Starfield’s big Shattered Space expansion isn’t weird enough

It’s been a agelong clip coming for Starfield players. Bethesda’s sci-fi instrumentality connected Skyrim primitively launched past summer, and portion determination person been immoderate updates and improvements since then, it’s taken much than a twelvemonth for the crippled to get its archetypal large expansion. This lead-up means there’s a batch riding connected Shattered Space — which is simply a perfectly good summation to the crippled that besides feels incredibly underwhelming. After a promising setup, it ends up mostly being much of the same.

Things start, arsenic they truthful often bash successful expansions, with a distress call. This 1 leads you to a derelict abstraction presumption that is brimming with ghostly apparitions and which yet whisks you distant to the location satellite of the House Va’ruun, a spiritual sect that worships a elephantine serpent. There, you larn the Va’ruun person been beset by a calamity that has caused immoderate members to disappear, others to crook into convulsive wraiths, and a fig of different unusual and disastrous happenings successful and astir their main city. After a ceremonial that really converts you to the church, your occupation becomes solving the enigma of the calamity and helping the House enactment things backmost successful order.

(Note: you tin technically entree Shattered Space astatine immoderate constituent aft Starfield’s opening mission, but Bethesda recommends being level 35 oregon higher to get done it. I played connected a New Game Plus prevention astatine level 32 and didn’t truly person immoderate problems.)

It’s a large premise that promises each kinds of cosmic horror. The satellite you’ll research is rendered successful a garish reddish and purple, filled with unusual glowing growths, bubbles wherever gravity doesn’t exist, and oddball creatures that would look close astatine location successful No Man’s Sky. The main metropolis — which looks similar a transverse betwixt a frontier municipality and an past temple — is filled with radical struggling done the turmoil, whether it’s mislaid loved ones, nutrient shortages, oregon a situation of faith.

Shattered Space is besides notable for being incredibly focused. While overmuch of Starfield’s entreaty has been the sheer standard of its universe, here, you’re constricted to a azygous satellite that’s dense with things to bash and see. It’s reminiscent of the mostly standalone Far Harbor expansion for Fallout 4.

This results successful immoderate large storylines, peculiarly successful the sidequests, which person you doing everything from investigating a haunted orphanage to hunting down a livestock thief. At first, the spiritual sect seemed standoffish and hard to understand. But eventually, it became wide that contempt their implicit isolation and content successful a large snake, they were each conscionable radical struggling to get by. Even the elemental missions springiness you immoderate caller penetration into the quality broadside of this group, which, successful the main Starfield campaign, is mostly branded arsenic a sect of convulsive zealots.

But however you bash that is emblematic Starfield (and Bethesda) stuff. Quests person you warring done dungeons, collecting oregon delivering items, and occasionally talking your mode retired of problems. There’s a caller backdrop, but thing overmuch has changed successful presumption of the operation oregon moment-to-moment acquisition of Starfield. Those alien monstrosities are conscionable much enemies to fight; the ghostly wraiths are conscionable much soldiers shooting astatine you. At the precise least, the fetch quests are a bully accidental to effort retired the caller dune buggy.

There’s thing peculiarly atrocious astir Shattered Space. And if you’re conscionable looking for much Starfield, that’s precisely what this is, lone successful 1 of the much visually and narratively absorbing locations successful the game. But aft truthful overmuch time, I can’t assistance but privation a small much than conscionable more. Shattered Space had the imaginable to beryllium weird and creepy and different, but it looks similar players volition person to support waiting for thing that feels genuinely new.