So I have been trying to decide where \ how to go with the new Celestial Followers that are going to be added in the next version. While through testing and all that I simply had them sitting there waiting for the player to come and say " hey follow me ", I knew I wanted more to it than just the generic "nexus" followers ( you know what I mean ). At first I had thought about putting each of them in faction specific locations that the player would have to access before being able to recruit them. Some ideas were the Shaydow Knight in the Thieves guild, the Devil Knight in the Dark Brotherhood, and the Angel Knight in the Mages guild. I might still do this, or something along those lines ( I'm not so sure still how I feel about the Angel Knight in the Mages guild, since she is more of a warrior, but don't really want her in the Companions since that can be accessed as early as level 2 if played right ). However, today I had a "lightbulb" moment and began work on a 2nd functIon of the followers you saw before....

Summons.

My new idea is for you to meet up with the Celestial Knights in a location that you will visit through the story ( such as the Devil Knight in the Dark Brotherhood ) and have them tell the lore as to why they are there. See, if you read the lore I made for the Celestial's, you would see that you are picked to achieve a task by the Celestial Council. My idea is, you're not the first. There were 3 sent before you that basically FAILED, and each of the 3 has a different reason as to why they couldn't complete the task. Maybe the Angel Knight lost her sword, the Devil Knight never learned how to control mana on Tamriel, the Shaydow Knight was caught, etc. In return for aiding each one, you will learn how to summon each of them at any time you wish.

This new idea played perfectly into my desire to add more perks to the magic trees, and today I made the first one. Conjuration now has a Celestial perk. Having both the Twin Souls perk AND the Master Conjuration perk, you can learn the new Celestial Tri Soul perk, allowing you to summon all THREE of the Celestial Knights at the same time.

The new Summons are permanent, that is, they will stick around until you dismiss them or they die. If they die you can re summon them. Unlike followers, you are summoning the SPECTRE of the Knight you helped before, not an actual follower, so you can't talk to them or give them commands, even with UFO or EFF, they simply follow you around and attack anything that becomes hostile to you. I wrote a script to dismiss them so that you could tell them to stop following you whenever you wish, and just summon them again when you like.

Another neat note, because they are SUMMONS and not actual ACTORS in the traditional sense, I was able to bypass the whole " crash when trying to get custom followers of a custom race " thing I mentioned before in a previous blog entry. These summons are full on CELESTIAL, with all the skeleton / head data / you name it that goes with being a Celestial. If you use PCEA, they will use the same animations YOU use as a Celestial.

Now mind you, all the spell data and scripting for this idea is DONE, I did it today and it took me ALL DAY to do. HOWEVER, adding in the base NPC's to my desired locations, and of course the big one, the QUESTS, hasn't even been touched. I will be honest, I've never really done any quest scripting AT ALL, except the starting quest script that auto adds the Celestial items to a new Celestial \ first time instal of the Celestial Mod. I expect this will take me a rather LONG time to work on, so don't get your hopes up of a v7 release anytime soon. I'm just giving updates as to what I am up to and the ideas going through my head.