Todd Howard Wondered if Starfield Should Have Delayed Buggies for Shattered Space

Shattered Space hasn’t fared terribly well among fans since releasing back in September, sitting at a Mostly Negative rating among fans on Steam. Most of the comments center around the quest’s story, though there’s plenty of broader criticism for Starfield itself. But Todd Howard seems to have his own theory on why Shattered Space might not have gone down as well as it should have.

In an interview with the Game File newsletter, Phil Spencer said “we’re always learning” when talking about how to approach expansions, and mentioned a conversation he had with Howard about the release cadence for content. Howard focused in on the buggy, which was surprise released during Gamescom Opening Night Live ahead of the expansion.

“Todd and I were talking about Shattered Space. Starfield is a game I put a ton of hours into and really love, but they’ve had this thing where they’ve added features throughout the year and then they had an expansion,” Spencer said. “I think some of the feedback on the expansion is: ‘We wanted more features.’ And he’s like, ‘Well, should we have waited to put buggies out?'”

He continued, “And so, I think you’re trying to tune both development effort and the impact of the expansion. And I think there will always be a balance to managing the game month to month. But not every game will do expansions.”

Ultimately, though, Shattered Space was criticized more for its lack of space content than its lack of ground content. We wrote in our review, “As far as I can tell there’s absolutely nothing added for spacefarers other than now you have a way to legitimately acquire Va’ruun ships instead of stealing them from Zealots who attack you in space. That’s fine, as an expansion doesn’t always have to meaningfully expand every aspect of a game – but I was surprised that there wasn’t at least a token feature thrown in for space jockeys in an expansion with ‘space’ in the title.”

As for Spencer, he shares various other thoughts about Xbox’s game lineup in the interview, including some of the biggest surprises (Blizzard and South of Midnight among them) and Avowed’s release timing. Xbox also launched a new marketing campaign today called “This is Xbox,” which highlighted various items that may or may not be an Xbox.

Kat Bailey is IGN’s News Director as well as co-host of Nintendo Voice Chat. Have a tip? Send her a DM at @the_katbot.