‘Starfield: Shattered Space’ Is Not A Hit With Critics Or Fans

Starfield’s big Shattered Space expansion launched this week, and in an age of redemption stories, No Man’s Sky and Cyberpunk, or stellar expansions, Shadow of the Erdtree and The Final Shape, Shattered Space is none of those.

It’s…just not very good, and that seems to be the general consensus of the majority of journalists, YouTubers and players, all of whom began playing at the same time, given that no Shattered Space review codes were sent out.

Starfield may have a reputation at this point as a somewhat under-par Bethesda game, but Shattered Space is scoring and reviewing worse, and even people who may have liked the base game aren’t really liking this (I am very much in that camp). So let’s compare:

• Starfield Metascore – 83
• Shattered Space Metascore – 54
• Starfield Steam Reviews – 57% positive
• Shattered Space Steam Reviews – 39% positive

YouTuber reviews? I’ll let MrMattyPlays sum that up:

I am also of the position that the data is not showing a very high attachment rate for this DLC, at least with the information we can see. Shattered Space peaked at 21,000 concurrent players on Steam, around double its usual, but it is far from a spike for a game that launched with 330,000 concurrents, which you would not expect from what was supposed to be a very major expansion. Compare that to the launch of Cyberpunk’s own big expansion, Phantom Liberty, which spiked Steam players from 31,000 a night to 275,000 at DLC launch. Meanwhile, Shattered Space is barely a blip on the radar in terms of an increase.

It’s true that as an Xbox Game Pass game, much of the playerbase may be over there. At least as of now, however, with a sometimes-delayed listing, Starfield is not inside Xbox’s Top 25 most-played games. We’ll see if that changes in the coming days, but generally speaking there does not seem to be a lot of enthusiasm to rush out and play here.

I said before that the performance of Shattered Space may dictate how much Bethesda, and in turn Microsoft, want to continue to invest in Starfield rather than moving on. While yes, Bethesda has said they want people to keep playing the game for ages as with their other games, they also have a significant amount of pressure to get all hands on deck for Elder Scrolls 6, and to kick off Fallout 5 after that. Is there time for teams to still be devoted to Starfield? And if there is, are all the additions going to be this underwhelming? It’s a question worth asking.

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