Starfield: Shattered Space

Shattered Space is a DLC that expands the lore of the world of Starfield, detailing a pleasant and well-conceiveded tale, which makes clear the gruesome and brutal plot of House Va'ruun, which absolutely deserves consideration, from now on. From a playful point of view, here, I would have expected a little more, with some additions as has happened in the past with other Bethesda works. The final result is still very good.

Ultimately, Starfield: Shattered Space is an expansion that delivers.

Intriguing lore and a new hand-crafted planet to explore can't quite override recurring bugs and tired quest design.

Shattered Space was a chance for Bethesda to do some stuff that’d make quibbling about where you can spend five hours building a little house surrounded by mineral extractors a lot less important than it was in the base game. It was a golden opportunity to take the great ideas Bethesda’d had when devising a faction that’d grabbed players’ attention, and bring them to life with a bunch of either the classic Bethesda magic, or a new mojo that the studio could carry on into the great games it may well add to an already storied legacy in the future. Instead, anyone returning to Starfield after all the time they’ve spent with what remains a very marmite base game will likely be left feeling much the same way they did about all those hours when they get done playing what could have been a home run return to star form.

While Shattered Space is quite possibly one of Starfield's most enjoyable storylines to date, it once again struggles to offer any real consequences. And its new setting feels woefully underutilised.

Maybe one day, Starfield will finally become what everyone had hoped, with more emphasis on the mechanics people enjoy. Starfield: Shattered Space isn't the worst DLC in the world, and fans of the base game may enjoy it, but it fails to live up to the reputation that Bethesda has established as a company that makes great expansions.

Despite a prologue that promises an oppressing and mystical atmosphere, Shattered Space leaves on the long run the taste of a « lazy » DLC that does not push its concept to its full extent. Its hand-crafted open world is gorgeous to look at, but sadly uninteresting to explore. House Va'ruun, the core of the story, deserved a better treatment, but falls short because of shallow characters and a scenario that poorly motivates the player to feel invested in. The whole experience can although be pleasant for the fans of the (too ?) classical Bethesda formula, despite an almost total lack of new gameplay mechanics and enemies to fight. Nevertheless, players who did not like Starfield in the first place will certainly not enjoy its first DLC. Let us hope that Bethesda will do better on a second one, presumably already in the works somewhere among the stars.

Quite a decent DLC which introduces a gorgeous new planet and a new faction.

Decent length and quests content ,but a new romance would have been nice as would a star system with multiple planets instead of one.

It is genuinely incredible how many dumb lies and empty invocations of "wokeness" are allowed to stick around in the user reviews. Most of the people here simply haven't played it. I think the critical average is harsh-but-fair. It's not great! I said 7/10 since everything is pretty average for a Bethesda DLC: it's no Dragonborn or Fall Harbor, but it's comparable maybe to Nuka-World or Dawnguard. If you don't like Starfield you won't like this. I liked Starfield quite a bit, and I mostly liked this too. Good: - gave me an excuse to check out Starfield again: there have been good QoL updates and necessary bugfixes / proc gen improvements (still some problems) - a lot of good flavor/background text and dialogue - I still think Bethesda is (usually, not always) one of the better RPG studios at thoughtful moral ambiguity, rather than a diversity of good-bad moral options, and that's true here too. A lot of "what's the least bad option?" if you want to solve things positively. - *some* of the fights were good and tense; many enemies teleport around and sometimes that's quite spooky - the overworld is fun to explore and well-crafted - professional critics whining that Bethesda didn't explain away the Great Serpent is are babies: what do you think religion is? Mixed: - most of the fights were nothing to write home about; combat reminded me a lot of Broken Road from New Vegas in being a refreshing challenge but not a particularly interesting one - I liked the individual house quests, but they were poorly-motivated by the main quest - the city itself is pretty but not very convincing as a disaster zone, nor as a center of government - the cosmic sci-fi stuff is fine, I liked some of the cutscenes - the new weapons weren't anything to write home about, though it does add a bit of diversity to energy and melee weapons - a lot of the assets were pretty and we are definitely seeing them again in TES6. The visual design often felt Elder Scrolls. Bad: - it would have been nice to have new skills (e.g. a dual wielding tutor), new types of ship equipment, etc. Maybe there's stuff I missed. - there's some iffy voice acting in prominent roles - the cosmic *horror* stuff was just too goofy and low-budget to be scary :/ - I am a programmer and therefore gracious when it comes to bugs, but some of the dialogue triggers need to get fixed as a high priority - the asking price is too expensive ("why not just play Phantom Liberty?"), but I got it with the preorder so didn't pay for it. At $0 it is definitely worth playing! I suppose BGS kinda fell on the sword of inflation here...games aren't getting any cheaper.

This has got to be bethesda weakest dlc, in a long time, the dlc just doesn't function. I don't know what else to really say. It's just boring, in my opinion, and sure it's pretty and the game does its visuals well but it's just a no for me

Microsoft - I believe it's time to step in and restructure the management team at BGS. They had a good run, but it's time to move on. You can't afford ES6 to be another catastrophe. My biggest gripe with **** Space was how Andreja was practically sidelined in it, bar a shallow conversation with the council. Or did I miss something? The dissonance was spectacular. Didn't the designers play the base game? After listening to all her stories and concerns about Va'Ruun in that unendingly pained voice of hers, all the emotions, I thought, yes, we're going together on a big quest to deal with her past. So, we get to Va'Ruun and... bupkis. Hey Andreja, you're home! Let's do this! We can properly address Tomisar, your mentor, who we let live and then proceeded to tell us that it's not over as he ran off like a rat. Now when I go to back to the base game she just sounds like misery. It was nothing, Andreja. Get over it already. You made a mountain out of a mole hill, and I believed you. I married you for god's sake. Someone, anyone, call my divorce lawyer. This is besides all the other story, plot, quest design issues that plague the DLC (and base game).