New Starfield Deep-Dive Reveals How Shattered Space DLC Will Finally Fix The Game's Biggest Combat Flaw

Starfield's Shattered Space DLC might fix the biggest issue with the base game's combat. Due for release on September 30, 2024, Shattered Space will be the first DLC for Starfield. It's expected to address many of the game's biggest flaws, including the lack of handcrafted environments and the unsolved mysteries of House Va'ruun. However, these could all be minor tweaks in comparison to Starfield's biggest combat change.

According to Bethesda Softworks' recently released Shattered Space Deep Dive, melee combat could be getting a total revamp in the upcoming Starfield DLC. The Deep Dive consists of a ten-minute YouTube video in which lead creative producer Tim Lamb and other devs narrate footage of the DLC, explaining some of the new creatures, game mechanics, and story elements to be introduced in Shattered Space. It's easily missed, but during a portion of the video focused on combat, the phrase, "In the base game, there was a lot of focus around ranged gun combat...In Shattered Space, we're closing that distance."

This phrase is accompanied by footage of a character lunging forward with a sword in hand - but the video quickly cuts to a segment regarding Shattered Space's horror elements before anyone can expound. Even so, the implication is clear: Shattered Space will seemingly have a greater focus on melee combat, but exactly what that looks like remains to be seen. Even so, it's an exciting development, as a full melee revamp is one of the things Starfield's base game arguably needed most.

Why Shattered Space's Revamped Melee Combat Is A Big Deal

Starfield Needs A Melee Shakeup

Despite the presence of some more-than-decent melee weapons in Starfield, the game's approach to close-quarters combat is in need of a serious shakeup. Melee is overly simplistic in Starfield. Bethesda RPGs have never been known for complicated systems of melee combat; even relatively melee-focused games like Skyrim are limited to simple mechanics like multidirectional slashes and blocking. Melee combat works much the same in Starfield as it did back in Skyrim, making it feel both basic and outdated. As the Deep Dive video admits, there's definitely more of a focus on gunplay in Starfield.

Moreover, melee combat is pretty unbalanced in the base game, making it much harder to create a viable build that relies entirely on close-quarters combat. It was only just recently that Starfield added tiers to its melee weapons, a day-one inclusion for its procedurally generated guns. In short, players could always find multiple variants of each unique ranged weapon: regular, Calibrated, Refined, or Advanced. Each of these would successively level up the weapon's stats, and players would be more likely to find higher-tier guns at higher levels, allowing their preferred weapons to effectively scale with their levels throughout the game.

Such tiers were previously unavailable for melee weapons, which could only be found as-is. As of Starfield's June update, though, melee weapons got three tiers of their own: Sharpened, Honed, and Quantum-Edged. This makes them much more viable at higher levels, allowing players to select a preferred melee weapon and find gradually improved variants of it throughout an entire campaign. Between this and the addition of melee weapon mods, close-quarters combat has become a lot more interesting since launch.

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Even so, melee builds are still pretty imbalanced against ranged enemies. It's an issue of defense: melee players inevitably have to run up to enemies in order to deal damage to them, but are often riddled with bullets before they even get there. New defensive options would also be welcome, allowing players to close distances in relative safety.

Shattered Space's melee updates could take several forms: they could consist of new skills and mods to make melee fighting more viable, new weapons with their own unique fighting styles, or simple balance changes to ensure melee fighters aren't always outpaced. Whatever the case, they'll certainly make Starfield's character builds more flexible, and could go a long way towards solving its biggest combat flaw.