The first story expansion for Bethesda’s big, bold, rickety space RPG arrives after a year’s worth of incremental updates that have already ironed out the game’s most egregious flaws. Those quest-breaking bugs have been squished, there are now vehicles to make planet-side travel less of a chore, city maps are at least partly 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 baffling profusion of loading screens – but just as the Phantom Liberty expansion finessed Cyberpunk 2077 in its entirety, Shattered Space arrives poised to improve upon what came before.
It appears that Bethesda has acknowledged that travelling across space by selecting planets from menus and watching a cutscene was a bit rubbish, because Shattered Space mostly takes place on a single map, much like Skyrim or Fallout. This new, self-contained narrative concerns House Va’ruun, Starfield’s slightly tiresome cult of space-serpent-worshipping zealots. The player is whooshed towards the secretive society’s homeworld after it has suffered a cataclysm, heralded as the civilisation’s potential saviour – which, naturally, means everyone has plenty of chores for you to do, busy as they are standing around staring at walls or genuflecting in courtyards.
These tasks range from traversing the void between universes, to blasting homicidal electric-blue phantoms, to literally tidying up an old man’s manky little flat. It’s the usual initially overwhelming RPG to-do list, and it all, at least to begin with, feels very old-school Bethesda.
The problem is, very little of what you’re asked to do turns out to be any fun. Fetch-quests that offer next to no payoff are compounded by annoying travel: you have to make an unappealing choice between the vein-popping frustration of trying to drive across the craggy, impassable, boulder-strewn landscape, or giving up and shlepping there on foot. And this landscape isn’t Skyrim, or The Capital Wasteland, with discoveries to be made around every corner. It’s a Starfield planet map like any other, with only the odd cave or cookie-cutter facility to explore, and it rarely rewards inquisitiveness with anything other than wasted time and the urge to swear.
Any previous suggestion that Starfield was leaning into cosmic horror in some new and interesting way also turns out to have been wide of the mark. Occasional, very brief sequences do threaten to conjure an atmosphere of foreboding, but this soon gives way to the same bullet-sponge gunfights through the same uninspired buildings in return for the same loot. The unreliable quest markers feel inexcusable, and Shattered Space becomes a slog long before the 12- to 15-hour campaign comes to an end.
It isn’t all bad. The main story is engaging enough, and throws a few interesting choices your way, as the three ruling houses of the planet of Va’ruun’kai vie for power. And when the frame rate is stable, Shattered Space is quite pretty, if overwhelmingly, monotonously purple. But it is simply more of the same slightly broken Starfield experience, only without any space flight to add a soupcon of variety. It isn’t cheap, either.
Perhaps the next package of extra content will lean more into Starfield’s strengths, rather than amplify its weaknesses. But it really does feel at this point as if most of Starfield’s imperfections are baked in at the technological and conceptual level, and only a full-blown sequel, rather than continued updates, would be able to address them. It’s only because there is a such a bright kernel of brilliance here that it’s so disappointing to see Starfield’s galactic potential remain cosmically unfulfilled.
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Starfield: Shattered Space is out now; £29.99 on Xbox, £25.99 on PC