Starfield's Shattered Space expansion addresses one of the game's biggest criticisms

Starfield is on track to receive annual story expansions, with the first of two currently in development on track for a 2024 release. The Shattered Space expansion focuses on the mysterious House Va'ruun, the Great Serpent, and a story that will take players to a new location in the "dark reaches of space."

As a new RPG from Bethesda Game Studios, the team behind Skyrim, Fallout 4, and other classic titles, the response to Starfield has been divisive among Bethesda fans - with any criticizing how different the game feels compared to Elder Scrolls or Fallout.

One of the biggest criticisms of Starfield surrounds how the game handles exploration. Instead of Skyrim's meticulously hand-crafted open worlds, you've got countless procedurally generated planets with a handful of randomly generated points of interest repeating. With a loading screen every few minutes.

Fans of classic Bethesda Game Studios RPGs will be pleased to learn that Shattered Space will see the studio dipping into its past to deliver a hand-crafted experience. According to studio head and Starfield game director Todd Howard, Shattered Space's design is similar to Fallout 4's excellent Far Harbor expansion, with a single detailed open-world location/planet to explore.

"The bulk of that expansion pack, once you get to the city and the planet, it takes place there," Howard said in a recent interview with YouTube creator MrMattyPlays. "It allows us to build a landscape like we would traditionally do and have a city and the quest."

"Content-wise, we're looking at what we did with Far Harbor on Fallout 4," Howard adds. "This scope works for our development and annual story expansions, so we're really excited about that. It lets us kind of do some things the way we would in previous games and give people not completely that experience because it's still Starfield, but this new kind of alien world that you're able to explore."