I’ll admit it – I’m a Starfield fan. The space RPG has its problems but despite them I’ve managed to plow tons of hours into it and enjoyed the vast majority of my time. Part of that is a willingness to switch off my brain and simply enjoy the kind of quest-based games Bethesda now produces, and Starfield gives plenty of that. The recently released Shattered Space DLC promised to do something different, however, with its design director directly referencing my favorite game, Morrowind, as inspiration. Unfortunately what’s been released seems to have taken the wrong lessons from the best game in the Elder Scrolls series, and shows a lack of understanding about Bethesda’s own legacy.
The more RPGs Bethesda releases, the more Morrowind looks like an accidental masterpiece. Before it came massive adventures like Arena and Daggerfall, and latter games like Oblivion and Skyrim up the scale again, though not to the same extent. Starfield is definitely the biggest game the developer has ever made, and with that has come a ton of problems – most notably the feeling that everything is the same, with few reasons to explore when there are no surprises.
Shattered Space promised to fix that, and to its credit it does provide a different experience to the main game. If Starfield is a space version of Daggerfall, then Shattered Space is definitely more akin to Morrowind – at least in terms of scope. It’s a small, hand-crafted experience, all set on the same planet with unique ruins and caves to explore. Morrowind’s joys, however, aren’t solely related to the size of the game, they revolve more around things like tone, style, and theme, all of which seem to have been somewhat disregarded in Starfield’s new expansion.
The similarities between the two titles are apparent, at least at first glance. Morrowind has three great houses battling for supremacy over Vvardenfell and Va’ruun’kai has the same. Where Morrowind succeeds, however, is by making each of its houses distinct – a Telvanni mage living in a mushroom tower is a vastly different character to a Redoran warrior who makes the corpse of a giant crab their home. Meanwhile in Shattered Space, there are a few thematic differences in outlook between House Dul’kehf, House Veth’aal, and House Ka’dic, but by and large they’re interchangeable.
This approach also applies to the larger House Va’ruun, who we finally get to spend time with in the DLC. Morrowind stared fantasy religion square in the face, weaving together a story of faith, hypocrisy, unreliable narrators, prophecy, and the inevitability of fate into something that’s unlike anything else out there. You aren’t trusted and you have to earn your way in a harsh world, with your every achievement feeling earned as a result. Shattered Space on the other hand has you become the chosen one within seconds of arriving in Dazra, and those deep mysteries about House Va’ruun you’ve spent the last year theorizing about collapse as you find out they’re just a bunch of guys worshiping in caves.
There’s plenty of good in Shattered Space but by directly calling out Morrowind as an inspiration, the expectation was set high. Morrowind’s setting, themes, and depth have all been bypassed in favor of emulating its scope, which is welcome but it leaves the expansion feeling a little flavorless as a result. Va’ruun’kai ends up looking more like a more heavily populated Soul Cairn from Skyrim’s Dragonborn expansion, rather than a fully-fledged and believable theocracy in its own right.
We know Bethesda is capable of creating fantastical adventures complete with lashings of meaty themes you can really sink your teeth into – it’s done it before, after all. Shattered Space doesn’t achieve that, and by making the comparison to Morrowind Bethesda shows that it doesn’t quite understand what makes it the developer’s enduring magnum opus, and will have a hard time repeating its highs until it does.