I might not have noticed how weirdly asexual Starfield is if I hadn’t been coming in straight from a very thirsty game: Baldur’s Gate 3.
As we move into the last part of the year, we’re going to have a lot to say about how absolutely packed 2023 was, on every level, in just about every genre. RPGs are no particular exception. With Baldur’s Gate 3 and Starfield in particular, they neatly make up both the high and low ends of the AAA video game thirstiness spectrum.
To be fair, every time I play Starfield I somehow end up with an entire inventory full of boxed wine and bourbon. If nothing else, micro-brewing is alive and well in the Settled Systems. What passes for the rest of its civilization, however, looks like a high-concept shopping mall.
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New Atlantis is all kiosks and storefronts, with a single high-end restaurant and a coffee shop. Even in the slums, most people seem to hang out in the diner. It’s not until you reach the mining settlement on Cydonia that you see a dedicated bar, and you don’t find anyplace where someone seems to be having fun until you reach Neon. Maybe that’s why everyone drinks.
In retrospect, it makes sense. Part of the reason why Starfield starts at all is because, as Sarah Morgan explains to you, the Settled Systems have, uh, settled. There’s no taste for adventure left in its culture, so everyone appears content to hang out in a Skymall catalog for the rest of their natural lives. New Atlantis is boring and safe because it’s the capital of a society that’s decided that’s what it wants to be right now. We have seen the future, and it’s the suburbs.
Meanwhile, over in Baldur’s Gate 3, every time I select “long rest” it’s the latest chapter in an evolving love rhombus. It’s as messy and bloody as Starfield is clean and bloodless, and packed to bursting with hot singles in my area. You can go 30 hours or more without seeing the actual city of Baldur’s Gate, but maybe one without picking up a new potential love interest.
Out of pure scientific curiosity, I rolled up a barbarian to see if anyone in Baldur’s Gate 3 would react at all to my character always being naked. They do not. You can run the whole game like you’re the tactical strike team for a nudist colony and while that’s not tactically sound unless you respec everyone into barbarian/monk/sorcerer, nobody will bat an eyelash. In a game that otherwise seems to have taken every potential player decision into account, BG3 failing to react to my full-frontal attack suggests that in the mystical landscape of the Forgotten Realms, bare-assed adventurers are common as crabgrass.
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Seriously. It almost stopped being fun after a while.
This all compounds to make Baldur’s Gate 3 feel like playing Dungeons and Dragons with the weird kids. It’s the product of that one Dungeon Master you heard of in passing who actually tried to run a campaign with stuff he found in the Book of Erotic Fantasy, and more impressively, found players who were willing to humor him. Seducing your party members isn’t actually the whole point of BG3, but especially around launch, when it was glitched to be much easier than it should’ve been, the romance options got all the attention. Go figure.
Comparatively, Starfield’s romance options all feel like an episode of “Leave It to Beaver.” You’ll see some good writing in the process of pursuing your companions’ hands in marriage, but it’s all surprisingly tame. More importantly, it would still seem that way even if I wasn’t comparing it to BG3, where my character only just barely survived her first night encounter with Lae’zel and may eventually get the option to bang a bear. There’s a certain subdued feeling to virtually every human emotion that’s felt or expressed in Starfield, up to and including violence, and even its romantic encounters come off like a business deal.
My point isn’t that Starfield would be improved if it had more explicit nudity. Some games would be, but that’s not where I’m going with this. It’s more that Starfield’s themes of repression and stasis are much more deeply woven into its narrative than was perhaps intended, and that simultaneously, BG3 has raised the bar for video game relationship options, if only by letting the player get enthusiastically weird with them. It’s just Starfield’s rotten luck that it came out right after BG3. It’s like Bubsy 3D vs. Super Mario 64 for dating sims.
