Shattered Space leans into some of the best parts of Starfield, but also exposes some core problems that still plague the Bethesda RPG.
While I had put around 25 hours into Starfield after it launched last September, I hadn’t revisited Bethesda’s ambitious sci-fi RPG in about a year. When the Shattered Space expansion was released on Monday, I was excited to finally have a worthwhile reason to jump back in and reassess the game. I was happy to discover that Shattered Space leans into some of the best aspects of Starfield, namely very handcrafted content, even if this expansion can’t escape the rocky foundation that it feels like this RPG has lived on.
The gaming community has not been nearly as kind to Starfield as it was to previous Bethesda RPGs like The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and Fallout 4. The base game’s overreliance on procedural generation and lack of polish are to blame. If the former was your biggest problem, then you might actually enjoy a lot of Shattered Space. If the latter bothered you more, Shattered Space won’t do anything to win you back. I’m glad I returned to Bethesda’s sci-fi universe one more time, but I’m not sure I’ll stick around.Starfield, one year later
Jumping right into Shattered Space’s storyline is quite the cold plunge if you’ve been out of the loop for a while. This expansion focuses on the religious House Va’ruun faction and the lore that comes with it. The names and references to events that took place centuries before the events of Starfield‘s story were a lot to take in at first, but after a while, I settled in and found myself enjoying this DLC’s tale. That was thanks to some core strengths that Starfield has always had.
Handcrafted narrative moments and writing are often the best features of Bethesda’s RPGs, and I thought the same was true for Starfield’s base game. I liked its multiversal twists and grew to genuinely care for the members of Constellation I spent a lot of time with. Yes, House Va’ruun ties into some pretty complex lore, but it’s fleshed out in an engaging and well-written way that only a premier RPG developer could accomplish.
The downside to Starfield’s base game is that it often pulls players away from those handcrafted moments for procedurally generated planets that need more of an identity.
