A year ago, Bethesda released Starfield, their massive space RPG that was a decade in the planning. It's fair to say it underwhelmed, despite some enjoyable moments. The game had a laudably weird, off-kilter main storyline and Bethesda's best combat to date, but bland writing, dry characters and a lack of the curated exploration that characterised their best games made it a frustrating experience.
In particular, Starfield suffered from its structure, which encouraged you to jump from star system to star system not via its space travel system but by fast-travelling. Given that both involved faffing around with menus and loading screens rather than engaging in rip-roaring space adventures, why not just do the faster method? Although more efficient, it arguably defeated the object of a space game to mostly avoid the space bit of it.
Shattered Space, the first major Starfield expansion, tries to grapple with this problem head-on. The expansion starts in a very promising way, with you being drawn to an abandoned space station without gravity, and having to fight what appear to be "space ghosts." The mystery of the space station is unusually gripping (by Starfield standards, anyway) and lasts just the right amount of time before you get some exposition which leads you to Va'ruun'kai, the homeworld of House Va'ruun, a faction mostly represented in the mothership game by fanatical space pirates worshipping a great serpent.
Your arrival on Va'ruun'kai is not welcomed and you'd have probably been ventilated in short order, but fortunately there was some kind of "incident" just before you arrived which blew up half the capital city, created gravitation anomalies through the area and brought in yet more space ghosts. Thanks to your knowledge of weird space phenomena from the OG game (and the incredible desperation of the planet's leader), you're recruited to help them out even if you're not totally convinced that their big space serpent god is actually a thing.
After the initial space station episode, the entire game takes place on Va'ruun'kai. The generously-sized new map is handcrafted and covered with story-critical locations, locations essential to side-quests and even locations just there for you to stumble across in random exploration. This is a huge change from the base game where most planetary areas are procedurally generated with identikit bases with the same layout, and the same small pool of events constantly happening. If anything, Shattered Space might spoil you (well, more) for the main game.
The collection of quests here is a notch above the original game, and occasionally it surprised me. One quest involved helping out a confused elderly gentleman after his daughter and only carer disappeared in the incident. This quest makes a big play for an emotional story - something not so much not in modern Bethesda's normal wheelhouse as not even in their galaxy - and almost pulls it off. A lot of the side-quests tie into the annihilation of half the city and its people, selling it as a big, traumatic event in these people's lives (and perhaps explaining a bit better than usual why they immediately trust the total rando who's shown up to save their arses for them). The main mission chain is more predictable, requiring you to bring the three ruling factions of the city in line by doing favours for them, then recovering vital equipment to allow you to get inside the lab where the incident began. But it's executed at least moderately better than the original game.
Where the expansion falters, not unlike the core game, is in comparison to its forebears and contemporaries. It feels like the expansion is aiming at a similar experience to Fallout 4's splendid expansion Far Harbor, including the hand-crafted smaller map, better story focus, and even its focus on one of your companion characters (Andreja is from this planet and bringing her along can open new dialogue options). But the game isn't quite as compelling as Far Harbor's, which had much more bittersweetness and character depth, and a really thorny moral quandary at the end. Shattered Space is less engrossing, and Andreja's extra ten lines of dialogue or whatever it is can't compare to Nick's much greater direct involvement in the Far Harbor narrative. Also, as a lot of people compared Starfield to Cyberpunk 2077 (both being first-person SF RPGs with an open world) and found it critically wanting, so Shattered Space is not even operating on the same level as Phantom Liberty.
Shattered Space is basically 12-15 hours or so of more Starfield, which some might find a questionable proposition, but the more focused storytelling and characterisation is at least a moderate improvement over the base game, even if that does insanely mean dropping the space travel bit from your sci-fi RPG. Graphically it's very pretty (especially if you're a big fan of purple), and it feels like the environments are a step up over the base game. Still, it's hard to conclude anything different to the original game: Shattered Space (***½) is solid but underwhelming. The expansion requires Starfield to run and is available on PC and Xbox Series X/S, and via the Xbox Game Pass service.
1 comment:
I have played Skyrim way too much so I was looking forward to Starfield, but both the base game and now the expansion have stuck with the tired trope of a generic protagonist thrown into a series of situations as savior. As a result, I probably won't play Starfield or Elder Scrolls VI if it remains the same. Nobody want to keep replaying exactly the same kind of game for 20 years. I'd much rather be a believable character on the fringes of a story than a damn hero about whom everything revolves.
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