If you’ve ever played Bethesda Game Studios’ Starfield, you’ll know that seamless transitions are not a part of the game’s makeup. From elevators to hidden level transitions to loading screens when entering every planet and moving between ‘regions’ on the planet, the game has never felt as truly open as it should.
In a new video released on YouTube, one modder has revealed an incoming creation that will make Starfield feel masterful in the openness stakes, taking the concept of landing on a planet and making it absolutely seamless, just like you’d see it in something like No Man’s Sky.
In truth, it looks absolutely stunning.
Simple Thing, Massive Mod
In a post on YouTube, Frederik Wessberg is a Nerd uploaded a two-minute video showcasing ‘Seamless Landings’, a mod that permits seamless landings on moons and planets without a single loading screen.
It looks phenomenal, eradicating the clunky loading screens that prevented things from feeling clean and seamless for a hot minute. And by that, I mean for the three years since the game hit the market.
Per the description of the mod:
You’ll be flying through real 3D layers of volumetric clouds, driven by climate data and weather systems, thunderstorms and lightning, auroras around the poles, airglow above the night-side horizon, physically-based atmospheric scattering based on the actual atmospheric composition the game data provides, city lights glowing from POIs on the surface, terrain and cloud shadows cast on a global scale, real biomes, oceans, and snowcaps, built from the game’s own data and surface maps, re-entry heat shield effects that fumes against the hull of your ship correctly and leaves a layer of ash, detailed new live cockpit monitoring, and rich new ship HUD elements.
I’ve never been a huge fan of mods and prefer a vanilla experience every day of the week, but this looks like an utter must-have.
Frederik Wessberg is a Nerd revealed that they’ve been working on the mod for around six months, and while it’s still a work in progress, it shouldn’t be too long until it’s here.
When available, it’ll be dropped for free on Nexus Mods.
I can’t stress how good this looks:
As you can see in that video, the re-entry mechanics, effects, and how seamless it all is might be considered on par with games like No Man’s Sky. That’s often considered the pinnacle of open-universe space exploration games, and it’s something that Starfield might have always aspired to be.
That got me curious, and I took to SteamDB to check out some player numbers after saying that. At the time of writing, No Man’s Sky had 16,000 players on Steam, while Starfield had 3,000. Yeah, aspired to be sounds about right.
Do you think you’d install this Starfield mod to enable seamless landing transitions? Let us know your thoughts on the Insider Gaming Discord server.
For more Insider Gaming coverage, check out the cut content from Black Flag Resynced, and don’t forget to sign up for our newsletter
Grant has been gaming for 30+ years and in the industry for 10+. You'll probably find him playing a post-apocalyptic game or an extraction shooter somewhere.
More from Grant Taylor-Hill
Comments