Starfield: Shattered Space was released this week, but the highly anticipated expansion isn’t getting the fanfare many expected.
It’s about 10 hours of content if you go slow, with a handful of new items that are mostly just reskins of existing things. No new mechanics, no new powers, no new ship parts, no new companions. EDIT: I’ve googled and there are actually two new companions, they are minor characters you meet during the main questline and once the respective quest is finished they say “meet me at X place”, where you can hire them. Mind you, this was not added as a misc quest on my log at all, so I forgot to ever check it, and judging by what I’m seeing, they are nothing different from the usual minor companions you can hire on pubs around the galaxy, nothing like the full fledged companions from Constellation.
Writing is comically bad even for Bethesda’s standards. I give a pass to them many times but on this DLC it was painful. So we got this overly religious faction that’s almost completely cut off from the rest of the galaxy, to a point that members leaving the planet literally cannot return because they cannot know the way back, except for a other faction of even more overly religious zealots, traders and you that come and go as you please. Despite all the secrecy and isolation and whatever, within 10 minutes of you arriving at their planet, you’re considered “the one” because you said a phrase that you heard every single zealot of this faction repeat it before but for them there was no way for you to know that, so then they make you do a guided tour on a cave and suddenly you’re part of the cult and everyone is fine with that. The few quests are mostly fetch quests, or the “this could’ve been an email” quests, but at least it’s all within one planet. Some quests have that trademark “moral dilemma” Bethesda is known for, where it tries it’s best to not allow you to be anything but lawful good, and the only consequences of picking the ““evil”” option is that the NPC will will raise their voice when speaking to you, and your omnipresent companions on the other side of the galaxy will instantly hate you for that. The very few choices you’re given during quests are false choices since they lead to the same outcome always.
Main quest spoilers
The main quest is 5 or 6 quests long (really), and revolves around the most xenophobic and isolated faction ever blindly trusting an outsider to complete 3 errands for each house and allowing them to enter the Citadel (the big building which is centre for the faction and looks like a corporate building, in and outside) to stop the quantum shennanigans happening there and save their leader. You get there and find that the leader is a prick that wants to commit genocide of the other factions in the galaxy and you kill them and stop the experiment, which destroys the citadel. Coming back, the council of this faction, absolutely fanatic and desperate wanting to get their leader back, ask you where he is and you just say “lol he doesn’t care about you”, and everyone immediately believes you. You, the outsider that just reached this planet 5 hours ago, is then given the most important decisions as to which house shall rule the faction, and if they should continue the genocide crusade or not, but in the end it doesn’t matter because in typical Bethesda fashion, the game is not allowed to be changed since that would “spoil the fun” for your current run, are you are awarded a two room house their city and you can build 2 structures in their artchitecture in your outposts.
What also bothers me immensily is how Bethesda absolutely lack depth and scope perception. This is a major faction with supposedly an army that could ravage the entire known galaxy, but all they have is one single city that has less than 10 buildings in it and 2 parking spots for ships, and that’s it. Of course Bethesda would come with an excude for that, saying that the explosion which happened there deleted over half of the city. There are a couple of landmarks outside the city walls, which is a first for Starfield, but most of them are a 2 minute walk away.
On the good part, the atmosphere, architecture and design of the planet and everything is really fucking good, but it’s overshadowed by how absurdly shallow the DLC is.
30€ for 10 hours of what seems to be cut content.
I kow that some people will claim whatever about the Creation Engine (or call it Gambryo as if it’s some sort of slur) for the limitations and why their games are bad, but I wholly disagree. The engine is not the issue with Bethesda games, it’s who’s making the games. There are engines more limited than Creation out there (build engine) and people are making impressive things with them. You could give Bethesda Unreal Engine 5 like these armchair developers campaign for, and you’d still get the same tasteless blob from before. Their game design is severyle outdated and severely limited, as as long as they keep beating this long-rotten horse’s carcass, their games will keep falling in quality headfirst.
I have not played it yet and I still know that there’s two new companions, so I’d suggest to ignore this person’s opinion as they clearly went into it with a certain bias already.
I didn’t have any bias when playing this, and I definitely steer clear from the usual Bethesda hating bandwagon, but this DLC was so lackluster and disappointing that it’s no wonder I completely missed the two new minor companions from the DLC, specially since it wasn’t added to my misc quest log to meet and hire them, so I was none the wiser. I’ve edited my comment to reflect this.
