So I’ve finally finished my time in Starfield’s DLC Shattered Space amounting to over 30 hours both on and off streams on top of the almost 400 hours in the basegame I had already spent since Starfield released and this is going to be a review of what I think about the DLC specifically.
To make this super clear because the Internet seems to think you have to be overwhelmingly positive or super negative to have a valid opinion, I really do like Starfield, do I think it’s the best game ever and can cure cancer, no, do I think it’s the worst game ever and can cause cancer, no.
If you’ve ever watched a Starfield lore video on YouTube, it was probably one of mine and I’m just bringing this all up because inevitably someone somewhere out there who’s one of those weird console war fanboys or want to cope blindly in defense of or against something that isn’t Elder Scrolls VI will accuse me of whatever their mind conjures up when in fact it’s in my best interest as a YouTuber that Starfield does extremely well.
On a side note, check out my partner StarfieldWiki for all things Starfield.
Anyway, in my initial review of Starfield last year that gave a 9/10, I noted that there was immense potential for Bethesda’s newest IP in terms of mods or future expansions including Shattered Space because partly unlike the Fallout and Elder Scrolls series, this was completely new ground with new lore that didn’t have the decades of worldbuilding like said franchises. And with the physics and 1000 blank template celestial bodies of the galaxy ripe for updates, it could indeed be a game that people could play for years to come.
Unfortunately, I feel that Shattered Space did not deliver on said potential in a lot of ways including stepping up from the base game gameplay akin to a semblance of say Cyberpunk 2077’s Phantom Liberty DLC which is literally the same price of $30 USD nor did it offer a reason to invest more into the lore for either the fans or people who were open to changing their minds about Starfield on that front.
A miffed commenter asked how I, someone who likes Starfield and has put so much time into it, cannot like more of Starfield but that’s sort of the problem here which I will get into later on in the video. To put it simply, Shattered Space not only didn’t offer an improvement on the base game but it felt less of the same rather than more of the same.
The Positives
Before I get into what I found disappointing, and Spoiler Warning by the way, I want to go over the positives of Shattered Space because yes there are positives. First, the visuals and audio are great, there’s no denying that the environment of the moon planet of Va’ruunkai and the remnants of the capital city of Dazra introduces to players a vibrant and unique aesthetic not seen in the base game or the Settled Systems.
Some of the unique and really big POIs offer a reason to revisit if you’re into exploration and some of the side quests in Shattered Space felt more grounded and emotionally impactful compared to its base game counterparts. There’s also unique voice lines from Andreja and even Barrett during some parts of the main questline or during general exploration that I appreciated.
I also appreciated the addition of new weapons, and yes there are new weapons unlike what some people have said, new outfits, the two new crewmates with their own interesting backstories, the introduction of the groat, the ability to build outposts in House Va’ruun aesthetic and so on.
And I certainly acknowledge the attempt to expand upon House Va’ruun and its inner workings along with trying to make the DLC have a bit more of a cosmic horror vibe. Performance-wise for the DLC, the experience was really smooth at least on PC overall. There were some framerate drops, a few dialogue glitches and some energy anomaly bugs where your screen can flicker on and off as the game tried to recognize where your character was being teleported to.
However, that’s all the positives I can really say about this DLC because everything else, even the good points I’ve just brought up, have a lot of bad things underlying them especially the lore which was one of the major focal points of Shattered Space.
The Bad and Ugly
The first issue I have with Shattered Space is this premise of handcrafted content that has been touted in the interviews with Tim Lamb and other social media posts.
Starting with the solar system of Kavnyk in which House Va’ruun resides, I was a bit disappointed to see that there’s just some moons with procedurally generated POIs orbiting two gas giants that are orbiting around a blue star that are essentially just an addition of the same blank slates from the base game for outpost building, I feel like if they were gonna go this route a black hole or something unseen before like a nebula cloud that you could fly around or through would have been better considering that finding House Va’ruun is supposed to be extremely difficult which the DLC says is only due to isolated chains of smugglers or saboteur agents wiping the Kavnyk system from government databases.
As for the moon homeworld of Va’ruunkai itself, while yes Dazra and the immediate vicinity of the city certainly has handcrafted elements or POIs, it was super disappointing to me that the outer boundaries of the Dazra map tile had procedurally generated POIs which didn’t really give much of an incentive to explore beyond the center of the map.
You would think that just for one map tile of one planet in one largely blank slate of a solar system, the developers of Bethesda would have deigned to completely craft the one map tile with custom POIs or meaningful incentives rather than focusing on a small center of the one map tile of one planet.
And since there was a Cave Landing Point located on the other side of Va’ruunkai at least for my playthrough, I was hoping to find more side quest content or some sort of implied lore through environmental storytelling in other places outside of that small center of Dazra yet again I was disappointed by seeing things you can find anywhere in the base game like those blue cave mushrooms or piles of presumably actual alien shit in random caves.
