Summary
- Modders have enhanced Starfield's main cities with unique NPCs, changing generic "Citizen" names to hundreds of unique ones for immersion.
- LarannKiar's "Souls of Cities" mod adds expressions, further full name combinations, animated outfits, and unique characters for a more lifelike experience.
- These mods address criticism of lifelessness in Starfield, making major cities feel more immersive and realistic for more interesting gameplay.
Two Starfield 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 Starfield, everyone who isn't a story character was named "Citizen", which felt pretty impersonal, especially when other open-world titles such as Watch Dogs were able to give a brief profile for every one of its NPCs when players scanned them back in 2014, 9 years prior to Starfield's launch. A mod from X2357, simply titled "NPCs Have Names" 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.
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The Souls Of Cities Mod Completely Overhauled Starfield's Crowd NPCs
Introducing A "Modular People System" To Make Citizens Feel More Like Individuals
LarannKiar's "Souls of Cities" mod - which "NPCs Have Names" is compatible with - takes this immersion a step further by completely overhauling Starfield's default crowd system by using a "Modular People System". 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 "Modular People" wear normal playable apparel which are fully animated with physics, rather than the non-animated "dummy" outfits used by the vanilla NPCs. "Souls of Cities" 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 Starfield 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 Starfield - which ittedly have been one of the more praised elements of the game - should feel far more alive than before, with more realistic citizens ultimately making for a far more interesting journey across the Settled Systems.
Source: X2357/Nexus Mods, LarannKiar/Nexus Mods
Bethesda Game Studios presents Starfield - the first original IP from the studio in twenty-five-plus years. Set in the year 2310, the United Colonies and Freestar Collective are observing a shaky truce after a war set 20 years prior. The player will customize their character as a member of a space exploration team called Constellation while navigating The Settled Systems and the conflicts between the warring factions. According to Bethesda, players can explore over 100 systems and 1000 planets to find resources and build their ships, living out their own sci-fi journeys.
- Platform(s)
- PC, Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S
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