Major Starfield Overhaul Makes Cities Much More Realistic & Immersive

Two mods can completely overhaul its main cities, making them more immersive than ever. The base game did include several story-specific cities such as New Atlantis, Neon, Cydonia, or Akila City spread out across its 100 star systems, with crowds of NPCs populating them, but two modders have taken to making these citizens feel far more realistic and unique, rather than the more generic characters that came before.

In, everyone who isn't a story character was named "", which felt pretty impersonal, especially when other open-world titles such as were able to give a brief profile for every one of its NPCs when players scanned them back in 2014, 9 years prior to 's launch. A mod from X2357, simply titled "" has changed this by providing hundreds of unique names for these citizens, making it feel more like players are interacting with an actual character each time and building immersion.

LarannKiar's "" mod — which "" is compatible with — takes this immersion a step further by completely overhauling 's default crowd system by using a "". This system ensures that all the characters in the world have far more facial expressions applied by FaceGen to better represent an array of emotions, a further 1 billion full name combinations, and far smoother animations including the ones used by the player's character to make them move in a less robotic fashion.

On top of this, these "" wear normal playable apparel which are fully animated with physics, rather than the non-animated «dummy» outfits used by the vanilla NPCs. "" also has a Unique Character system in which players can specify what character data they want (namely: appearance, name, outfit, voice, encounter chance, encounter locations) and guarantee the presence of this unique character in that location.

While Bethesda's initial vision for was clearly extremely vast, there have been several elements that players have criticized for feeling empty or lifeless. With both of these mods combined, the major cities of —