There are mods for Seamless Grav Jumps and for Seamless Planet Takeoffs. But when you arrive at a planet in Starfield you still have to choose a landing spot, and then watch a loading screen and an animation. It's another thing that contributes to the feeling your spaceship is more like a house that can teleport.

When you're in space, Starfield's planets are basically just textures you can fly right through if you put in the hours to try it, as Alanah Pearce discovered back when the RPG's boundaries were still being explored. It seemed like one gap modders would never be able to paper over, but Frederik Wessberg has apparently managed it.

The video of his work-in-progress mod shows a planetary approach, complete with heating effects on the ship during atmospheric entry, a moment of white as he hits a layer of clouds, and then the ship just lands. It seems like the clouds are there to mask a moment of loading, but Wessberg says "the cloud cover is in fact not a fancy loading screen."

He goes on to explain, "The clouds are not covering loading – they're helping make the seam as minimal as possible right at the point when we do the final cell switch, in terms of lighting and exposure, and terrain color. For airless moons and planets, I just do the switch with no veil, which is fine in that context as the lighting and exposure won't change as much between the two cells (although there I do some extra exposure matching). The underlying loading mechanism is entirely done in the background, while the game is still interactive. We just wait until the assets are finished loading in, and then we do the swap."

To make that work, the floating textures had to be replaced with actual models of the planets and moons. "I had to completely reimplement Starfield's planet rendering in space in 3D," Wessberg says, "in a way that looks detailed and sharp at every altitude.

"Thankfully, Starfield is actually amazingly physically accurate, and in many ways a true space simulator – it just doesn't ever reveal this to the player, but I could leverage it in my design here. So, the planet rendering is based upon Starfield's biome data and exact surface maps, including climate data, atmospheric composition data, and takes into account things like orbital phase, distance to the sun, distance to the moon(s) orbiting the planet and how they contribute moonlight, and so on. The philosophy is: Starfield's data is the 'truth', but we then modulate it by real physics."

The finished version of the mod, which will be freely available on Nexus Mods, will let players fly manually in low orbit, or turn on the autopilot and walk around the ship as you descend from orbit, and land anywhere you like—even on water. There's a post on Wessberg's Patreon with the details.

Years ago, I read that Jake Solomon prototyped the Firaxis reboot of XCOM by making a simple board game version. Something rudimentary that could be played in the office on scrap paper to get ideas across and figure out where the fun would be, without having to commit. But it's surprising to hear the same idea being used for a game as different from XCOM's turn-based tactics as Star Wars Galactic Racer.

As Fuse Games' creative director Kieran Crimmins told Eurogamer, "You can't know if you can feel the system until you can play the system." And so the early prototype of this high-speed arcade racing game was indeed a board game.

"You know, modern engines are so capable that you can do a lot of it in-software," CEO Matt Webster said, "but there's still something [about that which is] not as fast as getting a written idea down. From a board game perspective, you sort of decouple yourself from a particular prototype and you're talking about moment-to-moment."

Specifically, the board game simulated Galactic Racer's progression system. Its rewards differ based on the event, but typically offer tuning points to spend on one of three random stats, and maybe a part for your speeder that will affect its abilities or grant a bonus related to a specific status effect. After several races you get to go shopping, and spend the credits you've earned on more upgrades and parts, or a whole new ability.

It's a progression system right out of a roguelite, with new unlocks added to a pool so they might appear in future runs, and each run handing out tuning points that can be used for permanent upgrades that carry over between them. Not something you expect in a racing game, and a system that presumably needed a bit of road testing to find the fun.

"There's a prototyping tool for every kind of system that you want to prototype," Crimmins said, "and the one that you pick should be the one that gets you there the quickest, and gets you to validate the emotion the quickest. So when it came to upgrades and meta progression, I can do a board game in a day. I mean, I say 'board game'. A lot of it is Post-its and a scribble and some dice. But we're trying to validate those feelings as quickly as possible. So you just pick the best tool for the moment."

I remember being a kid and wishing I had shoes that lit up. I know now that I was a fool. If I festooned myself with garish lights, how would I scavenge for supplies in a frozen wasteland without being spotted by strangers who may or may not kill me before I can use my grappling hook to get away? This isn't a real problem I have, nor is it a real problem Arc Raiders players will have anymore, since your backpack now has an emissive toggle.

That's one of many little overhauls that arrived in Embark Studios' popular extraction shooter Thursday, and you can read all about the rest in the 2.0 patch notes. If you've not been tuned into the extraction world as of late, you did indeed read that right: Arc Raiders has gotten a big shakeup with the Frozen Trails update, which comes bearing snowy mountains and grappling hooks.

But that's not what's exciting about patch notes—the best part of combing through each little bullet point is seeing all those long-awaited bug fixes and little quality-of-life changes like the aforementioned emissive toggle for backpacks. That and tidbits like "added mouth animation for when players are talking in proximity chat," which I can only hope looks as silly in-game as it does in my imagination.

Some other big, but also small changes include the fact that you can open the map when you're downed now, new contextual animations for a variety of things (your character should look more exhausted when sprinting for a while), and an increased max stash size: 328 without expedition bonuses.

Snowy and desolate as it might look, Arc Raiders seems to be picking up momentum with the new update. Its average player count has gone way up recently, probably due to the free weekend that's going on right now, so it seems like as good a time as any to dive back in if you're so inclined. If that's you, try out our guides on how to arc raid with the best of 'em.