Lack of weird or previously-mentioned elements of Cyrodiil and its capital made many proclaim the developers as sellouts, listing the notorious horse armour among their evidence. How do you deal with that kind of issue? Bethesda, quite smartly, chose to give the project lead of the last dlc to Oblivion more creative freedom, as well as encouraging individual members of the development team to add something cool to the game that they didn't have the ability to add. The variety of enemy types is the result of animators and creature artists being given carte blanche in what they could put in the game. Oblivion already got slapped with a Mature rating, so making gorey and visceral enemies was on the table again, while the original game was trying its best to get a Teen rating. A nude model, hidden within the developer files and inaccessible through gameplay itself, was the official reason for the rating change, but it didn't stop urban legends forming around the real reason being Lucien LaChance's corpse model with how gruesome it looked in comparison to the zombies and other undead you encounter in the game.

With the creative freedoms and less pressure about the content, Shivering Isles was released to universal acclaim and at least in that one moment alone, convinced some of the "betrayed" fans of the older titles that not all is lost and it is still the same old Bethesda that can create engaging and wondrous worlds. I can attest to having at least two conversations with people at the time telling me how the dlc improved their opinion on Bethesda and made them give a second chance to the studio. This trick would be repeated with every other major release of 'Thesda games. Fallout 3 would have The Pitt and Point Lookout, Skyrim had Dragonborn and Fallout 4 would have Far Harbour. Each time it was called a "return to form" by a section of the audience and even with not every single player being impressed, the dlcs allowed Bethesda to retain players who would've dropped their titles ages ago, if not being fed this shred of hope carefully placed by Todd in their mouths.

Shattered Space (jesus did I only start talking about it now?) is no different. For some unknown reason, perhaps the general discourse around Bethesda games - they chose to pander to Morrowind again. You have a weird alien world where you have to learn how the culture and religion of the local people works. You have multiple "noble" houses which work more as conglomerates and focus primarily on one aspect of the local society. You even have quests where instead of markers you have to get your directions from books and dialogues and one of such quests specifically focuses on travelling to the wayshrines of the local religion in order to understand its worshippers better and earn their trust, just like in Morrowind guys! Except it doesn't work because the person who wrote the society and its aspects is a moron. Emil Pagliorulo is the king of cringe-ludo, as I have a hard time trying to imagine a more shallow and corny approach to writing a fundamentalist society.

In the original game, House Va'ruun was an uncommon type of enemy with its members focusing on energy weapons and applying poison with their attacks. All mentions of the Great Serpent, the deity that members of the House worship, came across incredibly bland and with a lack of vision to it. You could've given their "god" any name and it would still come across as ridiculous as it does. Giving a reason to why people living in the age of space exploration would adopt an almost animistic faith is quite hard and Emil didn't even try with the original game. The dlc then would be his chance to prove himself, right?

Any attempts to deeply introspect the faith of House Va'ruun lead to a roadblock where the npcs will shy away from giving you info as you are an outsider. The four pillars of the religion given to us are Strength, Devotion, Obedience and Perseverance. Despite the traits being vague enough to be shared with many religions throughout human history, there is no reasoning given as to why these are the traits and why the "Great Serpent" chose to impart them to his prophet. It comes across as a religion a bunch of kids playing around in a sandpit would create - sounds epic with elements of what they know of real religions, but no serious attempts are made to give any reason to it. Why would people choose to worship this deity? What is the ethical framework of the region? Even something as banal as the planet the original worshippers landed on possessing a hallucinogenic effect or the area they landed on being the only good chunk of the planet's surface are not explored or even brought up. I was actually surprised (one of the few times when playing this) that the origin of the religion remains a mystery. You can find audio logs of the prophet who started the religion and see that he was a normal man before forming the tenets and creating the society that we interact with in the game. Eventually he does end up as a genocidal maniac, who throws away decades of civilisation building and intergalactic relations with other factions to appease the "Great Serpent". So was it schizophrenia, the allure of power or an actual visit from an otherworldly being that corrupted him? Emil doesn't know himself, so he doesn't even try to give us any explanation. Or does he?

In the main game, House Va'ruun was shrouded in mystery and its serpent-based culture seemed to be a genuinely original concept. The few non-hostile members of the faction could encounter would have slavic or finnish names with "z"s and apostrophes thrown in to make it sound like a hiss of a snake. Overall, I couldn't actually tell you what inspired this faction, which I would somewhat congratulate Bethesda on, after years of borrowing historical concepts from America and Europe to buff up their lore and storytelling to actually create a new design of their own, no matter how r-slurred it is. Well, Shattered Space provides a different perspective.

One other thing that surprised me is how the naming conventions and cultural aspects of Va'ruun society are predominantly Arabic in the dlc. Characters being bluntly named the likes of Abbas and Farud, honour being of utmost importance and goats being the main means of sustenance made me think. Was Emil trying to depict Muslims as House Va'ruun? It makes some tiny bit of sense, as perhaps the violent and alien culture willing to enter "crusades" against non-believer factions with its prophet being worshipped in equal measure as the deity itself is how a white middle class American like Emil sees Islam and it's followers.

Ok, interesting point, but what does he make of it? Does he explore the premise of integrating and tolerating violent societies and cultures with the rest world? Does he explore why the faith is so hostile to infidels? Does he propose an alternative to their serpent-worshipping? No, motherlover literally gives us two options:

the Jihad Crusade is great and should continue

or

it is bad and we should focus on the good in our society instead

How the frick do you fumble this? An exploration of an interesting, and some hat taboo topic? Just give the most basic opinions and hope that it is enough? I have no clue when the dlc development started for real, but what I experienced showed a total lack of learning any lessons from the launch of the game and its initial criticisms. Usually that is what these dlcs are for, the last chance to draw you in, and yet I saw the same incompetence as I did a year ago with the launch of Starfield. The dlcs higher up in the post were made roughly 5 months, half a year after the base game. Shattered Space took one whole year and a month to show the same sheltered and self-indulged design philosophy that made Starfield fail on launch. I am aware of the main studio forming a union around middle of the summer to gain some independence from Microsoft and its r-slurred policies, so the dlc development was probably affected by it, but the nonchalant way Bethesda dropped this dlc as a solution to the base game problems is troubling.