Shattered Space is how Starfield should have been on day one

In my opinion, Shattered Space is a much better designed and refined version of Starfield, invoking more fantastical mysteries, and making better use of the game’s mechanics. Unfortunately, the DLC suffers from many of the base game’s flaws, and the uptick in concurrent players shows it. 

The first Starfield DLC, Shattered Space, launched yesterday and the Steam reviews have already dropped the DLC to “Mixed” in less than 24 hours. Honestly, some of the reviews are quite unfair, but do underpin what many players feel towards Starfield on the whole: disappointment. 

To quickly set the scene if you don’t know how to start the Shattered Space DLC, you warp to a planet with no active objective and a space station appears out of nowhere with a distress signal. Odd, but not something you likely haven’t encountered before – The Pale Lady comes to mind. 

You board the station and are thrown into tight corridors with no gravity, presenting a difficult and disorientating experience that you could say emulates the situation aboard the station: FUBAR. 

The Oracle space station is dark, claustrophobic, and haunted by violent ghosts. More than that, blue, glowing walls of anomalous energy will teleport you backward if you so much as graze them.

Examining written and audio logs, it’s clear that an experiment with the station’s Grav Drive went horribly wrong. Your job is to open all the locked doors, restore the power, restore the gravity, and find out what happened. 

At the end of the dungeon, you’ll fight a mini-boss of sorts (Sirak Veth’aal). On beating them and activating the terminal, the station will warp itself and you along with it to the DLC’s true playground: Va’ruun’kai.

My experience of this was fantastic overall. I really enjoyed an environment where Zero-G made tactical and exploratory elements more interesting. The more fantastical elements felt like science pushed too far and presented something that was visually and thematically interesting to me. The new guns and armor were interesting, if not very abundant, and the hints of lore were enough to lure me into engaging with the mystery.

Unfortunately, everything after the first mission is where the DLC starts to fall apart. 

Dialog. Why oh why (at least in my playthrough) did my Starfield companions have to open their mouths?

I took Andreja with me because she happens to be a member of House Va’ruun. Unfortunately, she has very little to offer as you float through the corpse-strewn corridors apart from the usual generic dialogue, only occasionally offering more interesting tidbits like “Poor Sirak, so close to seeing their efforts realized.”

Having been warped to a new planet in an unknown system, I retreated to my ship, and that’s where in my playthrough Barrett and Sam Coe chipped in with:

“Sam, this is pretty serious, isn’t it?”

“There is just no hope.”

“I don’t know how it got this bad, I really don’t.”

You might think this is building to something interesting about the DLC, but, no.

“They shouldn’t have traded players. It was a bad move.”

Oh, they’re discussing sports, after witnessing the legendary planet of Va’ruun’kai pop into view after a space station warped into a hidden system.

My excitement and immersion was assassinated by generic dialog. Not all players will encounter this exact exchange, but it highlights one among many small problems with Starfield: generic and random dialog. It’s there to either fill the air, or move the plot along at a breakneck pace.

Immediately following this exchange, I descended to the planet’s surface and was confronted by a Va’ruun guard. 

Quick context: the Va’ruun have been isolated from the Settled Systems for a long time and have suffered an apocalyptic event creating ghosts and sundering their home planet. 

I arrive, and after a very brief exchange, I am named the chosen one because I could hear a ghost’s voice. 

No effort required. You land, you are the chosen one. There wasn’t even a skill check, combat encounter, anything.

Why is this so disappointing? Compare this interaction with The Elder Scrolls Skyrim’s Dark Brotherhood. You aren’t the chosen one immediately. You start as a low-level assassin and get a few missions under your belt to prove you belong. After a few missions, you wind up in the Night Mother’s coffin with a corpse. 

It’s obvious the corpse is going to start speaking at some point, but the game waits for the suspense to settle in. Once she talks and you are discovered, you are named the Dark Brotherhood’s Listener, effectively their chosen one. By this point, the story and its characters have been established, and it feels like a natural progression from your relatively humble beginnings.

In Starfield, you just are the chosen one before the faction or the stakes or the plot are fully established. 

For that reason, it’s not surprising to see so many Steam reviews not praising the DLC. However, some reviews are definitely undeserved. Some reviews are stating that the writers are “hate-playing” Starfield, or just reviewing the DLC without even playing it (no, seriously).

Regardless of the fairness of the reviews, the game’s player count reveals the truth of the DLC. At the time of writing, the 24-hour peak on SteamDB shows that Starfield peaked at 21,792 players, up from 12,584 from the previous week. 

Starfield is by no means like Elden Ring, but the Shadow of the Erdtree DLC saw player counts soar from 160,535 the week before the DLC release to 781,261 post launch.

In all honesty, it seems Shattered Space hasn’t resonated with players very much. It’s a shame, because the first Shattered Space mission “What Remains” is a genuinely interesting experience right up to landing on Va’ruun’kai. If all of Starfield had been designed with more fantastical elements and mystery, with more hand-crafted locations, it might have been more enjoyable since day one. 

As for the rest of the DLC, more has yet to be explored before I can make an in-depth review. 

So, to ensure you don’t miss out, be sure to follow Starfield Db on Google News, and let us know what you think about the DLC over on the Starfield forum.