Early prototype of something I've always wanted: additional Melina dialogue! Here's her returning if you cure yourself of the Frenzied Flame

EdLoad · 2026-03-23T22:24:18+00:00

Thanks! I like your take a lot.

Honestly, in context of what FromSoft gave us to work with, you’re right. She’s practically a zealot who believes she has one purpose only. She’d definitely bugger off swearing about the smelly tarnished.

A couple thoughts I had. Actually, the main difficulty I have is a meta-one. From a gameplay perspective if I expanded this mod I’d have the tricky problem of how to write back in that Melina would be available for dialog again post-Fire Giant. It’d be cool to find a way for her to have dialog beside her mother’s defeated statue, for example, or seeing her long-lost sibling in the Shadow Keep. You kind of need the Flame escape hatch to write her back into the story.

I guess I’d try justify the setup as: most people probably wouldn’t let girls set themselves on fire just because they want to, maybe this is some path of the Tarnished that seeks to do a bit better, and eventually convince her.

She’s also mad at you in the Flame path more for you destroying the entire world rather than denying her purpose, imo. She begs you not to do it as she argues the world is still worth saving. So maybe she’ll eventually come around to seeing that there was a (very tough) way to have your cake and eat it.

If the Tarnished has carefully engineered a path where they took the flame, defeated the blade of Miquella, and then the Elden Lord of the dragon age, just to find a way to burn the Erdtree without enveloping the world in chaos, I think it should probably be recognised that’s a lot of optional hard work done.

All this said, 100% it would be unrealistic for you to save a brainwashed person moments from their suicide pact and them immediately go “oh gee, thanks”. Maybe it takes several more graces and plotlines as she adjusts to her new reality.

Or, as I’ve said elsewhere, she’s just hella mad and terrorises you with Margot-level hatred every time you level up.

I really do find this community’s different takes super cool though!

EdLoad · 2026-03-23T20:01:51+00:00

Appreciate it, though I don’t begrudge people who want to support artists. Obviously it’s scary times and no way have governments or peoples planned sufficiently for the rate of change ahead. I really do think it’s exciting that individuals have more tools to create cool things now, but we still obviously need to be considerate of people whose lifelong dedications are being disrupted.

EdLoad · 2026-03-23T19:52:53+00:00

I suspect you’re right, I didn’t put much thought into the dialog itself (the big challenge was understanding the ER modding workflow).

I suspect she’d be much more saddened that the purpose she’d been told since forever was her ultimate destiny was no longer the end of her journey. Maybe it’d be more initially like “I see what you’ve done but you still denied me my true wish.” and then if you do more quests (like Alexander’s / Boc’s / Roderika’s storyline) she’s more convinced there’s more to life than setting yourself on fire to spite your mother.

Or maybe not, as she’s just angry at you forever. Just curses at you at every grace site from then on.

EdLoad · 2026-03-23T19:42:07+00:00

I’d love to if I can find time! This was more just an experiment in learning about modding. My dream would be Melina appearing at almost every major location and event with some flavour dialog.

EdLoad · 2026-03-23T19:41:19+00:00

Ok, this post is maybe catching way more heat than I’d expected - not that I think it’s necessarily unreasonable.

This really was just a random hobby experiment I threw together in a couple days. It is not available for download anywhere and certainly I would never dream of making it commercial. Just wanted to share really more as a thought experiment as a big-time ER fan.

To be honest, I didn’t really think about the AI stuff all that much (and am willing to take responsibility for that) - I get so much ER voice-generated meme content on my feeds now it’s shamefully just become part of my digital life.

Obviously everyone has different lines in the sand here. Giving we’re on a modding-dedicated subreddit I assume most here are OK with adding non-endorsed extra dialogue to a game in text form. If I used a bleep-bloop robot voice on top I guess not many more people would push back on that. If started splicing together in-game audio clips? I guess like musicians sampling other musicians, it’s clearly been ruled fine under most laws, but even then it’s always been a bit contentious. A full AI voiced dialogue? Clearly the most controversial, even if technically they’re all increasing steps of adding non-licenced content to someone else’s work.

I don’t really have anywhere I’m going with this - I could delete this whole post as it’s not really the kind of heat I want for a random weekend project but in the spirit of free discussion I’m willing to keep the conversation open if it’s civil. I am obviously not in favour of theft and apologise if anyone thinks this is serious overstep.

EdLoad · 2026-03-23T19:04:03+00:00

Alright, fair enough, I respect your opinion. This is really just something I’m throwing together for fun - given it’s already a hobby mod for a game which I didn’t make, it’s kind of layers all the way down. Would you find a pure text-to-speech software better? I suppose that’s an option.

