Starfield’s First Big DLC Looks Weird And Wild

Starfield, Bethesda’s latest open-world busywork simulator in space, has been out for about nine months. Bethesda has been putting out updates to make the game better, but fans have been waiting for the first big expansion called Shattered Space. Well, they won’t have to wait much longer, as the company put out a new trailer and confirmed a 2024 release date during today’s Xbox showcase.

Check out the trailer here:

If you’re interested in the DLC, it comes as part of Starfield’s Premium Edition, which you can upgrade to for $34.99 if you’ve already bought the base game. That also comes with some digital doodads, like skins for your character and digital copies of the artbook and soundtrack. If that’s not of any interest to you, it’s probably worth just buying Shattered Space separately to save some cash.

Also announced during the event was new free content coming to Starfield today as part of a larger update adds community-made content, too.

Shattered Space is the first of an unknown number of planned DLCs for Starfield. The reason we know that there’s more than one is because Shattered Space was labeled as the “first story expansion” in promotional material, implying that there will be at least a second at some point. Who knows? There could even be a third if Bethesda’s feeling spicy.

While Shattered Space seems like a substantial addition to the game’s world and narrative, it sounds like Bethesda plans to support Starfield in the coming months beyond just adding paid chunks of story. Todd Howard, the game’s director, said in an interview with IGN that it plans to look at its support for games like Fallout 4 and Skyrim as a frame of reference.

“Our plan is to do things of varying sizes, and we’ve done a lot of that in our previous games, so it’s something that we really like doing, our fans like,” Howard told IGN back in June. “So despite the size of the game, there’s still things we want to add as far as features in the future or stories and things like that.”

Will that be enough to keep people playing Starfield for a decade like Xbox’s Phil Spencer wants? Time will tell. For more on Starfield, check out Kotaku’s review.