I have no idea what happened next but the 'small mod' grew four more major areas, a long storyline and a handful of smaller fedex quests. As it grew I tried to change its direction so that although there is one main storyline, it is possible to complete it in a non-linear fashion and indeed, it is possible to miss out large parts of the mod and still complete it successfully. Equally, there are points at which you can bring part of the story to a halt without breaking the entire plot and a few - a very few - points at which you can break the entire storyline but still be given experience points for having completed it so far. In a lot of places plot development depends on your attitude and to some extent, your charisma. In nearly all cases there are multiple ways to complete sections of the main quest and some ways will give more experience points than other ways. The choice, as ever, is yours.
There were times when I lost interest in it for months at a time (hence why it's taken five years to complete) but it was never going to be completely abandoned, unless I could not find an answer to one particular problem. I really did not want to have to use those awful words 'you need to start a new game to be able to use this mod' and had determined that if that did become the case, I would abandon it completely. Well, I badgered SConrad for .tp2 code help and Seb badgered The Bigg for new Weidu macros and between the two of them they resolved that problem.
And at long last it's nearly complete. A very few people have been aware of the mod's existance but I did not want to go public until I had reached this point in case I hit insurmountable problems. I really didn't want to have the over-enthusiastic modder's traditional hard drive crash at the last hurdle....
A few useless statistics:
Five new major areas
One new piece of music
One new movie
Almost 11000 lines of dialog
Sixty portraits for the major NPCs
Four cutscenes
Two new spells
Sixteen new stores
Twenty-two new items
Twenty-four new BAMs
Forty-nine new .cre scripts
All of the 'new' areas have been created from cut-up and recycled Bioware originals, but less than ten of the internal areas have not been modified in one way or another to distinguish them from the original areas. Much as Bioware themselves did, in fact...
FFT is designed for characters at mid-level (nine and above - it can be done with lower levels i.e. just starting out in BG2 but it will get a bit difficult in places). If you are a high-level character then it will be a complete walkover. It can be started at any point in the game but preferably before Saemon Haverian takes you to Brynnlaw. After the start of Chapter 4 a lot of options become restricted because Brynnlaw/Spellhold is no longer available after you leave there.
-Y-
[EDIT] Dialog count updated; thanks to GeN1e for making me go away and count them (sort-of) properly!
Edited by Yovaneth, 25 October 2008 - 03:01 PM.