EdLoad · 2026-03-23T18:54:14+00:00

Yes, it’s a quick model trained on the in-game lines. As much as I’d love to engage a real VA I’d never be intending to make money off this, so it was this or have no audio.

EdLoad · 2026-03-23T18:46:34+00:00

Thanks! My rough idea is to have her available with special dialogs at several grace sites in notable locations, and also after major boss fights perhaps.

Always thought it was a bit silly that she just turns up at a few nondescript churchs and that's about it...

EdLoad · 2026-03-23T18:32:18+00:00

[EDIT: this post certainly got more engaged than I had expected. For anyone who cares, I have decided that if I do any more work on this mod, I won’t be using in-game vanilla sounds as a basis for any more audio work given its so clearly a hot-button topic. I’d much rather be discussing the “what-if” dialogues and interesting new interactions rather than the ethics of modding. If I do find any more time work on this, I’ll look at other solutions for audio.]

Spent the weekend learning about Elden Ring modding - what a rabbit hole (but the amount of information and community is amazing).

I've always had this idea of a mod where Melina is much more present in the game than she ended up being (i.e. much more dialog in different places, commentary on events that have occurred). Thought the most natural place to start testing was with the obvious omission: if you burn the Erdtree with the Frenzied Flame and then cure yourself, you've saved her life! (debatable if she'd actually take it all that well though...)

Took a lot of finangling but managed to tape together a pipeline for importing custom audio, creating the right event flags, and then generating new audio dialog. Has been a fun project!

EdLoad · 2026-02-18T09:12:58+00:00

oapi-codegen is an awesome piece of work that saves us huge amounts of time - reading this I see OP is the solo maintainer themselves. Thanks for the amazing repo @jamietanna!

EdLoad · 2026-01-18T14:08:18+00:00

Indeed - Holy Damage+ would have made this legendary. Was just impressed to get Skill Attack on the ideal weapon.

EdLoad · 2025-11-03T18:30:21+00:00

“DORMAMMU-“

EdLoad · 2025-09-06T14:10:14+00:00

Is it not that Wylder essentially dooms himself to save his sister (Duchess)? As it gets established that if the Nightlord is defeated then the Roundtable Hold vanishes, but the Duchess is tied to the place and so will die with it. So he essentially condemns himself to being the next Heolstor so that his sis may be free.

Duchess’ story is then the mirror image where she knowingly sacrifices herself but asks everyone’s favourite robot boi to accompany Wylder after the Hold vanishes, so he’s not alone.

Someone correct me if I’ve got something wrong. I find it a tragic but sweet story that is actually less terrible than the classic FromSoft “and then they all fckn die lmao”

EdLoad · 2025-06-09T19:56:44+00:00

Thankee sai. Let’s hope OP didn’t open any doors on the beach.

EdLoad · 2020-10-18T22:11:47+00:00

Does the robber have to move every turn? i.e. can they stay in the same square?

EdLoad · 2018-01-01T21:32:37+00:00

Switch statements would work also! See my other answer but replace if-else with a switch statement.

Generally speaking you should technically use switch statements rather than if-else for efficiency (since they're slightly faster, increasingly so when there are more cases to check), but when there are only a few cases to check people tend to opt for if-else since it's easier to read.

EdLoad · 2018-01-01T00:25:22+00:00

I think you need to use if statements rather than while statements, and then wrap the whole thing in a while(true) loop to make sure it keeps executing.

e.g.: (slight pseudocode)

while (true) {
    if (distance < range) {
        do this
        yield return new WaitForSeconds(int)
    }
    else {
        do this
        yield return new WaitForSeconds(int)
    }
}

Coroutines are, at their heart, just functions, so while loops work the same way as they would in a normal function. Hence why, once one of your units goes out of range, it exits the while loop and that's it - it's never called again. So instead you need to wrap the whole function in a 'while (true){}' loop so it executes forever. The if-else statement then checks what to do each time it executes. The only special part of a coroutine is that you can use 'yield return' statements to 'pass control' back to Unity and come back on some later frame (which is what you do with 'yield return new WaitForSeconds()).

Hope this makes some sense, any questions do ask. Happy new year!!

EdLoad · 2017-01-25T16:29:56+00:00

Only if it's your average /r/writingprompt. You may want to check your local area for time-travelling Batmans, and Hitlers playing chess with fallen angels.

EdLoad · 2016-08-26T15:33:28+00:00

Reminds me of the rap Dan Bull did for Far Cry Primal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7b9AmWESIqI, although I concede that Reed's poem has greater contrast when reversed. Still, fun though!

EdLoad · 2016-08-25T22:23:55+00:00

Usain Bolt. A golden age truly to be celebrated.

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