Starfield has received a Restricted R-18 rating in Australia, with some very strange and unexpected connotations around it.
In their classification guide, the item with the highest impact is its depiction of drug use, followed by violence. The game’s themes, and language are lower priorities. At the bottom of these items are sex and nudity, which all but confirms that Starfield won’t have either.
As reported by The Gamer, this is not unusual for Bethesda, who have received Restricted ratings for their other games also because of its depiction of drug use.
For example, The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim has skooma, a fictional potion that is straight up depicted like a narcotic. Characters who imbibe skooma will experience brief euphoria, followed by extended periods of tiredness and weakness. Skooma is also smoked, and made with fatally dangerous ingredients. Even if it is completely fictional, Bethesda did not leave a lot to the imagination as to what skooma is supposed to be.
Fallout is even bolder in its depiction, as drugs are straight up referred to as chems. In this universe, chems have effects very similar to modern day illegal substances, like painkillers and performance enhancing drugs. In the fiction of Fallout, they are straight up build by pharmaceuticals after their society had fallen to the point that no laws control their usage. The newer nations that have emerged also seek to control chem use, as a mirror and parody of how we experience them in the real world.
Now, what is interesting is that Starfield’s rating is higher and harsher than what these earlier games received. Does this mean that Starfield takes things further with their depiction of illegal or restricted drugs? Or is this a matter of a conservative regulator getting even more conservative than in previous years?
It certainly raises a lot of questions as other similar space exploration games, including those with scope as ambitious as Starfield, are not particularly known for their focus on illegal drugs.
Let’s look at those games and their ratings. The Outer Worlds, from Obsidian Entertainment and Private Division, received a Restricted MA 15+ rating, with its themes and violence having the strongest impact. There are illegal drugs in The Outer Worlds, but Australia’s rating considers it to have a mild impact.
No Man’s Sky from Hello Games received a PG rating. In this case, themes and violence had the strongest impact to the rating, but they were only rated to have a mild impact. No Man’s Sky has a marijuana analogue that has proven so popular real potheads have formed a community in the game around it.
So we had no idea that something like this could even be in the game, but it seems that there’s something unusual about the drug use in Starfield.
Starfield will be released on September 6, 2023, on Xbox Series X|S and Windows via Steam. It is also Day One on Game Pass.