Edit NPCs for Jedi Outcast?

[rlcrum17]

Hello,

I am curious if there is a way to edit the attributes, health, or power of various NPCs in Jedi Outcast.    I have done this before with Jedi Academy tools, but haven't found anything as simple with Outcast.  Can anyone point me in the right direction as to where to start if possible?  Is there a file in the game folders that I can access?

Dessann is one tough dude. Just trying to make him less OP. 

[Futuza]

Personally, I wouldn't recommend depriving yourself of the fun experience of beating the game the way it was designed to be, but if you insist you could do a couple of things to make Desaan a wimp.

The most straight forward to what you're asking is to edit his npc file.  You can find a tutorial about how to do this here (note might vary slighty as this is for JKA not Outcast, but its basically the same format):

  Note, that you probably want to make a seperate pk3 to store the modified Desaan .npc in, so as to not overwrite the original gamefiles permanently.  The easiest way to make him a scrub is change his health value to 1hp, but have fun trying out all the new stuff.  You could change his class, or lower his accuracy, aggression, etc.  Keep in mind doing this will probably mess up your save file, so don't mod until you have a backup save.

[Lancelot]

4 hours ago, rlcrum17 said:

Dessann is one tough dude. Just trying to make him less OP. 

I would say he's challenging, but not overpowered. Tactic is the key. Once you know what you have to do during the fight, he's pretty easy to defeat (unless you mean the fight at the beginning, in which he is intentionally "overpowered").

And besides, cheating is the worst thing you can do in a game like this one. I speak from my own experience, as I used to do that often whenever I didn't get far in a game.

[rlcrum17]

All good points. Honestly, just trying to make it so he doesn't have infinite force lightning or unbreakable force choke/grip.  I've toyed around with NPC files in Academy, mainly to fix bugs in them (wrong voices, wrong run speeds, ect.). I just hadn't found the files to do so with Outcast yet.  Should be fun! I enjoy Desann's fight a lot, it just feels like he can tank me despite my knowledge of the mechanics at times.    To quote Cassian Andor, I've been in this fight since I was six years old. quite literally been playing this game for a looong time. so it would be fun to know how to tweak it.     I'll probably toy around with it for an hour and then agree that Raven did a great job balancing him and leave it be haha.

[Circa]

Just a warning (that I should put in the tutorial above) is that JK2 NPCs have more attributes hardcoded than JKA ones do. They really opened them up more in JKA. With JK2 you can't even change the weapons or saber hilts, because they are tied to the NPC names, which is why you see mods with NPC support have NPC names like "jedi_bob" instead of just "bob" because "jedi" means it uses a lightsaber. Or at least that's what I understand.

With Desann, you will probably have to change his class but even then, I'm sure a lot of his attributes are tied to his name. You might try making a new NPC named "reborn_desann" and change his class to CLASS_REBORN to have him behave more like a Reborn, which would be much easier than normal Desann.

[rlcrum17]

Fun update!  I have started tweaking funny things like dismemberment probability and enemy aim (just to see how it works and feels).   Most of Desann's attributes are indeed tied to his class. His unique lightsaber hilt, invulnerability to lightning and level 4 force powers are all linked to that. Unless I want to create a custom class and attribute it to him, all I can really change is his rank, aim, intelligence, ect.    I have got him to the point where the only thing I have changed is the frequency at which he uses his unbreakable force powers. So all in all, i'd call that a victory. He's still a 7 foot tall monkey lizard who can jump on Kyle while using his one handed strong stance to dominate, but at least he won't suspend me in the air while I helplessly watch my health drain.