Today’s Xbox Games Showcase was a nice, healthy dose of what’s on the horizon for Team Green (and maybe a few other platforms?). In the midst of it all Starfield, Bethesda’s enormous space RPG with over 1,000 planets, got a nice trailer for its upcoming expansion, Shattered Space and from the looks of it, it’s clear this is the kinda style Starfield desperately needs. As I said in my review of Starfield, Bethesda’s big ol’ space RPG was “a galaxy in search of an identity.
” Impressive in its scope, and certainly capable of some very pretty space vistas, Starfield really fails to overcome much of its vanilla, paint-by-numbers approach to forecasting humanity’s future among the stars. Sometimes a low-fantasy science fiction story works well, but as I said last year, Starfield really could’ve stood to dazzle us a bit more: [Starfield] draws more on the “grounded” sci-fi of material like Star Trek and The Expanse than it does the high space fantasy of Star Wars and Destiny, which isn’t inherently bad, of course. However, it does so in a way that emphasizes their utilitarian view of the future while largely overlooking the elements that make them compelling.
Just a dash of space opera fun could have gone a long way in livening up the game’s tone. One of the factions that didn’t get a whole lotta love in Starfield was its very creepy, reclusive, and religiously zealous House Va’ruun faction. Though they’d appear here and there in the main story and .
