I’ve played a good amount of Starfield’s Shattered Space expansion since launch yesterday, and enough to form at least a cursory opinion.
Yes, this is going better than the base game. Especially in one area in particular.
The phrase “a mile wide and an inch deep” came up frequently when describing Starfield at launch, a thousand planets where most were devoid of life and many others were still devoid of any interesting content, outside of a scarce handful used for specific quests. In many ways that felt very un-Bethesda, and even though they were trying to branch out from their usual, it did not land for many players.
Enter Shattered Space, where the galaxy-spanning exploration concept has been shelved in favor of being contained to one specific map on one specific planet, for the most part. I think I was in my ship for a grand total of two minutes this entire expansion so far.
It’s a huge change but it’s…a lot better. This entire Va’ruun’kai map may be just one giant tile square, but it is a throwback to something that at least vaguely resembles something like Fallout, where if you see a building in the distance, it is not going to be something clone-stamped across the entire planet. Or other planets. Everything here has a purpose and has been hand-made by Bethesda rather than procedurally generated.
As such, this one tile is more interesting than any singular location on the rest of the galactic map, thanks to a density of things to do. It reinforces the now-common thought that instead of a thousand mostly-empty planets, Bethesda would have been wise to make maybe ten more dense zones like this, rather than attempting to follow in No Man’s Sky’s footsteps, but not do it as well. I think they realized they were never going to catch NMS, so they went back to Bethesda basics, and it’s working.
If you had larger problems with Starfield, those will likely remain. Starfield can be beautiful at times, but on Bethesda’s engine it does feel dated, and even more so another year since launch, compared to its competition. Combat has not meaningfully changed. The writing is fine, and it at least lets you be a little more evil now with decision-making, but I’m not sure it will flip the unconverted.
This is better, though, there’s no disputing that. I understand that some people were hoping the galactic concept would expand with more biomes, more creatures, more interesting things to find on planets, similar to No Man Sky’s updates, but this has none of that. Rather, it’s a much more focused traditional Bethesda experience which I’d argue the majority of fans were hoping to see.
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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