Furthermore, with so much of the hype around Shattered Space being that the content was supposed to be spooky or scary outer-space stuff and that Bethesda was going to put the meaning of fear in deep space exploration, I could only count maybe two times where I genuinely even felt that theme:
Once on The Oracle space station with the introductory mission that gets you to the homeworld of House Va’ruun and second with the discovery of how Redeemers are being made by the Zealots. Everything else felt tamer and safer than some of even the base game lore which you had to eke out through a lot of subtle implications in the first place. If you’re looking for cosmic horror or Dead Space vibes, I don’t think you’re gonna find it in the DLC.
Next, while some of the side quests and character dialogue were admittedly better than their base game counterparts, it felt like there wasn’t enough exposition given to other parts of House Va’ruun society as it grappled with the loss of half their capital city and population. With how surprisingly few side quests there are with a notable lack of environmental storytelling, it makes Shattered Space feel like more of a faction questline such as the questlines for the Crimson Fleet or Ryujin Industries.
And I mention the side quests here not because of playtime like other reviewers but because of meaningfulness. Anyone can praise the approximately 50 POIs being present around Dazra but it seems like a lot of them are there just to be discovered and not interacted with except for a few things like Longfang’s quest or picking up dataslates to find out how there was a Chunks branch on Va’ruunkai. So much of this lack of meaningfulness ends up with most of the story and content lying in the main questline which has a terrible pacing in my opinion, which in turn also explains why so many people seem to think the main questline was too short.
And while I’m aware that some of Andreja’s dialogue is bugged, I was not at all impressed by the overall impact of lines or interactions she had with other House Va’ruun members or side questlines to the point I felt like I could have brought along other Constellation members instead except maybe Barrett who had an interesting interaction with Anasko Va’ruun on account of Barrett also having touched the Starborn artifacts which is the main lore explanation for how we Spacefarers can interact in some ways with Vortex Phantoms including Anasko and the Ma’leen Dam phantoms.
The lack of character development of Andreja as she was born of House Va’ruun is incredibly disappointing as that’s one of the few things a lot of people including myself were looking forward to and while she has new lines referencing some of the things we’ve done or seen in Shattered Space, I just feel like that doesn’t equate to character development. I have yet to see her express concern for perhaps her family or what this may mean for some of her worldview after the ending of Shattered Space, probably the biggest line I got out of Andreja was in regards to House Va’ruun needing to progress and not stagnate.
Lore-wise, Shattered Space was also incredibly disappointing due to how little it offered in terms of lore or storytelling. Like Fallout, a lot of Starfield is storytelling or at least the lore is presented in a format where you’re presented with a narrative and you can try to seek out some details or what-ifs. This format is unlike The Elder Scrolls, where the lore there tends to be more esoteric and requires a lot more Indepth examination of source materials due to the heavy usage of unreliable narrators in the Elder Scrolls universe.
Shattered Space could have leaned more towards an Elder Scrolls-like presentation of lore especially with House Va’ruun or its deity the Great Serpent but instead it dumbed down the story of House Va’ruun even forgetting some of the previously established lore-bits including the existence of gravids, horticultural practices involving the prevalent venom trees we saw in the base game or even a mention of the Pilgrim or as House Va’ruun called him, “The Unbeliever” in any of the NPC dialogues or stories.
While there were some cool details like the portraits of Jinan, Jarek and Anasko Va’ruun ingame and House Va’ruun literature, a lot of the expansion on House Va’ruun lore felt hollow or predictable.
Much of what was presented in Shattered Space apart from some religious practices, the Three Houses and Ministries and the fact that Jinan Va’ruun had twin sons who wrestled for power were basically figured out in a lore video from last year which is fine but it means that House Va’ruun as alien or exotic as Bethesda wanted it to be in its final form, turned out to just be yet another weird group of religious fanatics with one or two mysteries who are just making life hard on themselves for no reason especially when you take into account perhaps the biggest lore disappointment for me which is that the Great Serpent doesn’t exist, like at all.
It’s heavily implied by both Jarek Va’ruun and Anasko Va’ruun that whatever being Jinan Va’ruun had communicated with or had heard words from during the Old Earth colony ship the Mourning’s grav jump was at the very least not communicating with them or that there was no sign of the Great Serpent which pushed Anasko to experiment with grav and vortex technology. We also find Jinan Va’ruun’s dataslates that don’t really give too many answers either to the point it feels like it doesn’t matter.
Throughout our entire playthrough of Shattered Space, that seemed to be really it, there’s no other notable mention of The Great Serpent, there’s just nothing which could infer anything whatsoever about this incredibly important entity in the Starfield universe. One could argue hey Bethesda is just leaving it open ended for you to come up with lore theories about it but not really when two characters connected most closely to The Great Serpent as its Whisperers basically imply that there just may not be a Great Serpent after all which is kind of disappointing or best case scenario, it’s a being that exists in the space between space i.e. the Vortex but there’s still not much explanation for the Vortex nor the Vortex horrors either.
