Well…here we are…my Starfield DLC review. Wish I could report better news, but it’s nowhere near what people were hoping for. No big improvements to gameplay, no big improvements to writing quality, and no big improvements in optimization.
Let’s start with the story.
You select a semi-random planet to fly to and are immediately greeted with a rogue space station that you must board. You follow a somewhat linear path to learn the story behind it’s appearance before you reactivate it, taking you to the House Va’ruun home planet. As with most Bethesda DLC, your gifted access to this new area pretty much right away, and unlike other Bethesda DLC, only curiosity is the motivator for actually docking with the space station and exploring.
Once you reach Va’ruun’kai (the aforementioned home planet) you immediately confronted as an unwelcome stranger. Your told to go through a fairly vague and not well explained ritual to become a member of the religious order and worthy of paying any attention to before going out and talking to the locals.
Dialogue is dialogue and none of it particularly captivating. Which is my first criticism of Shattered Space: there is no motivation to care about any of the characters. There was nothing meaningful in nearly this entire DLC. Almost like it was written by A.I.
There don’t seem to be any voice actors here, just voice contributors. Every character you meet speaks in measured, even voices, with little to no emotion. It’s like the voice ‘director’ pulled in people from the waiting room, asked them to read part of the script into a microphone, then yelled, “NEXT!” I doubt there was any conversation beforehand to give the contributors any clues as to their character’s motivations or feelings. All of the dialogue was very dry and, frankly, not worth remembering.
The only exception appears to be with the main NPC, Anasko Va’ruun, as only he seemed to have a voice actor. His were the only lines delivered with emotion and weight. It figures really, since he’s also the villain of the story.
Now that we’ve discussed that problem, let’s discuss another. Like the base game, Bethesda missed a huge opportunity to provide us with any need to replay this DLC.
Under the umbrella of House Va’ruun there are actually three factions, also called Houses. Each house apparently has different responsibilities, but all are extremely loyal to the Great Serpent. They also have their own viewpoint on the teachings of the founder of House Va’ruun, Jinan Va’ruun. Don’t ask me to break it down, it was hard enough to remember that much (like I said, very dry dialogue).
Where’s the conflict, Bethesda?
In the ending where you don’t embrace a new Serpent’s Crusade (read, holy war), you are tasked with choosing a new leader for House Va’ruun. Here is the only time when you have to choose between the houses, but there are no stakes or motivations to choose any one of them over the others. I should add that you can choose to lead, but again, there’s no reason to, really.
Now, about the graphics. As with other Bethesda games, this is a visually stunning landscape. The sky above is also pretty breath taking. Too bad the poor optimizations killed the experience.
The room of the final boss fight has so much going on that this problem really shows. Standing outside, I had a decent FPS of 50 to 60. I stepped into the room for the final dialogue with Anasko and it dropped to 15. Now, after the dialogue it went back up, but seriously…why make it so that you can’t pay attention to the dialogue at the climax of the story?!
This was the perfect opportunity for Bethesda to redeem themselves, prove that they still had what it takes to make a good game. But…my moderator Mojo put it best, “I had really hoped they redeemed themselves with this DLC despite the price tag, that IMO honestly should’ve been a free apology for the lack of depth in the base game. But I’m not seeing the redemption in this. It feels like less bang for the buck compared to Far Harbor, just my opinion.”
One more quote from Mojo to wrap up this review and give our overall conclusion about the Starfield: Shattered Space DLC: “this is somebody’s high school project for computer lab that was done last minute and copied everyone else’s assignment.”
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