New Starfield Mod Makes Cities More Lifelike

25.02.2024 - 22:19 / gamerant.com / Dominik Bo

A newly released Starfield mod 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 some Starfield players, 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 random NPCs in Starfield share 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.

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. Called Souls of Cities — A Modular People System, the latest project by prolific Starfield modder 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 fixes weird NPC faces in Starfield, 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.

Vanilla Crowd System

Modular People System

Crowd NPC Outfits

Non-animated, have no physics.

Fully animated, with physics.

Taken from a limited pool of dummy assets.

Taken from a much larger pool of player-equippable clothing.

Crowd NPC Animations

Non-existent facial animations.

Animations on par with essential NPCs, like companions.

Simplified, robotic movement animations.

Crowd NPC Names

Everyone is named «Citizen.»

Everyone has a full name, with over 1 billion possible combinations.

Crowd NPC Voices

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