Here’s a fun fact: Lydia, the dutiful Skyrim follower who became a gaming sensation, only had around 50 voiced lines of dialogue when the game first shipped. In comparison, the ambitious Skyrim mod Feris the Follower just got an update that gives the fan-made rogue 450 new lines. Fully voiced. No AI. That’s on top of Feris’ existing 6,000 voice lines, which give the companion something to say about nearly every quest in the vanilla game.
These aren’t throwaway barks, either. Feris will speak to the player and often have multiple potential responses for the topic at hand. She’ll have something to say about everything, from the weather to religion. “Utterly unbelievable,” reads one comment on the Skyrim mods page from QaxeIsKaze, who’s voiced their own follower mods in the past, and tried a number of community ones as well. They maintain that Feris is better than most of them.
If you’d like a sense of what Feris the Follower is like, here’s a 16-minute introduction trailer made by the mod creator:
In addition to new lines, the update contains a number of bug fixes for Feris’ existing dialogue. The update also expands her idle dialogue options and allows her to respond to more specific situations, like when the player is a vampire. What makes this mod particularly astounding, though, is that mod creator Lirinden_ is nowhere near done. Lirinden_ says they are currently working on dialogue options for the Dragonborn DLC, as well as three-way conversations between Feris and other follower mods.
Beyond the inclusion of a staggering number of conversations, Feris also has her own questline. The mod is programmed to dole out the personal quests periodically, only after the player has already gotten to know Feris a little more. Obviously, it wouldn’t have been prudent for Bethesda to make a version of Skyrim where every follower has thousands of lines. But nearly 15 years after its release, it’s easy to see why the game’s most devoted players might be feeling like the existing dialogue has grown a little stale.
“I have been playing Skyrim over a decade,” one mod user writes on Feris’ download page, “and she is my favorite follower now.”
