LE Port

Ever find it weird that dragons, perfectly intelligent beings, never speak a word while you're trying to defeat them? This mod changes that.

Port Notes

I originally made this mod for SSE. I don't have LE so I couldn't port it myself, but FierySnowman and EmeraldShadow ported it for me - thank you very much! I included both ports (most likely they are the same).

Overview

This mod reuses some vanilla voice lines to make the dragons speak in combat, so they feel like sentient creatures rather than just beasts. I recently started a new game and was surprised by what Mirmulnir actually said during combat, since I didn't remember that from my other games at all. Most of these lines don't have anything special either, just generic battle talk. I can see the developers trying to make the quest-related dragons more unique by adding dialogue, but ultimately, you'll have one fight against those few dragons (or none at all if you choose not to do the main quest), and all the rest of your daily battles will be silent. There are modes that allow voice lines to do shouting, but I haven't seen anything that adds dialogue.

There are some completely universal lines that will be used regardless of the dragon's target, and there are some additional lines that will reference Dovahkiin - these will be used with the universal lines when the dragon targets the player, and you've already said Greybeards (MQ105).

Paarthurnax, Alduin and Odahviing have unique sounds so they don't use these lines. You won't see the first two in missions outside of combat anyway (unless you have a mod that spawns enemies like SOT and they happen to spawn someone on the Throat of the World, but that's very rare and I don't think Paarthurnax has a battle line that doesn't involve Alduin). Odahviing has no universal battle line, no mention of players or shouts, so I just added the shouts and they would be used if he was targeting another dragon. I set it to a relatively low chance so it's not too repetitive.

Manual installation

Extract the archive into the Skyrim\Data folder.

compatibility

I've only overridden one record (CreatureDialogueDragon), which has minimal purpose, so it should be compatible with anything. Dragons added by mods (such as Diverse Dragons, Deadly Dragons, etc.) will also speak, as long as they use the vanilla "CrDragonVoice" (which I'm pretty sure all dragons without custom voice lines use).

Just to clarify, if you're asking "will this be compatible with X?", the answer is yes, I'm 90% sure about it. If you have a mod with dragons with custom voices, they won't use the dialogue lines from my mod, but they won't prevent dragons using "CrDragonVoice" from using them.

If you're wondering what I changed, I modified the conditional CreatureDialogueDragon to check the Dragon's voice list instead of just "CrDragonVoice" in order to enable the row for Odahviing (his voice is "CrUniqueOdahviing", so the old conditional checking "CrDragonVoice" always returned false). The other records in my mod don't overwrite anything, they just reference the CreatureDialogueDragon quest.

It's worth mentioning that my mod is marked as ESL, which means it won't have a limit of 255 on plugins. Unfortunately this is an SSE exclusive, so no ESL here.