This immersive Skyrim mod gives bandits 500 more things to say

Skyrim bandit — (Image credit: Bethesda)

Bandits are everywhere in Skyrim and yet few of them are truly memorable. They hang out in forts, caves, and ruins, just waiting for the Dragonborn to show up, kill them, and take all their stuff. And when it comes to dialogue, bandits never have all that much to say. Once you've met a few bandits, you've met them all.

But they're finally getting some love and attention. Prolific immersion modder JaySerpa has created the Bandit Lines Expansion mod for Skyrim which adds around 500 new lines of dialogue spliced from existing voice files. The mod transforms the bandits from angry robots with a few common barks into more fleshed out and believable characters with a lot to say.

Many of the new lines appear during combat. While fighting you, bandits may comment on your gear and weapons, your level and wealth, and use new race-specific lines which make the encounters feel more personal, like they're really seeing your character as an individual. Bandits may now also react to events during combat such as their allies being killed or the player's use of Dragon shouts or other magic spells.

And even when you're not fighting them, bandits will have more to talk about. New warning lines occur when they've spotted you but haven't decided to fight yet, and the idle chit-chat bandits engage in while you're eavesdropping has been heavily increased too.

"Bandits might show a more humane side to them (or not)," says JaySerpa. "They might talk about betrayal, gold, missing their families, hating Skyrim, loving life as a bandit, being ashamed of being a bandit, jealousy, resentment, greed, addiction, infidelity, home, lustful encounters, what drove them to become a bandit, hunger, tragedies, having mouths to feed... and more!"

Here's a great video showing the wide variety of new Bandit dialogue in the mod:

All lines are pulled or spliced from existing dialogue files, and there's no crossover between bandit types, so none of it sounds robotic or out of place. Repetition is cut down, too: Once you've heard a particular line the mod will make sure it isn't spoken again for 30 in-game minutes.

The mod is available for both the Skyrim Special Edition and Skyrim Legendary Edition.

PRODUCTS

Chris started playing PC games in the 1980s, started writing about them in the early 2000s, and (finally) started getting paid to write about them in the late 2000s. Following a few years as a regular freelancer, PC Gamer hired him in 2014, probably so he'd stop emailing them asking for more work. Chris has a love-hate relationship with survival games and an unhealthy fascination with the inner lives of NPCs. He's also a fan of offbeat simulation games, mods, and ignoring storylines in RPGs so he can make up his own.