Starfield: Shattered Space expansion dropping sooner than we'd thought

You couldn’t be blamed for forgetting that Starfield has an expansion on the way. When the game launched last year, certain editions included access to as-yet unreleased Shattered Space expansion.

The expansion wasn’t elaborated on at the time and it certainly hasn’t been mentioned since. All we know is that it’s in the works and is assumed to be released sometime this year. Well, it looks as if Shattered Space could be releasing a tad sooner than expected. While many of us were anticipating a late 2024 release, there’s some suspicious activity going on within Starfield’s Steam backend that could signify we’re closer to launch than first thought.

Take a look at our review of Starfield below.

As reported by DualShockers, Reddit user salmagros spotted that Starfield’s Steam files were recently updated, with an unnamed app added to the game’s backend. This is almost always a sign of incoming change. In fact, Elden Ring’s backend was updated on SteamDB just a couple of weeks ahead of its Shadow of the Erdtree trailer reveal. I’d love to think that means a Shattered Space trailer is on the way although, of course, we must be cautious with our hope until anything is confirmed by Bethesda.

It’s hard to even theorise over what Shattered Space’s story could be. If I had to guess, I’d speculate that a new mystery may have caught the eye of Constellation requiring our help but then given how the base game’s story escalates, it might be tricky to make that work without messing up the pacing of the base game’s main quests.

It could be an endgame quest. I’m somewhat hoping it isn’t. Warning, endgame spoilers lie ahead. If you truly want to ‘complete’ Starfield, you’ll know that you’ll need to step inside The Unity. This automatically begins a New Game+, completely resetting your progress in the game’s open world. Due to that, I hesitated to step through it myself, instead choosing to leave my save open given how much work stepping inside would undo. I very much hope Shattered Space doesn’t compromise that.

If we don’t get an update sooner, hopefully this summer’s annual Xbox Showcase will provide answers.