Starfield Dev Explained How Shattered Space's World Was Created

Starfield's expansion Shattered Space, a "multi-hour mystery that will take you into the long-lost heart of Va'Ruun culture," was released yesterday. The DLC further expands the vast space universe of the base game but with the alternate techniques of a hand-crafted world.

In a recent interview, Emil Pagliarulo, Design Director, said: "We knew very early on that we needed to add an explorable landmass with lots of hand-crafted content." This approach differs from the base game's procedural content. "Knowing that content is contained to a single, large landmass means players can explore like they used to in Fallout and Skyrim," added Pagliarulo.

According to the developer, the objective was to make players feel like they were stumbling upon surprises, for instance, a "specific story," left by the game's developers. "The vibe is very different between random, procedurally generated content and bespoke goodness. And while there's definitely some procedural, repeatable content in Shattered Space, this is a DLC dedicated to bespoke goodness," explained Emil Pagliarulo.

Shattered Space reveals some details about the mysterious Va'Ruun that are not covered in the base game. Pagliarulo shared that since the time when this faction was created, the developers "went wide" into their background but didn't go into specifics. "We knew House Va'ruun was the most "alien" of all the human factions in the Settled Systems. We knew they were isolationists, weird sort of Lovecraftian cultists, in a sense," he explained.

Recently, Bethesda's Head Todd Howard shared how the team developed the games with such extensive worlds and why they were so "irresponsibly large."

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