Starfield got its first official rating this week with the game earning the “Restricted” rating from the Australian Classification Board. According to the breakdown of why the game got that rating, it received it primarily because of a drug use in the game which the board said made a “high impact” on the content rating. No other details about the game were revealed by way of content descriptions or anything like that which we see often from the Entertainment Software Ratings Board, but it’s interesting to take note of how this game’s ratings differs from others like it.
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The rating seen here really only takes issue with the drug use in the game. Violence, another category of consideration when determining the rating in Australia, received a “strong impact” mark as opposed to “high impact.” Everything else including themes, language, and nudity continues downward beyond that with the board also noting that there’s no sex in the game.
Compared this to some of the other ratings Bethesda’s games have gotten and you’ll see that the board is taking a bit of a harder stance on this game in particular. Both Fallout 4 and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, for example, got the “Mature” rating which limited the games to those ages 15 and up. Australia’s ratings board is one typically know for issuing somewhat higher ratings to games especially where drug use is concerned, for context, but it still makes one wonder what Starfield’s got going on with it in that area considering how games like the Fallout and Elder Scrolls series employ drugs like Jet, Skooma, and more as beneficial yet potentially harmful resources for players to use.
Other ratings will naturally follow this first one now that the game’s gotten a September release date, so we’ll hopefully learn a bit more about it soon as those surface. The ESRB’s system typically allots games a content summary, too, where specific examples of content warnings are cited, so we usually are able to get a better understanding of why games are rated the way they are from things like that.
Starfield will be out for the Xbox Series X|S and PC platforms on September 6th.
