Starfield: Shattered Space is all about pockets of gravitational anomalies, dimensional horrors, and cultist whitewashing

It’s been a long time coming, but Bethesda’s finally released a proper Deep Dive discussing Starfield: Shattered Space in appropriate detail. It’s a solid showcase, but it’s also a potential disappointment in one key way: it seems to whitewash the Va’ruun into regular ol’ spacefolk, with Chunks stores and all.

I’m sure not everyone is going to be quite as taken aback as I’ve been, but the fact that there’s an honest-to-goodness Chunks storefront in the middle of Dazra gave me whiplash. Don’t get me wrong: Shattered Space still looks very interesting if you’re a Starfield fan, and the aesthetic on show is definitely on-point. It’s just that I was a fair bit disappointed to learn that the Va’ruun really are every bit as ordinary as everyone else in the galaxy.

Starfield: Shattered Space reveals that the Va’ruun are quite normal, actually

For what it’s worth, the Shattered Space Deep Dive vlog does show off some cool new gameplay ideas. Since the city of Dazra is basically torn apart due to a mysterious grav drive experiment the Va’ruun conducted not long ago, we’ll come across anomalous blobs of anti-gravity just strewn around. Jumping into them enables the game’s zero-grav mode, allowing you to float around willy-nilly, which isn’t something Starfield really had in planetary exploration.

Gameplay-wise, then, we’re looking at something that’s quite interesting. Since Shattered Space is supposed to be more in-line with the remainder of Bethesda’s flagship sandbox RPG portfolio, this certainly tracks. The presence of new dimension-hopping alien monsters is quite neat, too, as they appear to be spawning in depending 🌃on how the🌱 player interacts with the aforementioned gravity anomalies.

Again, though, I just can’t overstate how strange it is to see such a casual version of Va’ruun, considering just how mysterious and ominous the Va’ruun Zealots have been in the base game. Certainly, Bethesda’s designers and writers have covered their tracks by the fact that we’ve only come across literal religious extremists in Starfield so far, but I’m still a bit miffed over this.

Whatever the case may be, we won’t have to wait long to see whether Shattered Space meshes with the rest of Starfield or not. The DLC is due to launch on September 30, and the good news for fans of the game is that it’s only the first of potentially many to come. Year 2 content support has already been confirmed, and Bethesda is clear that it aims to keep adding to Starfield for a good long while. Now, if only they could help me relive the Destiny explorer fantasy I’ve been mulling about, that’d be lovely.