Deeper Thoughts - Curie

Have you ever noticed how much dialogue the companions in Fallout IV have to get out of them? That's pretty impressive, at least more impressive than Skyrim's Dead Eye fans. It's been so exciting to be able to ask them different things and hear how our relationship has changed and grown over the years as we've ventured through waste. Recently, however, I've noticed something that's started to nag me - these companions, after years of hearing their thoughts and opinions about our relationship, have become extremely boring and repetitive. Likewise, I'll see YouTube videos and I'll hear my peers make comments that I've never heard before!

So after realizing how much of the Juicy Companion dialogue I'd missed and finding an explanation of how to access it on the internet, I decided to try the Fallout IV Creation Kit. From this point on, in this first part, I hope to move into a series called "Deeper Thoughts," whose goal is to expand our pool of wonderful peer conversations in a simple and accessible way.

What does change is actually quite simple. Finally found a few hitherto unheard voice files, set the activation in "Hellos" - for some unknown reason I never activated them - I just copied them and moved the copied files to the Idles pool, with the "What do you think?" option draw.

I decided to start this adventure with my personal favorite Mate Curie (admittedly basic) mod. I took five vocal lines from that section and added them to her "What do you think?" dialogue when she's "in love" with you, and another six from the "Infatuation" section (when you're at maximum affinity but not romantic) to make sure she has more ways to say she likes/want you while also not being obsessed with it.

All the affinity parts do the same thing - Curie now has more thoughts to share when she hates you, despises you, is neutral towards you, admires you, has a crush on you, loves you. Some of them have even been mixed and matched to a tasteful degree, all the while adhering to how I assumed she actually spoke.

Finally, there are two versions of this mod. The first one was just labeled "Deep Thoughts," which only added "new" dialogue while keeping her normal background library (including lines such as "It's hard to determine whether surfaces are more or less susceptible to outbreaks" and "Influxes of data are difficult to process..."). However, if you were like me and had been listening to Curie go on about "people looking for science and the academy" for so long you'd think she was setting a broken record, and I've made a second version to my own support - "Deep Thoughts with Affinity-sorted dialogue." What this version does is reassign these generic comments to the affinity section. For example, Curie will no longer ask to "see and scan native life forms" once she becomes a synthesizer, or "continue to wonder if the data she collects will be used for any purpose." This is the version I like to use.