Okay, okay, I know everything there is to know about memes. But you can say “dead games” all you want, and you still can’t destroy one eternal fact: Starfield’s Shattered Space expansion looks great. During a closed demo at the Xbox booth at Gamescom ’24, Bethesda gave me about 15 minutes of information about the game’s upcoming DLC pack, and I have to tell you: I’m sold. It actually reminded me of Dead Space.
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Shattered Space, which has long been shrouded in mystery, was properly revealed at the Xbox Showcase in June 2024, but even after the media broke the news, specific details about the expansion have remained difficult to come by. We’ve known since the initial trailer that Shattered Space would take us to the homeworld of House Va’ruun (a yet-to-be-formed faction in the main game) to investigate some kind of global catastrophe.
But in this new display I saw this morning, I learned that things are getting more intimate on this planet. As Todd Howard outlined in an interview shortly after it was first revealed, the entire new area is “handcrafted,” so the environments will feel more curated and less generic than most planets in the main game . It will be open-ended; any quests you take on in the DLC will help you learn more about the mysterious house and its home, which you’ll arrive shortly after a major incident. The population remains in turmoil, and – like any true RPG protagonist – you’ll be the one picking up the pieces.
Gameplay-wise, though, that’s where it gets really interesting as far as I’m concerned. “We wanted to get into the mystery and horror aspects of Starfield,” one developer said during a deep dive. He noted that the main game is open and relies heavily on long-range firefights, eliminating the need for close contact to resolve combat. In Shattered Space, “we wanted to bring that distance closer.”
What follows is a series of chainguns, melee weapons, and close-range firefights. I know there’s been a lot of criticism about how melee and unarmed combat work and feel in the base game, so it seems like Bethesda is doing its best to address that in the DLC. Of course, this means that religious-themed locations—all the churches, pillars, and monuments—will be set up to be conducive to short-range combat. Some arenas look almost like Doom levels.
The sets appear to be interconnected with narrow corridors and dead ends. Expect jump scares and face-to-face fights. It’s completely separate from the open spaces and sniper nests of Starfield itself, which I’m intrigued by. After all, variety is the spice of life.
Dead Space comparisons aside, the Spacetime Event resulted in a zero-gravity patch on the Varun family’s home planet, meaning some traversal and exploration will leave you feeling hesitant about air and using Your mathematical brain figures out some nifty environmental platforms. How it’s handled is another matter entirely, but hey; Bethesda scores points for creativity here.
It’s just a quick, hands-off video, but I was impressed after my first Gamescom ’24 date. For those who’ve stuck with the game, it’s something very different to fuel their fights, and for those who’ve failed (like me, admittedly), it’s got enough hooks to hook you back. It fascinates me; if this is the future of Starfield, Bethesda may have the ability to rewrite the legacy of its best-performing game at launch.
Shattered Space will be available on PC and Xbox Series X/S on September 30th. This won’t be Starfield’s only expansion, and Xbox may be hoping it can inject a little life into one of 2023’s most divisive games. A planet in a lunar rover was driven on the ground.
