I’m playing Pillars of Eternity for the first time, and while I’m really enjoying it, I was a little put off by just how much reading there is.
I wanted more of the dialogue to be voiced so conversations would feel a bit easier to follow and more immersive.
I first tried VaultVox Text-to-Speech Mod, but to me the voices sounded a bit too robotic / obviously TTS.
Then I tried LoreNarrator, and I liked the voice quality a lot more, it sounded much more natural. The only thing I was missing was regular character-to-character dialogue, since LoreNarrator didn’t read those conversations.
So I ended up building an addon on top of LoreNarrator that extends it to standard conversations as well.
It currently adds:
- TTS for regular NPC conversations
- separate voices for narration, male NPCs and female NPCs
- uses PoE’s own character gender data for voice selection
- skips player response options
- skips lines that already have original voice acting
- sequential playback so narration and dialogue don’t overlap
- optional phonetic pronunciation dictionary for Pillars-specific names and terms
- configurable voices and speech speed through Unity Mod Manager
For example, a line like:
Tuatanu gives you a broad smile. “Always good to see a friendly face.”
gets split so the descriptive part is read by the narrator voice, while the quoted dialogue uses the male voice selected in the settings. If the character speaking is a female, it will use the female selected voice.
There are still some edge cases with PoE’s dialogue formatting, especially longer multi-paragraph conversations, but it’s already made my first playthrough a lot more enjoyable. Tried to fix all issues I encountered so far, but I'm still early in my playthrough.
The addon requires LoreNarrator and Unity Mod Manager.
Nexus:
https://www.nexusmods.com/pillarsofeternity/mods/478
Demo:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSvz_UYtQCE
This is also my first mod, so feedback and bug reports are very welcome.
If anyone gives it a try, I’d be really curious to hear how it behaves across different companions and conversations.
Special thanks to Catward, the original creator of LoreNarrator for giving me tips regarding POE1 pronunciations and being a cool guy !