Bethesda has insisted it’s committed to supporting Starfield, and confirmed at least one other story expansion will release following this year’s Shattered Space.
In an interview with YouTube channel MrMattyPlays, Bethesda Game Studios’ Todd Howard said the developer is aiming to release an annual story expansion for “hopefully a very long time.”
Sci-fi RPG Starfield launched in September 2023 as Bethesda’s first brand new intellectual property in years, and its first mainline single-player game since Microsoft bought parent company ZeniMax Media in March 2021. IGN’s Starfield review returned a 7/10. We said: “Starfield has a lot of forces working against it, but eventually the allure of its expansive roleplaying quests and respectable combat make its gravitational pull difficult to resist.”
Howard said Starfield has now seen 14 million players following its launch on PC, Xbox Series X and S and straight into Xbox subscription service Game Pass, although Bethesda has yet to announce a sales figure. The game’s first story expansion, Shattered Space, launches later in 2024, with its debut trailer revealed during Microsoft’s recent Xbox Games Showcase event.
During the interview, MrMattyPlays asked Howard if it is Bethesda’s intention to continue to release annual story expansions for Starfield. Howard replied: “More or less, yeah. How long that continues, hopefully a very long time, but we're planning for the one after this, so there will be another one.”
As for Shattered Space itself, Howard revealed interesting details about its size and scope, likening it to the well-received Fallout 4 DLC Far Harbor.
“One of the things we always liked about it from the get-go, but I don’t think people realize, is Shattered Space, the bulk of that expansion pack, once you get to the city and the planet, it takes place there. It allows us to build a landscape like we would traditionally do and have the city and the quest. And so that story takes place there.
“Content wise, we're looking at what we did with Far Harbor on Fallout 4. This is a scope that works for our development in doing this annual story expansion type of thing. So really excited about that, and it lets us 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 and it takes place there.”
One common criticism of Starfield is that exploration is spread too thin across a thousand planets, many of which were deemed barren as a result of procedural generation. This is in contrast to previous Bethesda games in the Elder Scrolls and Fallout series, which are set in focused areas filled with hand-crafted cities and other points of interest.
Howard said Shattered Space, which sounds like a more traditional Bethesda experience, is not necessarily a response to that criticism, but the studio’s internal reaction to the game it had made. “It wasn't a reaction,” Howard insisted. “It was our own reaction that we had as well.”
It’s a busy time for the 450-person Bethesda Game Studios, which currently operates five teams: Starfield; Elder Scrolls 6; Fallout 76; mobile; and external development partnerships. It’s working on the aforementioned Elder Scrolls 6, ongoing content for Fallout 76, various mobile games, updates for older games, and, eventually, the next Fallout.
But will Starfield see a sequel? If it does materialize it may be some time before we see anything of it, with Elder Scrolls 6 expected no earlier than 2028 and another Fallout game set to follow.
Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
