware. You alone take the risk and the responsibility for using such mods and having them potentially break Malia.
   
3. At this time, there is no news to impart for completion of the mod. There is no news to impart about Malia being voiced. My key focus right now is to get her up and running at 100% before moving on to the other phases of her development and testing. Asking for news on either of these points is not going to be answered because I simply have no answers to give.

 

Due to file allocation limitations, screenshots are not able to be attached to this post. I have a few added under my user account on the main Nexus Fallout 4 site, should you wish to see some.