Starfield: Shattered Space Preview – Getting back to what Bethesda does best

thesixthaxis.com:

For all the years of build up and anticipation, Starfield’s launch last September didn’t exactly set the world alight. It took a bold step into sci-fi with its interstellar adventure, but felt like it didn’t quite explore its galaxy of possibilities as fully as it could have done. Launching on 30th September, Starfield: Shattered Space, the first big expansion for the game, looks set to take one of the dangling threads of potential and head down a dark and twisted rabbit hole.

Throughout the version of Starfield that shipped, you can see the vestigial remnants of some of the many gameplay experiments and ideas that Bethesda explored through the game’s eight years of development. Some remain as gameplay elements with little meaningful purpose, like building bases to refine fuel for space travel that was eventually made practically limitless, while others were left as dangling threads waiting to be revisited, like House Va’ruun.

This bunch of fanatical space serpent worshippers were easily one of the most enigmatic aspects of the main game. Ostensibly one of the biggest factions in the Settled Systems, alongside the United Colonies and FreeStar Collective, they were almost nowhere to be seen, outside of historical context and having Andreja as one of your possible companions. The presence of Va’ruun’kai, their homeworld, was kept a closely guarded secret as they retreated into isolation.

Also weird as heck experiments. Shattered Space reveals the location of Va’ruun’kai and the capital city of Dazra in the wake of a reality tearing experiment by their leading scientists, with extra-dimensional beings flooding through.

Va’ruun’kai promises to be a dark and unsettling locale to explore, the planet shrouded in deep, dark reds and purples from its sky that lend it a deeply ominous tone, while Dazra itself has been engulfed in a spatial anomaly and surrounded by a suspended explosion. Still, Dazra is basically the one safe place left on the planet, with the Va’ruun evacuating