Starfield Sacrifices the RPG Element
Another disappointing thing from Shattered Space that’s linked to the lore of Shattered Space was the absolute cop-out of submitting to Anasko Va’ruun’s plan if you really want to help him unleash his army of Vortex Phantoms on the Settled Systems to resume the Serpent’s Crusade. You just die and the game reloads you to the point before you make such an important choice or at least an illusion of choice in which you essentially have to stop Anasko and save yourself plus the rest of the Settled Systems.
Considering that Starfield is a RPG, it still seems okay with sacrificing the RPG aspect for the sake of delivering true outcome endings or what the writers and designers want the endings to be without taking into account player agency or interesting stories. There is no feeling of consequence and indeed a severe disconnect between what you decide to do or say except for one moment when you tell the Three Houses to fuck off at the end of the main questline. There are almost no what-ifs, there are no satisfying conclusions or a push to wonder at what would or may have happened.
There’s no immediate or even long-term consequences of what you decided at the end of the main questline save for a few NPCs talking about what happened in Dazra if you walk around which doesn’t really incentivize me to go visit the House Va’ruun embassy in New Atlantis or go to the Unity again to see what may have changed because the potential outcomes for those scenarios are pretty obvious.
Sam Coe, Barrett, Sarah Morgan get mad at you for reinstigating the Serpent’s Crusade WHICH IS A BIG FREAKING DEAL but only Sarah Morgan mentions it by name, the others just have their generic angry lines to which you can easily persuade them hey you know, “shit happens” when we travel the galaxy (yes that’s an actual dialogue you can pick after resuming an intragalactic war).
At worst Bethesda could have put in a Serpent’s Embrace dialogue option for your character for things like that instead of reserving the trait for generic dialogue options for some of the quests but even that was too much for the so called hand crafted content of Shattered Space. Maybe some of this is owed again to the fact that Starfield is the first IP Bethesda has done in a while not backed by decades of worldbuilding and lore but some of the things in Shattered Space doesn’t really stand on its own regardless.
Ultimately, you’re just kind of there to experience most of the story as a bystander rather than take an active part in it which is just so disappointing to me especially with a Bethesda DLC or expansion which is why I’m saying there was less of Starfield in some ways rather than more of it.
The Future of Starfield
Lastly I want to talk about the overall impact of Shattered Space for the game because I did mention a comparison to Cyberpunk 2077’s Phantom Liberty which in my opinion is a fair comparison considering the same $30 price tag. Phantom Liberty which also took advantage of the Edgerunners anime not only gave a new part of the map for players to access but that part of the map was filled with quite a few quests, gigs, characters and POIs that made it feel alive rather than something to just fill out. A new skill tree with a bunch of new quickhacks was introduced with a level cap increase, a decent variety of new weapons and vehicles were put in with the addition of vehicle guns along with even a new ending to the base game that could be unlocked after you play through the DLC.
In comparison, Shattered Space offers nowhere near the same level of quality in content or writing for the same price if you’re expecting that. Gameplay-wise, Shattered Space is just more of the same with not a lot of thought behind most of the combat instances. The teleporting Starborn are replaced by Vortex Phantoms, the Spacers are still Spacers, the Crimson Fleet pirates – who are inexplicably on Va’ruunkai with less of an explanation for why they are there compared to the Spacers – are still pirates.
Was the Shattered Space supposed to completely remake Starfield? No, that’s just silly to suggest, but was Shattered Space an opportunity for Bethesda to add in a bunch of cool things like new ship parts or ships that could still circumvent the Va’ruun shipwright’s explanation of reusing scrap parts? Yes. Could there have been more character customization options added with the DLC??
Yes. Could there have been more zero gravity fights or other unique things to Starfield that the base game could have also capitalized on? Yes. Could there have been a greater amount of side quests with terrific stories? Yes. Could the Va’ruun wayshrines or other POIs offered better stat bonuses or unique functionalities or skills for your character? Yes. Instead, we got something in Shattered Space that I feel like should have been a part of the base game experience much like how the Trackers Alliance could have also been part of the base game.
So those are my thoughts on Starfield’s Shattered Space, as for Starfield itself, I think Bethesda is still banking on the modding community to step in and in the event that the modders aren’t motivated by the game to invest into it then Bethesda’s Creation Club may be the final motivator. I think Shattered Space did demonstrate once again that Starfield has the skeletal structure for potential to be added to it but the onus of that really is on Bethesda and I’m not sure with their development timeline for Elder Scrolls VI if they could do more DLCs for Shattered Space at this point.
As I said before I do like Starfield and hope the best for the game but the DLC was quite underwhelming and I hope they take this feedback, I hope they reconsider how they present some of the stories or lore, I hope they focus on what makes Starfield actually unique and expand on that while improving the RPG aspect. I will probably make three or four more lore videos for Shattered Space but that will be it until the next update or DLC.