fallout new vegas: benrey mod

a work in progress by yours truly

recently i got my old pc (that can actually run Video Games) working again, and i felt the siren call of one of my all-time favorite games, fallout new vegas. but not just any call......i realized, with my newfound power, that i could put benny-boy in the game as your very own companion and nobody could stop me

you can download him here on nexusmods.com!

ive never modded a bethesda game before, but that didnt stop me and it shouldnt stop you, either. theres a lot of really handy resources/tutorials out there, like what youll find on the unofficial GECK wiki. this page isnt intended to be a tutorial in and of itself, so im not gonna be going over stuff in exhaustive detail. i just wanted to talk about the progress ive been making b/c it makes me happy

benrey 1.0

benrey speaking to the player: 'wow. so ungrateful... and after i came all this way to - to check up on you, make sure you had your passport...'

for the first iteration of benreymod i was primarily concerned with the basics: getting him to look right, successfully join your party, not break when you talk to him.....etc. rudimentary stuff. i chose to outfit him with in-game armor as a placeholder b/c the security guard armor looks pretty close to the real deal, and i didnt wanna go to all the effort of importing his half life 1 model before id even gotten him up and running. but honestly, its growing on me! i like the idea of him adapting to whatever game world he finds himself in. so i might just stick with it

benrey standing next to the player (gordon freeman) in freeside

most of the work was made much, much easier thanks to tammer's customizable companion framework. i cannot thank this guy enough. its still been a lot of blood, sweat, and tears on my end, dont get me wrong (piecing together how new vegas' dialogue scripting works has been.......Fun), but if you ever see an opportunity to make things easier for u, take it!!! thats the tigerdrop motto

one of the features included in the framework is the ability for benrey to level up with the player and give you new perks as his skills improve. its more that i dont know how to easily get rid of it than anything, so im keeping it in. benreys starting stats are pretty average - low intelligence, high endurance, like you might expect - so he only starts off with the one. but youll be able to spec him as you see fit and get all kinds of "Interesting" perks.

benreys endurance perk: 'Benrey's high Endurance allows him to temporarily boost your Damage Resistance and Damage Threshold when knocked down. He's a persistent little guy. Unfortunately, this makes him awfully hard to get rid of...'

benrey 1.0 features the ability to choose whether your player is Gordon or Not-Gordon, although limited in scope. at first, id intended for this only to have a minor impact on some of his dialogue - the idea was that, even if you told him you werent gordon, hed still be convinced that you were gordon, and that you were either lying or mistaken. so, basically, most of his speech would be written as if he was talking to gordon the whole way through.

the player choosing whether theyre Gordon or Not-Gordon. the option 'I'm not a boy. And I'm not sure what you're talking about.' is highlighted.

benreys response: 'oh, uh, no, yeah, that's - that's cool. gender freeman... i can get into that.'

but thats pretty low-effort! and when i was comparing benrey 1.0 to the other companions you can get in new vegas, i realized that he was gonna need A) a lot more dialogue and B) some kind of companion quest. so why not make that split more concrete, and have it affect which version of the companion quest you get? (b/c its a lot more fuckin effort is why. but im committed!)

currently, he doesnt have any voice lines or anything. it would be pretty hard to gin up voice lines for entirely new dialogue, unless i had, like, one of those neural network voice synthesizers for benrey. or unless a genie granted me a wish and scorpy volunteered to record all of them. however, once ive gotten him into more of a finished state, im thinking about adding grunts and other tiny pieces of dialogue straight from HLVRAI to his battle shouts/etc. so you might be able to hear him go "ow what the hell" in real time. its pretty low-priority for me, though - im primarily focused on dialogue and quest scripting.

for now, ive chosen to make it so that you cant change his armor from his inventory. as tempting as it would be to play dress-up with him, this saves me the effort of having to come up with a face that feels Right for benrey, given the......constraints.....of the new vegas player creator. to be honest i just hit the random face button until it threw up something i could live with. thats what the helmets for, babey

benreys face underneath the helmet

however, he does start with something special in his inventory.....remember the camera he kept pulling out in HLVRAI? i do

benreys starting inventory, including his camera!

