Shattered Space Suffers From a Lukewarm Launch That Has Left Fans Disappointed
Starfield’s first major expansion was released in recent days, but it has been a less-than-stellar delivery that has left many fans with a sour taste in their mouths. Collectively, we’ve waited more than a year for the first expansion to be released by Bethesda Game Studios, but now that it’s here, fans have been quick to criticise it.
From low reviews to diehard fans voicing their disappointment on social media, and from a failure to gain traction on streaming platforms to a complete lack of hype for what comes next, Shattered Space has failed to soar.
Shattered Space Didn’t Turn Things Around
It was a few weeks ago that I put a question to the community: ‘Will Shattered Space save Starfield?’
I’d say the answer is up there in black and white now that we’ve had a couple of days to sit with the expansion.
On social media, fans have been seriously critical of the first major Starfield expansion, which at best offers a few meagre hours of entertainment plagued by the same issues that garnered mixed reviews for the base game over a year ago. Even prolific personalities and top-shelf creators have found plenty of problems with Shattered Space.
For instance:
Or how about a take from MrMattyPlays:
Also on Twitter, user Luke Stephens wrote:
Finished Shattered Space, accidentally, in an afternoon. I thought there’d be a lot more, but the main story is VERY short. Simply, it’s more Starfield. The writing is painfully dry, the characters act like they don’t want to be here, and the lack of optimization is painful.
One of the biggest issues is that users are comparing Shattered Space to expansions released for Fallout 4 and Skyrim. It’s not even a fair contest at that point – some expansions, such as Skyrim’s Dragonborn DLC or Fallout 4’s Nuka-World, offered a huge amount of gameplay and plenty to explore, but Shattered Space doesn’t come close.
In the light of these impressive expansions, Shattered Space couldn’t ever put up a fair fight.
Another issue is that it took so long to deliver Shattered Space. It’s tough to see what took so long to piece this together, especially as updates for Starfield have been relatively few and far between over the last year. It took Bethesda Game Studios almost a year to add a rover to the game.
To throw another figure into the mix, Shattered Space’s Steam reviews are currently sitting at 58% negative, with many users complaining that it’s too expensive for what you’re getting.
Even The Playing (Star)Field
To give a little credit to Shattered Space, it’s not all bad. On Metacritic, some positive reviews have been secured by the expansion. For example, XboxEra gave the expansion a score of 9/10, stressing that the DLC is an ‘adventure you do not want to miss.’ Elsewhere, GAMINGbible gave the expansion an 8/10.
It kind of goes downhill from there, though – aside from some glowing community reviews from genuine players.
Looking at the numbers, Starfield didn’t exactly move mountains when Shattered Space was released. For instance, on streaming platforms, there wasn’t much growth at all. The game went from a peak viewer count of around 12,000 to just 38,000 on Twitch, and by today, that number has almost reset to where it was a week ago.
It’s a bit of an unfair comparison, but Elden Ring’s first expansion, Shadow of the Erdtree, was released a few months back. That took peaks from around 30,000 – 40,000 to more than 400,000 users. When Destiny 2’s The Final Shape expansion dropped in June, the viewer count went from floating around 10,000 to 250,000 in a matter of hours.
Given the numbers that Starfield secured at launch, both in terms of sales and viewership, it comes as a dramatic surprise that Shattered Space has performed so badly one year later.
Starfield was a flash in the pan. It was dropped by many players mere weeks after it had been released, and even the ‘unique endgame mechanic’ failed to impress gamers.
From bizarre and boring NPCs to unforgettable factions, and rinse-and-repeat environments to a slew of bugs and performance issues, Starfield might have blasted off well in those first few days, but it broke up short of punching through the stratosphere, and that’s such a shame.
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