In the lead-up to Starfield’s release last year, Bethesda emphasized the sheer scope of their new role-playing adventure. With over 1,000 planets to explore and multiple factions to meet, replicating the endlessness of space seemed like a priority for their new game.
A year later, Starfield’s first expansion “Shattered Space” is going in the opposite direction. Not only will the expansion establish a terrifying departure from the optimism of Starfield’s base game, it's also reducing its scope to create something more focused and aligned with Bethesda’s past games.
In an Xbox interview, Shattered Space’s lead creative producer, Tim Lamb, spoke about how the DLC will twist what players know about the sci-fi universe.
“There’s a hopeful optimism in the giant, sprawling adventure of Starfield: you go to a lot of different locations and meet a lot of different types of people,” Lamb said. “[In] Shattered Space, we were able to distill it down and focus it into a location.”
That location is the city of Dazra, located on a brand-new planet Va’ruun’kai. Bethesda says that Dazra and the surrounding areas on Va’ruun’kai are where the entirety of the new expansion will take place. It's a big departure from the planet-hopping escapades of the game’s main quest.
“All of our effort has really been focused on the area around the city,” Lamb said. “The beauty of it is that there’s exploration. You can find nooks and crannies in the game, little secrets, discoveries, and locations.”
Based on Lamb’s comments, Shattered Space sounds like a return to form for Bethesda. Giving players a massive city and adjacent areas to explore certainly sounds like a space-themed version of what The Elder Scrolls and Fallout do extremely well. Even as a fan of Starfield’s much larger scope, Bethesda’s track record with smaller-scale expansions (Oblivion’s Shivering Isles or Fallout 4’s Far Harbor immediately come to mind) suggests Shattered Space will be less divisive than their latest game.
The single-planet approach to the DLC also addresses fans who disliked Starfield’s reliance on menus to traverse the galaxy. Bethesda’s brand of immersion works much better when players aren’t constantly fast-traveling between planet surfaces and piloting their ships in deep space. Telling a contained story on a single planet ensures there will be a lot few interruptions for players jumping in.
The story of Shattered Space will follow up on the mysterious origins of House Var’uun, the unsettling theocracy players were introduced to in the core game. Few people in the galaxy know about Va’ruun’kai’s existence when players stumble onto it, and the general sense of unease is something Bethesda is leaning into.
“The tone goes further with horror tropes than Starfield has done before,” Xbox wrote in a blog post. “There are cosmic ghost stories, monster attacks from new species, and even what look like fully-fledged survival horror sequences with stalking abominations.”
As wondrous as space can be (a feeling that Starfield nails), some of the greatest science fiction stories ever told also dive into the existential horror of the unknown. Seeing how Starfield leans into these tropes is a fun deviation for returning players who’ve turned over most of the main game's quest.
With just over a month left before Shattered Space releases, now’s a pretty good time to jump back into Bethesda’s role-playing game. Not only have long-requested quality-of-life features and official mod support been added, Bethesda finally created a brand new drivable landrover for players to add to their ship. Dubbed the REV-8, the new vehicle is equipped with turrets, planet scanners, and rocket-powered boosters that make exploring planets much more engaging.
