Starfield’s Shattered Space expansion is less than two weeks away on September 30, and Bethesda is ramping up with promotion including new looks and details about the expansion which make it look like something that will remedy elements people disliked about the base game.
A new ten minute Vidoc about Shattered Space has gone live and has reiterated and new details about what the expansion will contain, and what it will add to Starfield. Here are the highlights, though you can obviously watch it for yourself below.
- House Va’ruun’s home planet Va’ruun’kai is completely handcrafted, completely self-contained. Bethesda compares it to other expansions they’ve done for other games, but it is a departure for Starfield itself which is about exploring hundreds of planets where the main handcrafted elements are a handful of specific cities.
- The story will never send you off of the planet itself (though you can still leave and go wherever you want). Given that it does not send you off planet, that makes me wonder if ship combat is involved in this expansion whatsoever. That’s not confirmed.
- All exploration, all side quests tell the story of what happened on the planet in some form or another, nothing is wholly disconnected. This would be a departure from hundreds of disconnected mini-quests in the base game that have little to do with your central Starborn pursuit, albeit that’s hardly unusual for an RPG. Here, it’s all about this one story.
- The story is about what happens with Starfield’s “search for knowledge” concept goes too far, which has backfired horribly among the Va’ruun. A secret experiment involving grav drive technology went horribly wrong, resulting in a massive tear in the fabric of space-time which swallowed a significant portion of the capital city of Dazra. You show up just a few weeks after it happened. The leader of the Va’ruun is missing, and there’s a power struggle where you will of course, have to take sides and make tough decisions.
- The planet is full of gravity anomalies for easy jetpacking. The planet will not have one uniform gravity like others (base level should be “normal” however, like the game’s cities).
- The old factions like zealots, spacers and Crimson Fleet are on the planet, and there are new monsters, including Vortex Horrors, entering from another world. Even if the old factions are there, they should not be in clone-stamped procedural bases or mines like in the rest of the game when you explore.
- There is a new focus on horror elements and panic in combat, with more chaos. There seems to be an increased focus on melee as they want to “close the gap” in combat. Lots of melee monsters in particular featured. You will have access to new gravity grenades, new Va’ruun weapons are shown off.
Above all else, the idea that this is one planet, handcrafted for the entire expansion, is enough of a sell. We’ll see how it does, but I have pretty high expectations after what we’ve been shown so far.
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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
