the first story expansion for Bethesda’s big, bold, rickety space RPG comes after a year of incremental updates that have already fixed the game’s most egregious flaws. Those mission-breaking bugs have been fixed, there are now vehicles to make traveling around the planet less of a hassle, city maps are at least partially useful these days, and there’s now a 60fps mode for those playing on Xbox Series X. But Starfield’s fundamental problems remain: turgid, rubbery NPCs; the bewildering profusion of loading screens, but just as the Phantom Liberty expansion perfected Cyberpunk 2077 in its entirety, Shattered Space arrives prepared to improve on what came before.
It seems Bethesda has acknowledged that traveling through space by selecting planets from menus and watching a cutscene was a bit rubbish, because Shattered Space takes place primarily on a single map, much like Skyrim or Fallout. This new standalone narrative concerns House Va’ruun, Starfield’s slightly boring cult of space snake-worshipping fanatics. The player is propelled towards the secret society’s homeworld after having suffered a cataclysm, heralded as the potential savior of civilization, which naturally means that everyone has a lot of tasks to do, while they are busy standing around staring at the pictures. walls or genuflecting in patios.
These tasks range from traversing the void between universes to destroying homicidal electric blue ghosts to literally tidying up an old man’s small apartment. It’s the usual initially daunting RPG to-do list, and the whole thing, at least to begin with, feels old-school Bethesda.
The problem is that very little of what they ask of you is fun. Fetch quests that offer almost no benefit are compounded by annoying travel: you have to choose between the frustration of trying to drive through a rugged, impassable, rock-strewn landscape, or giving up and moving on. foot. And this landscape is not Skyrim or The Capital Wasteland, with discoveries to be made around every corner. It’s a Starfield map like any other, with only the occasional cave or simple facility to explore, and it rarely rewards curiosity with anything more than wasted time and the urge to curse.
Any previous suggestions that Starfield was leaning into cosmic horror in some new and interesting way also turned out to be wrong. Occasional, very brief sequences threaten to evoke an atmosphere of foreboding, but this soon gives way to the same bullet-and-sponge shootouts through the same uninspired buildings in exchange for the same loot. The unreliable mission markers feel inexcusable, and Shattered Space becomes a slog long before the 12- to 15-hour campaign ends.
Not everything is bad. The main story is quite engaging and gives you some interesting options, as the three ruling houses of the planet Va’ruun’kai vie for power. And when the frame rate is stable, Shattered Space is quite pretty, if overwhelmingly and monotonously purple. But it’s just more of the same slightly broken Starfield experience, just without any space flight to add a bit of variety. It’s not cheap either.
Perhaps the next DLC pack will focus more on Starfield’s strengths, rather than amplifying its weaknesses. But at this point it really seems as if most of Starfield’s imperfections are built into the technological and conceptual level, and only a full sequel, rather than ongoing updates, could address them. It’s only because there’s such a bright core of brilliance here that it’s so disappointing to see Starfield’s galactic potential remain cosmically unfulfilled.
