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. Traveling is also primarily done in menus in a game all about exploring the universe. Starfield is simultaneously Bethesda’s most expansive and most restrictive game. One year later, that’s all still true of the base game, even with some helpful additions like city maps and a vehicle to drive around planets on.
Starfield is not as bad as its reputation might make you believe, but it’s also not as good as Bethesda’s previous work. Shattered Space didn’t do as much to dispel that notion as it did to reaffirm it.
Shattered Space at its best
In Shattered Space, a House Va’ruun science experiment has gone wrong, resulting in many of its people turning into phantoms that shift between realities. While the adventure begins on a space station where all of the Va’ruun crew has either been killed or transformed, the meat of the expansion takes place on the faction’s home planet of Va’Ruun’kai and the city of Dazra. It’s a massive questline full of political and religious intrigue.
Across the main quests and all of its sidequests, Shattered Space is very interested in exploring the power dynamics of politics, religion, family, and how those impact our attitudes toward others. It has a tinge of horror for fans of media like Alien, but it’s still filled with some bigger set pieces and bombastic combat encounters. As soon as I started it, I felt committed to seeing this questline through to the end and became intimately familiar with Va’Ruun’kai by the end of Shattered Space.
That’s because Va’Ruun’kai doesn’t feel like it’s cut from the same cloth as most of Starfield‘s other planets. Its pinkish-purple hues, gravity-defying energy bubbles, and distinct inhabitants with unique tattoos and haircuts make Va’Ruun’kai one of the best planets in the entire game. My favorite worlds in Starfield’s main quest were the ones where Bethesda applied a more personal, creative touch, so it’s no surprise that an expansion fully committed to that pays off.
It adds credence to the idea that Starfield may have been better had Bethesda focused on fleshing out a smaller number of planets rather than procedurally generating hundreds of them. Bethesda is at its best when it guides players along a thought-provoking questline in a handcrafted fashion, and Shattered Space reaffirms that. It’s disappointing that this expansion doesn’t bring a new companion or game-changing gameplay system with it, but I’m content with getting more of the best parts of Starfield.
Shattered Space at its worst
Of course, all that good comes with some bad. Shattered Space circumvents one fatal flaw, but it can’t patch up all of the RPG’s problems. While the relatively new performance mode is appreciated on Xbox Series X and Va’Ruun’kai is a visually stunning planet, Creation Engine 2 still struggles to run at a consistent frame rate and can’t keep Starfield from feeling like it’s falling apart at its edges.
Visual and gameplay glitches still crop up every 10 minutes of play or so. Some are funny, like the one pictured above, where Sarah is clipped into level geometry during a conversation. Others are more frustrating, like a bounty-related glitch that made Dazra guards shoot me on sight with no way to stop it after I accidentally hit someone with my Rev-8 vehicle. With that issue, Starfield gave me a literal reason to not revisit Va’Ruun’kai after I finished Shattered Space’s main missions, which is a real shame.
I was also disappointed with the lack of consequence for some of the narrative’s events. Without delving into spoilers, some choices late in the DLC feel like they should have massive ramifications on the rest of the game, but they don’t. Similarly, outside of some weapons and armor, there’s not that much that feels like it would play back into the main story of Starfield. In some ways, it’s good that Shattered Space is this self-contained, but it also gives me the feeling that Starfield would fall apart had Bethesda tried to give it even more connective tissue to the base game.
As an expansion focused on one in-depth questline on a single planet, Shattered Space delivers. If you’ve been looking for a reason to return to Starfield like I was, playing Shattered Space won’t feel like wasted time. Just know that it’s not a radical reinvention of Starfield that will change minds or a must-play even if you don’t care about this new sci-fi universe Bethesda created.
Starfield: Shattered Space is available now on PC or Xbox Series X/S. It can be purchased on its own or as part of Starfield‘s Premium Edition.
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