In space, no one can hear you scream.and in starfield (opens in new tab), no one can hear you having sex. The reason is that Australia’s classification committee (opens in new tab)— the agency responsible for evaluating video games and other entertainment media in the country — in that particular darkened space, it’s not possible to have sex.
Starfield is rated R18+ in Australia and is “restricted for adult use due to content that is believed to have a high impact on viewers”. It has been attributed to its existence, and the board has rated it as ‘high impact’, the highest possible rating.
Violence in Starfield is considered “high impact”, which is only enough to warrant an MA15+ rating, while the game’s themes and language are “moderate impact” and “mature”. but means that anyone under the age of 10 can legally access it. 15.
In other words, simulated drug use is somehow worse than blasting a guy’s face with a shotgun while dropping f-bombs over your voice. I wonder.
In terms of sex, however, Starfield is squeaky clean. The Australian government says none. (And drug use. Heavy, heavy drug use.)
Ratings in video games have always been a bit more complicated: you can kill a guy with a brick and probably fall short of a “teen” rating (or its international equivalent), but discovering the wrong skin for a few seconds can lead to major Good retailers don’t win. I can’t even put the game on the shelf.
But even by that standard, Australia has always been a little nasty. was famous. The game’s maximum rating was him MA15+. This is probably due to the outdated impression that the game is for children. Whatever the justification, the end result was that, due to the lack of proper evaluation, anything beyond these guidelines could not be evaluated and was “rejected for classification” and banned.
Australia added an R18+ rated game in 2013. It slowed down the rate of game bans, but it certainly didn’t stop them: The past few years have seen bans on games, including DayZ. (opens in new tab)Disco Elysium (opens in new tab)and Rimworld (opens in new tab)All of these bans were imposed for the same reason Starfield’s R18+ rating (drug use) almost led to Wasteland 3’s ban over the existence of “Rocky Mountain Moongrass”. Developer inXile Entertainment chose to cut grass to avoid that particular fate, and other bans were eventually overturned on appeal as well.
Starfield is currently scheduled to launch on September 6th. We have reached out to Bethesda to confirm that there is no interstellar sex. I will update if I get a reply.
