Starfield‘s Shattered Space DLC represents an expansion to the game’s base map, adding new locales for players to explore. As is traditional for Bethesda DLC, downloading Shattered Space effectively unlocks a new area for players to visit, populating it with the quests, landmarks, and NPCs that’ll make up its story. Players need to travel to a new section of space in order to begin the DLC, and will likely remain there for the entirety of their runs.
With nearly 1,700 planets to explore, Starfield‘s map is both big and boring. That’s mainly due to the planet’s procedural generation, which ensures that the same points of interest are repeated infinitely throughout the galaxy. Regardless of its size, Shattered Space takes a new approach to map design. Exploring it provides an entirely new kind of experience, compared to what players have come to expect from Starfield, but its relative size is still impressive.
Shattered Space’s Map Is Significantly Smaller Than Starfield’s – But It’s Still Big
The DLC Focuses On A Single System
Shattered Space isn’t quite on par with the base game of Starfield when it comes to map size – it’s noticeably smaller, focusing almost entirely on a single, small star system. It contains two planets, one large and one small; the larger planet also has five moons, while the smaller one has two. If the base game has approximately 1,700 planets, then the DLC is less than two thousandths the size of the overall map.
However, the majority of the action in Shattered Space takes place on the planet Va’ruun’kai, home world of the enigmatic House Va’ruun religious faction. As Starfield planets go, Va’ruun’kai is a big one, easily rivaling locations like Akila or Jemison. It centers on a major city, Dazra, which is full of Va’ruun adherents. This will serve as the player’s home base for much of the DLC; it has pretty much everything other major Starfield cities have, including the merchants and crafting facilities they’ll need to create Shattered Space‘s new recipes.
Outside Dazra, there’s a huge chunk of planet just waiting to be explored. The surface of Va’ruun’kai is dotted with 50 different points of interest. Some of these are human-made, like satellite settlements, important archeological sites from House Va’ruun history, and, weirdly enough, a Chunks. Others are naturally occurring, like ore-rich caves or natural phenomena. While a few are visited as part of the main quest, many of them are also related to side quests, or are left up to the player to discover as they travel the planet.
In terms of other Bethesda DLC, Shattered Space ‘s file size is one of the largest ever. It’s not quite as big as the average Bethesda base game (let alone Starfield), but when it comes to DLC, its map is pretty impressive. While the amount of time each player will spend on it may differ depending on how many side activities they complete, most players will find Shattered Space one of the biggest DLCs ever released for a Bethesda game, both by surface area and by potential playtime.
Shattered Space Features More Handcrafted Environments
A Different Approach From Starfield’s Map
Shattered Space‘s map may be smaller and more condensed than Starfield‘s as a whole, but that’s not all bad. The relatively small map size is due to its nature as an entirely hand-crafted map. Base Starfield uses procedural generation to design most of its map. This means that the grand majority of its planets weren’t completely designed by human hands – instead, they’re machine-made, randomly generated based on an expansive set of parameters.
A handful of
Starfield
‘s environments are hand-crafted, like its major cities and other central landmarks.
This is the true reason behind much of Starfield‘s lackluster map design. Identical, cookie-cutter POIs recur because they were designed to be generic, able to be slotted into any number of procedurally generated planets. Large, empty spaces sit stagnant between landmarks because the computers that generated them couldn’t take into account a player’s boredom while attempting to cross them. The result is a world that feels cold and nonsensical, and is simply no fun to explore.
That’s not the case for Shattered Space, though. Every element of the DLC’s map is hand-crafted, from its general layout to the points of interest that dot its surface. Since it’s human-made, player experience was a major design consideration. Shattered Space also relies less on open space travel, another aspect of Starfield routinely criticized for its dullness. It won’t fix Starfield‘s base game, but it will offer something more in line with initial player expectations.
This is a return to form for Bethesda, whose earlier games are notoriously easy to get lost in. Players are meant to wander Shattered Space‘s map in a way that’s just not plausible in base game Starfield. They’ll rarely, if ever, find themselves on completely barren planets, with the nearest landmark miles away, and be forced to fast travel somewhere else. They’re actively encouraged to go from point A to point B on the Rev-8, or even on foot, and incentivized by the new things they discover along the way.
As a result of that, players may spend even more time exploring Va’ruun’kai than they will exploring any of Starfield‘s other individual planets. So even though its actual size is microscopic compared to that of the base game, it feels much larger than it actually is.
It bears repeating that Shattered Space is by no means a small DLC. It may be dwarfed by the rest of the galaxy, but even compared to similar Bethesda releases like Fallout 4‘s Nuka-World and Far Harbor, it’s huge, and will surely keep players occupied for a long time to come. Its hand-crafted nature makes Shattered Space‘s Va’ruun’kai one of the best maps available in Starfield, even if it is just a tiny sliver of the overall world.
