The time between a game having its release date announced and actually coming out is always a strange period. Studios are wary of overhyping expectations, so they tend to sit on their hands until just before launch. There’s a trailer with the release date, then very little else until a couple of weeks before it finally comes out, or a dedicated showcase. That’s what’s happening with Starfield. But fans don’t play ball - they’re desperate to know every inch of a game before they’ve even got their hands on it, and have all sorts of methods to help. That’s how we know there’s no sex in Starfield.
Starfield having its release date locked in might be a major step for fans, but for retailers, it’s merely a formality. Bethesda now has to get the game approved for sale in each territory, begin manufacturing physical copies, process online frameworks for digital downloads across multiple storefronts, and arrange the logistics behind shipping crate loads of the game around the world. Fans have been keeping a keen eye on this, salivating over any potential information that bleeds through the cracks, and what they’ve been told is they can’t f***. There’s no f***ing in Starfield. Space is a f***-free zone.
The game has been classified as 18+ in Australia, but that’s in line with the country’s rating board typically taking a hardline stance on drug use. This is likely a version of Fallout’s health stims or Skyrim’s stamina-restoring skooma rather than a Disco Elysium-style hallucinogenic bender being on offer. In the rating description, the board said the game had “mild impact” nudity, which means there may be some suggestive skin, but it’s unlikely that intimacy is anything more than a kiss, if that.
This is a major problem with modern media, and I’m not sure why. For all people like to talk about ‘you couldn’t have gotten away with this ten years ago!’, the ‘this’ almost always refers to racism. Modern media is more violent, more foul mouthed, and features more diverse characters than ever before. The only place we have really gone backwards is sex.
Marvel is the biggest media machine around right now, and there’s no sex or even much intimacy in any of them. We see love at times, like Wanda and Vision (or just the existence of a wife or children), but rarely any physical expression of that love. These are the perfect specimens, running around in intense, world-ending situations, hard and sweaty bodies pumped full of adrenaline and packed into tight lycra. And no one ever has sex. I’m not asking for a 15 minute long hardcore scene, just some acknowledgement that these characters sleep together because they’re real human beings. The Boys is a parody, and it does far better at tapping into this core part of the human experience.
After having the edges sanded off our media for so long, some have grown used to it and even encouraged returning to the days of the Hays Code which banned profanity, nudity, and sex from the ‘30s to the ‘60s. While Game of Thrones is credited with the invention of sexposition, where exposition is delivered via sex scenes, it’s during intimate contact that we learn so much about our characters. People asking for sex to be stripped back, or even eliminated completely, from modern movies and television show a lack of understanding of what the scenes offer, and reveal their own slightly warped relationship with media.
When Penn Badgely revealed he’d no longer be having on screen sex, some greeted him with applause for staying faithful to his partner, and even revealed sex scenes made them uncomfortable because the characters didn’t consent. It’s an odd, parasocial blurring of the lines where the characters are real people with real feelings and real boundaries, but can never be truly real because they also can’t upset us in any way. You don’t need to have sex to be sexual - Marilyn Monroe worked entirely through the Hays Code period - but modern media isn’t skirting the rules in clever, rebellious ways. It’s just a prude.
I admit, I don’t think sex is foundational to Starfield. I’m looking forward to seeing Bethesda’s big swing at a new IP, the space setting is intriguing, and what we know of the story has drawn me in. This isn’t a dealbreaker. But when I think of my many Mass Effect playthroughs, I define them by my romance options. It’s not that Mass Effect’s sex scenes are all that graphic - Trainor in the shower is closest, and undercut by the fact we’re fully clothed - but it’s that the intimacy is a key part of the journey. It’s of huge narrative importance when it comes to Jack or Thane too, while Peebee’s is the most artfully shot.
To offer up a game that lets you go anywhere in the galaxy and be whoever you want to be, tell you your choices matter, then put up a big sign that reads ‘No F***ing’ feels to go against the spirit of the game and relegates sex to a scandalous and extreme act, not as a regular and vital part of what it means to be alive. Starfield doesn’t have sex, but that’s not the issue. The problem is no media does anymore.