Starfield launched to mixed reception, garnering some critical acclaim while simultaneously receiving a thorough beating online from critics and players alike. The criticisms were manyfold, although largely centered around the lack of traditional Bethesda design that fans had come to know and love from their plethora of award-winning titles. Thankfully, a series of updates have fixed some of the numerous issues plaguing the game at launch, and the Shattered Space DLC promises to further rectify even more of them.

However, it's hard not to feel that Starfield was somewhat doomed from the start and that Shattered Space is too late, despite the many promises it makes. There is one fundamental problem with Starfield, one that was controversial even before the game launched, with developers jumping to its defense despite its overall absurdity. Shattered Space, with all of its good intentions, cannot fix this issue so inherently baked into Starfield's game design, and only a No Man's Sky-style series of updates could truly repair it.

Shattered Space's Location Can't Fix Starfield's Randomly Generated Planets

Starfield's Exploration Still Remains Unrewarding

Shattered Space is bringing Starfield's game design back to the classic Bethesda formula by offering players a single large open-world location to explore. Unlike the one thousand randomly generated planets located in the base game, Va'ruun is a handcrafted world with unique points of interest and optional content designed specifically for it, much like how Bethesda handled its DLC for the Fallout and Elder Scrolls series.

It is a positive change, and fortunately, not the only feature Shattered Space is fixing, as it does away with the worst part of Starfield and gives fans what they've wanted all along. However, this doesn't fix the fundamental issues with the base game's exploration, namely that it isn't very fun.

Dashing around randomly generated planets can be exciting, especially when there are things to do and alien civilizations to encounter, but Starfield doesn't offer any of that. Its planets are also not particularly spectacular, proving to be small, cut-off locations with little more than empty space peppered with the occasional Crimson Fleet base to fight through, unlike No Man's Sky, which generates entire planets and allows players to land wherever they want, just one of many things NMS does better than Starfield.

However, the greatest failing of Starfield's randomly generated planets, which Shattered Space fixes, is its lack of life and its desolate spaces filled with copy-and-pasted encounters that kill any and all immersion after the third time encountering it. Ironically, the more handcrafted locations Bethesda is best known for accommodating a greater sense of life and immersion, as developers are not only able to handcraft interactions and events for players to stumble upon but also set strict rules through which emergent gameplay can arise. Shattered Space cannot fix this, it'll only serve to make it so much worse.

Shattered Space Having A Single Location Is Bad News For Starfield

It'll Only Highlight The Issues With The Base Game

There is a good chance that Shattered Space will become more fondly ed than the base game, if only because it better fits into the Bethesda formula that fans love and that people will soon begin to turn against Starfield. Its single explorable location will have more memorable handcrafted content that players will reminisce about the same way they do about first encountering the College of Winterhold in Skyrim or stumbling across Megaton in Fallout 3. While that is undeniably amazing for fans of Starfield and those who've wanted to get into it, it's bad news for the base game.

It will be incredibly difficult to return to the generic and repetitive randomly generated planets after exploring Va'ruun in Shattered Space, and even harder to come back to the exploration model that Starfield adopts. Hopping from planet to planet through endless loading screens will feel exhaustingly trivial when the DLC offers an experience with seamless exploration on a singular planet. The desire for a more traditional Bethesda experience will grow even more, and yet it will be impossible to offer without fundamentally changing the entire base game.

It's almost a mistake to have made Shattered Space the way Bethesda has, even if it is a significant step up from Starfield's original experience. It offers too much hope for what a Bethesda game in space should actually feel like, and the need to slog through the base game to properly appreciate the DLC will become frustrating as a result. Shattered Space feels as if it should have been released as a standalone spin-off title that anyone disillusioned with Starfield, or simply those longing for Bethesda's original style of game design, could pick up without being burdened by Starfield.

Starfield Needs A No Man's Sky-Style Make Over

It Needs Major Updates To Fix Its Boring Systems

There's little chance Bethesda will invest as much effort into updating Starfield as Hello Games did for No Man's Sky, and yet it's exactly what it needs for it to retain the same kind of love and attention over a decade or more as Skyrim has enjoyed. Firstly, planets need a major overhaul to the number of potential biomes, thus diversifying the types of planets players can explore. Additionally, there needs to be more unique POIs and encounter types that players can experience to keep each planet feeling fresh and grant a unique, memorable experience.

If Bethesda wants to commit to its thousand-planet structure, then it needs to give a good reason to explore each planet and to make each one feel, in some way, a worthwhile experience. Players landing on a new planet in No Man's Sky do so because of the potential of what they can discover, as much as it is to see what type of wonderful creatures and biomes they'll encounter. That same incentive does not exist in Starfield, as, aside from a handful of story-focused planets, the rest feel as lifeless and dull as each other.

Alas, it seems that even Star Wars Outlaws has beaten Bethesda to its own game, a truly harrowing defeat considering the pedigree of its plethora of other games. The chances of Bethesda overhauling the base systems of Starfield are incredibly unlikely, with its next move seemingly to be to move away from its failed experiment back to its original game design philosophy, best evidenced by Shattered Space.

This is a shame, as Starfield had the potential to be something great. However, at least players will have the Shattered Space DLC to remind them of what that potential could have manifested itself as.

Source: Starfield/YouTube