Is Starfield's most famous House Va'ruun member worth bringing with you to start Shattered Space? Kinda, unless you run into a bug that makes her lose her voice
It's ok, some people just find it a bit awkward running into folks they probably went to school with.
Warning: Minor spoilers for the opening few missions of Starfield Shattered Space lie ahead.
Starfield's Shattered Space DLC arrived yesterday, and there's a good chance you've already started it, or binged it in one night if you're nonplussed about sleep. While I haven't done the latter, I did bring along the one base game companion that has a connection to House Va'ruun for the bits I've played so far. Should you bring her along too? Well, kinda, and you seemigly might end up running into a bug that makes it totally pointless.
Andreja's the companion I'm talking about here, since her whole thing is that she's Constellation's resident House Va'ruuner and would surely be a good candidate to bring back home to Va'ruun'kai, right? After all, it is her home planet, and if you've ended up good mates with her like my main Starfield character has, she'll probably be a part of your crew anyway.
I'll start with the good news. I can confirm that if you do bring Andreja along - which I'm hardly the only person to have decided to do - she does have a decent amount of unique chatter in the early stages of you arriving in House Va'ruun's system and starting to explore their capital city, Dazra.
She'll interject comments into a couple of conversations, say a couple of things as you explore Dazra, and have a little chat with you not long after you arrive about how she feels returning to the city and seeing its current predicament. What I'm about to say will probably be no surpise to Starfield veterans, but while she does provide some nice extra perspective about House Va'ruun, none of this actually seems to substantively change how these events and quests near the beginning of the DLC play out. If you turn up alone, as I also did, you won't see much of a difference.
While this is a bit disappointing, some players are reporting having a much worse time of it after bringing Andreja along, taking to Reddit to voice how strange they find it that in her playthroughs, she hasn't said anything unique at all. Folks seem to reckon this is due to a bug of some kind making the bits of dialogue I mentioned not trigger for some reason, with one post suggesting a long-running issue with the leadership perk or items/consumables that boost how quickly you gain companion afinity is to blame.
Luckily, it looks like modder Deebz96 has already identified the fresh instances of this issue affecting Andreja, which looks to be caused by a simple tweak to the companion's actor value check code, and submitted a fix for it to the Starfield Community Patch project.
How are you finding Starfield's Shattered Space DLC so far? Let us know below!