I believe I’m just about done with Starfield’s major Shattered Space expansion, having completed the main quest, all the sidequests I can locate and exploring every major landmark I laid eyes on. That took about 13-15 hours in a game I poured 177 into before this.
Time has not aged my initially very positive perception of Starfield very well, and many aspects of Shattered Space reinforce this. In an era where we see games try to evolve themselves in significant ways from No Man’s Sky to Cyberpunk, this feels like Bethesda attempting to make a sliver of the game that maybe they should have made in the first place, but ignoring large swaths of things players may want to see upgraded, and failing to fix very, very long-running issues.
The new zone of Va’ruun’kai is well-made. I say zone rather than planet because it is essentially just a square tile. But a handcrafted square tile where every location you find is not some sort of copy/pasted entity, but rather a unique thing that feeds into the story, various mini-quests or just exploration to uncover mysteries within.
The storyline also presents more interesting choices than others in the series. The main quest is short, only a few hours, but it feels like it lets you be “evil” more than other storylines, and it’s a bit more involved than a normal faction quest. Most of them, anyway (not Crimson Fleet/UC, probably). I legitimately would like to do a do-over to pick alternate options, though I’d have to do it through save files as lord knows I am not going through the Unity again to reset the entire game (a system I still cannot stand).
The rest of it is…not going to change any minds about the core of Starfield. Yes, it’s probably a good things that Bethesda tried to do a more Bethesda-like thing with a custom map that feels like at least a tiny chunk of something you might find in Fallout. But everything else is ignored. Nothing new with bases or ships or space combat. No new biomes or creatures outside of the singular planet. The “new” enemies you’ll find are just regular enemies but in “ghost” form where they glow and now can teleport, obnoxiously, right next to you. There’s also a big spider thing that emerges from void portals sometimes. There’s a guy who runs at you with swords.
Even playing on the Extreme difficulty setting that was added in a recent patch, this was still not very hard and for an “endgame” player like me. I am probably the main target audience for this expansion, but it just wasn’t difficult 90% of the time except for maybe the (actually quite great) final mission.
The other issue I found is loot, or the lack thereof. No, I am not expecting the game to be a looter shooter but this has been a persistent problem with the game since release, where you’ll spend 15 minutes killing an entire base of Spacers only to kill a boss and opening a chest with some terrible green-level item in it. Locked doors and safes and weapon chests still almost always have nothing of value in them. Most of the legendary weapons I got were duplicates of each other for some, presumably bugged reason. The final unique weapon you get after the main story is not good. In short, I played the entire expansion and did not find anything that replaced any single piece of gear I already had, armor or weapons. That’s bad.
There are no terribly new interesting characters to be found here, even if quest structure and choices have been improved. I was eventually asked to choose loyalty between three houses and I couldn’t remember which one I did which quest for as the Va’ruun names all sound the same and the leaders were all completely unmemorable. I found one new ship crewmate, no companions, no love interests. But perhaps the biggest disappointment is that the one driving mystery of the story, the nature of the Great Serpent, does not have a satisfying conclusion whatsoever by the end of the main campaign, only whispered rumors found in data slates. It’s really disappointing.
Yes, this is “more Starfield,” a game I liked, but I am very disappointed in the way it has barely evolved a year later, and the best thing about is Bethesda going back to a Bethesda-like zone structure. That’s good, but also feels very inauthentic to what the game was supposed to be. This is not going to convert anyone, nor may it satisfy many veterans. I did get some pretty screenshots, though.
Score: 6.5/10
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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
