By now, it’s clear that the upcoming release of Starfield is nothing short of a flagship launch for both Bethesda and Xbox, and that both studios consider it a key element of their respective 2023 line—ups. After the first demonstration of the gameplay gave players an idea of what would happen next, some began to carefully study the footage shown to try to figure out how the game might behave in practice.
One particularly noteworthy detail about Starfield comes from Reddit user _eldrone, who decided to highlight the technology of rendering characters in the game. They posted a short GIF that focuses on one of the animated skin folds, facial animation, and skin wrinkles of one of the characters to compare it to Bethesda’s previous major release, Fallout 4.
Bethesda has proudly announced that the Starfield character creator is its most ambitious implementation, but it seems the money doesn’t stop at a simple setup. As _eldrone rightly pointed out, the game uses the most advanced face rendering technology that Bethesda has ever had, which helps make the characters more interesting and believable than they were in any of the studio’s previous role-playing games. For comparison, the characters of Fallout 4 look outdated and generally devoid of authenticity, which is not particularly strange, given the age of the game.
animated skin folds and wrinkles on the characters in Starfield, just like in Fallout 4. from Starfield
What is particularly noteworthy is that all the characters in any Bethesda game are effectively created using in-game character creation tools. This means that increasing character loyalty is a basic, systematic improvement that should be applied to all characters across the board, including NPCs and player creations. It will also be interesting to see how these enhanced visual features will be used by the Bethesda modder community, as Starfield will fully support mods from the very beginning.
No matter how well the NPCs in the game are animated, fans of role-playing games should also pay attention to the fact that Starfield fully uses RPG elements in all directions. To this end, the characters will not only look and animate in a way that has never been seen before in Bethesda games, but players will also be able to enjoy a wide range of classic character creation features that were previously present in games such as Oblivion, only to be removed in Skyrim and Fallout 4.
A significant number of Starfield’s amazing discoveries have already been presented as part of its first full-fledged gameplay demonstration. The launch of the game is scheduled for early 2023, and Bethesda and Xbox are sure to present even more materials that can be boasted in the coming weeks and months, and so far everything looks good.
Starfield is coming out in 2023 on PC and Xbox Series X.
