Starfield Dev Expresses Disappointment at Mostly Negative Player Reviews for Shattered Space DLC. „That Makes Me Sad, Honestly”
Emil Pagliarulo of Bethesda studio spoke on the bad reception of Shattered Space and Starfield's problems. He assured that the developers are working on fixes and aren't deaf to criticism.
Last week's premiere of Starfield: Shattered Space turned out to be a huge disappointment. On Steam, the add-on currently has only 30% positive reviews, which is categorized as a "mostly negative" reception. So the DLC was received much more coldly than the base game, which after all is not a favorite among players (it has 59% positive reviews on Steam). Emil Pagliarulo from Bethesda has now spoken out on the matter.
- Pagliarulo, one of the game's directors, admitted that he and the entire team are saddened by the cold reception Shattered Space.
- At the same time, he assured that the studio is not deaf to criticism from players. Some accused Pagliarulo after his last interview of ignoring the issues raised by the community.
- Bethesda has spent this year preparing, among other things, patches for Starfield and has no intention of abandoning this title. However, as Pagliarulo explains, it's a huge game, so improving it takes a lot of time. Many elements are interconnected, so the devs must be careful not to spoil the rest by changing one of them.
At the same time, Pagliarulo emphasized that if someone liked the basic version of Starfield, they should give Shattered Space a chance, as they will most likely like the add-on. As he stated:
"If people haven't played Shattered Space and like Starfield, I think they're missing out by ignoring this expansion. However, if someone played Shattered Space and didn't like the DLC, then honestly, I'm sad."
Over time, Bethesda will likely fix most of Starfield's technical shortcomings. However, the problem here is also the structure of the entire game - with a ton of empty worlds and repetitive locations. Without developing the virtual universe almost from scratch, there is little chance of a radical change in the game's reception. The costs of such an alteration would be huge, so the chances of it happening are small.
Which of course doesn't mean that without it the game will quickly die. Starfield, despite everything, is still achieving decent activity numbers (daily records are around 10k) on Steam, and yet the base game is also available in Game Pass), and it also has quite an active modding community. There's simply no way it will ever match the popularity of Skyrim or Fallout 4, no matter how much time Bethesda spends fixing it.