so far, he functions! there were a few small bugs in his dialogue - missing taunts, improper dialogue priority, his 'Goodbye' prompt overwriting every single other character's prompt with "See ya, Benrey" b/c i didnt know what i was doing - which ive already fixed for the next iteration of benreymod. a lot of my issues just stemmed from a lack of familiarity with the editor. now that i have a better idea of what im doing, though, ive got big plans in mind

benrey 1.1

this version of benreymod now features significantly more interaction with benrey before he chooses to join you. previously, id only included the bare minimum of dialogue, and hed immediately offer to join up with you after 3 or 4 choices. but this isnt really how the other companions work! some have stat requirements you have to meet before theyll join you, like arcade, and others have entire quests you have to complete first, like cass. for benrey, ive opted for the former. for example, if your PC happens to have the Confirmed Bachelor perk.....

'all i did was give him a lil' booboo. and then he starts yellin' at me... callin' my meat small... says he's gonna - gonna punch my lumps out...'

'and he didn't even wait for me to show up to the black mesa birthday boy pizza party. just moseyed on out. without me.'

highlighted player dialogue: '[Confirmed Bachelor] Wow. Sounds like you have a really... *intense* relationship.'

'tch. no. not even. i don't even know if he's, uh... if he's like - if he's not - whatever, man.'

ive started work on a branching companion quest, too. if the PC opts to be gordon, benrey will treat you like youre his beloved bestest bud that he came here personally to rescue, and youll eventually get a quest to undertake your very own casino heist. just like in the ACAB stream! but if youre not gordon, you instead get a quest to help him find gordon and bring him home.

highlighted player dialogue: 'It seems like you're really worried about Gordon. Do you want some help looking for him?'

of course, this introduces the possibility of being able to find gordon and save him before you ever meet benrey. but im accounting for that, too. should this be the route you take, gordon will simply thank you and head home on his own.....and when you run into benrey, hell be so pissed off that gordon didnt even mention him that he just walks off for good. no resolution. sure, its kind of a bummer, but i think it would be really fucking funny and ill make sure to leave a note in the description warning that you can fuck yourself over like this. just in case.

other things of note: all those little bugs i mentioned previously have been fixed, meaning that his taunts and other comments now work as intended. unfortunately, benrey isnt the brightest tool in the shed.

PC gordon trying to crouch and stealth his way past a pack of deathclaws. benrey didnt get the memo.

currently, the companion quest is in a nascent stage: you can technically acquire it, but it doesnt do anything and it doesnt have any steps you can actually complete yet. its the next big thing on my agenda now that all of benreys introductory choices are fully fleshed out. and its also gonna be.....the most amount of work by far LOL but this is the bed ive made and i must lie in it

im not sure when the next iteration of benreymod will be finished, or when ill release any version of it to the public. its just somethin im messing around with for fun in my spare time. and i want it to at least be a self-contained Thing without a ton of dangling work-in-progress bits.

upcoming changes for benrey 1.2:

adding skill/perk requirements for gordon!PC to get benrey to join
implementing the companion quest so it actually shows up on your pip-boy like a regular quest
coming up with a solid "first step" for the player to undertake on the "find gordon" branch
picking a more reasonable place to find him than goodsprings. hes mostly there b/c its easy for me to bugtest
make his conditions for bailing on the player obvious, if there are any (havent decided)
i want to put in dialogue for if you find fisto with benrey. itd be funny.
figure out how to make benrey leaves if another companion joins. i think right now he functions like rex or ed-e does, effectively like an animal companion, which is extremely funny but not what i intended. this might be hard
possibly add in small, extant voice lines for attack grunts/etc

thank u for reading. here are some screenshots that i thought were funny and/or cute but that i didnt have a good place for. Bye Bye !

the worst picture possible of my gordon freeman player character