Summary
A newly releasedStarfieldmod makes in-game cities much more lifelike by revamping the RPG’s crowd systems. While its inner workings may leave it out of reach of someStarfieldplayers, those who do manage to take full advantage of the mod are promised an opportunity to behold “souls of cities.”
As is the case with most open-world games featuring densely populated areas, Bethesda’s sci-fi RPG makes some compromises when it comes to its crowd depictions in order to hit certain performance targets. As a result, many randomNPCs inStarfieldshare clothing and faces, on top of having access to just a fraction of animations that important characters like companions do. Some players can find this a bit immersion-breaking, depending on their exact graphics settings and tolerance for such phenomena.
Souls of Cities Starfield Mod Makes Every NPC More Lifelike
But Creation Engine 2 is capable of much more impressive technical achievements, as underlined by a newly released mod that adds extremely varied and lifelike crowds to the game. CalledSouls of Cities - A Modular People System, the latest project by prolificStarfieldmodder LarannKiar repurposes some of the features Bethesda already developed for the RPG in order to tackle the issue of repetitive crowds, consequently making the game more immersive.
The mod accomplishes its purpose with two distinct but complementary features. One of them is the so-called Modular People System (MPS), which introduces player-equippable clothing to the pool of apparel that NPCs can wear. It also adds physics to their attire, thus making even random crowds fully animated, similar to story-important characters. Furthermore, MPS fixesweird NPC faces inStarfield, which are a result of the vanilla crowd system using stiff “masks” instead of fully animated meshes. It even assigns full names to each character for extra immersion points.
Crowd NPC Names
Everyone is named “Citizen.”
Everyone has a full name, with over 1 billion possible combinations.
Limited.
More varied.
The mod’s second improvement comes in the form of the Unique Character (UC) system, which builds on MPS tools by offering granular NPC customization controls as an alternative to random generation. This is an entirely optional part of the project that can be used by creating and editing an INI file, one for each unique character tied to any given location. Even ignoring this aspect of Souls of Cities and just using the mod out of the box shouldmake someStarfieldenvironments much more immersive.
More Lifelike Starfield Crowds Are Best Left Reserved for Beefier PCs
It’s worth noting that there’s likely a reason Bethesda refrained from delivering this level of detail in the vanilla version of its galaxy-hopping RPG; generating fully animated and varied crowds requires additional resources, andStarfieldis already not the most optimized gamethere is. Regardless, this mod is still a helpful option for people with beefier PCs and a desire to experience more lifelike cities. And since its individual features appear fairly performant, it should still be possible to take advantage of Souls of Cities on more modest hardware by using the mod in conjunction with lower crowd density settings.
Starfield
WHERE TO PLAY
Starfield is the first new universe in 25 years from Bethesda Game Studios, the award-winning creators of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and Fallout 4. In this next generation role-playing game set amongst the stars, create any character you want and explore with unparalleled freedom as you embark on an epic journey to answer humanity’s greatest mystery.The year is 2330. Humanity has ventured beyond our solar system, settling new planets, and living as a spacefaring people. From humble beginnings as a space miner, you will join Constellation – the last group of space explorers seeking rare artifacts throughout the galaxy – and navigate the vast expanse of the Settled Systems in Bethesda Game Studios’ biggest and most ambitious game.
