Starfield’s first expansion, Shattered Space, is nearly here. And ahead of the DLC’s release later this month, Bethesda has released a new, detail-filled 9-minute video showing off the alien world where the expansion takes place, as well as its inhabitants.
Shattered Space was first announced in June 2023, months before Bethesda’s open-world space RPG had even launched. A year later in June 2024, Xbox and Bethesda released the first trailer for the expansion, which is set on the mysterious planet of Va’ruun’kai. This is a new “handcrafted” world, according to Bethesda, who also explained that the entire Starfield expansion takes place here. And in a new deep dive video, we get to see a lot of this new planet and its alien landscapes.
The biggest takeaway from this new video is how much Bethesda really, really wants you to know that this new DLC isn’t filled with boring, empty, procedurally generated worlds or spaces like the main game. Instead, this time around, Bethesda is promising a “handcrafted” planet that contains at least 50 unique locations to discover and explore.
The other big notable detail is that Shattered Space is a very self-contained expansion. In the main game, you’d often fly to a few different worlds to finish a large quest. Here, Bethesda is promising that the entire expansion will take place on this one world and will be focused on the power vacuum that exists in House Va’ruun following a devastating incident involving gravity-defying technology.
We’ve said this before, but Shattered Space really seems like exactly what Starfield needs. While the main game played fine and looked alright, the worlds you visited were often empty or contained copy-pasted areas to explore over and over. What Starfield needed was some new, fresh, handmade content that feels weird and offers players a totally new experience. And Shattered Space looks to be just that.
Shattered Space launches on September 23 on Xbox Series X/S and PC.
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