Starfield’s Shattered Space Will Indicate How Much Bethesda Wants To Keep Investing In It

Today marks the release of Starfield: Shattered Space, the first major expansion for the game delivered, impressively, almost exactly one year after the game launched. While QoL updates and fixes have been added to Starfield before this, this is a giant batch of new, handcrafted content which will depart from the traditional model of the game’s 1000 scattered planets, focusing on one world in particular with minimal, if any, procedural elements.

Shattered Space may also serve as a bellwether for how much Bethesda wants to keep investing in Starfield given pressure from Microsoft to deliver more games more quickly, including the upcoming Elder Scrolls 6 which was announced a full six years ago now, which is hard to believe. But Todd Howard has in fact that Starfield is a long-term project for them:

"It's intentionally made to be played for a long time," said Todd Howard at release in 2023. "It's one of things we've learned from our previous games. Skyrim, from Fallout, that people want to play them for a very long time. So Starfield, I would say, was the most intentional going into it. This is a game people are going to play for a long time."

But will this pan out? It’s true that Starfield did sell a lot of “bundled” packages at launch, especially a few million Xbox, where the game was touted as “Bethesda’s largest launch ever” but again, it was on Game Pass for “free” for millions of players. Longer term, it was less well-received than most of the last few major entries in big series from Bethesda, like Fallout and Skyrim, the ones Howard mentions. This isn’t to say Starfield is some big failure, but the longer term prospects for it remain to be seen when Bethesda has so much else to work on.

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Starfield is currently peaking below Fallout 4 on Steam, which experienced a surge in the wake of the Amazon show. Starfield had a peak of 14,000 players, the day before expansion launch, and Fallout 4 is doing 20,000 a night. Obviously Starfield will surge today, but that’s…still significant that it’s behind a game from 2015.

If we’re using Fallout 4 as an example for long-term “plans” for Starfield, that game had three workshop updates, the robot builder/story addition Automatron, and two large expansions, Far Harbor, which Shattered Space has been compared to, and Nuka-World.

My guess is that even with some issues, Starfield will probably get out a second large expansion at the very least. It has had minimal base/ship “workshop” updates since launch, and this expansion appears to not be focusing on that at all, and may have really nothing to do with the spacefaring aspect of the game.

But again, things are different now. Bethesda is under Microsoft’s umbrella who is desperate for high quality games, and probably what’s going to be eight years between Elder Scrolls 6 being announced and release is not something they want to see repeated. Supposedly the next project after that is Fallout 5, and Microsoft may want all hands on deck to finish ES6 and start that. We’ll see.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.