Starfield romance options: relationships and romance explained

What are your romance options in Starfield? Ever since the golden age of Mass Effect, it's seemed like par for the course that all massive open-world action RPGs have at least a couple of steamy romance options. Starfield is no exception, with four of your companions confirmed by Bethesda as being potential love interests for the player character.

In this guide, we'll answer all the big questions around romance and relationships in Starfield, including all your romance options, how romance actually works, and whether there is any sex or nudity in Starfield.

Starfield romance options: Who can you romance?

As stated in Starfield Direct, there are four confirmed romance options in Starfield, all of them members of Constellation. Here are all of the characters you can romance in Starfield:

• Sarah Morgan (she/her)
• Sam Coe (he/him)
• Barrett (he/him)
• ???

We don't yet know the identity of the fourth romanceable character in Starfield, although we do know that they are another member of Constellation. It would be unusual for an RPG to have only one romance option be a female character, so we suspect the fourth romance option in Starfield may be Noel, a gifted scientist and protege of Constellation's leader, Sarah Morgan. However, it's as yet unconfirmed whether Noel or someone else is the final romanceable character you can meet in Starfield.

How does romance work in Starfield?

It's unclear so far exactly how the romance system works in Starfield, so there are many questions that remain unanswered. We expect there to be some sort of affinity or opinion system which allows you to gain a character's trust and later their love. Each of the four romance options is also likely to have specific side-quests which will allow you to advance their own personal stories further, and solidify your relationship with them.

Bethesda's director Todd Howard has said that the relationships you can forge with the four romance options in Starfield are more complex than in their previous games. In an interview with Lex Fridman, Howard said the following about Starfield's romance options:

"We have a number of companions, but four of them we go... I won't say super-complex romantic, but more complex relationships than we've had, in terms of not just some state of they like you or don't like you, but they can be in love with you, and dislike something you did and be pissed at you temporarily, and then come back to loving you. [...] Previous stuff, you just work your way up, they like you more and more and more and more, and now you're in a relationship. And when you make them upset you drift out of it like it never happened.We wanted one where we can be in a relationship and we've committed to each other in some way, but I just did something that really made you angry. And as opposed to just drifting out of that status you're in a temporary 'I don't like what you did' state."

However, Howard then went on to say that he doesn't want to "oversell" this idea of temporary complications in Starfield's relationships, which leads us to assume that these moments of complexity may only arise once or twice at specific prescripted story beats per romanceable character. Still, it's a small step further than many other games take the idea of romance and relationships.

Will there be nudity and sex scenes in Starfield?

There will be no on-screen sex in Starfield. The game received an 18+ overall rating from the Australian Classification board, with the "Sex" category given a rating of "None", and the "Nudity" category given a rating of "Very mild impact". So it seems that you can invite a romanceable character to your bed, but then there is a cut and the next scene is post- rather than mid-coital.

So, quite unlike the recently released Baldur's Gate 3 romance scenes, things won't get too heated when it comes to romance with your favourite Starfield characters. Having said that, according to the ESRB rating summary there is some "suggestive material in the dialogue, and after sharing a bed with characters". For example:

• "Life is a sexually transmitted disease that's a hundred percent fatal."
• "I'm all for getting a little wild, but next time let's try it without the jetpacks"
• "Talk about seeing stars, whew… that was amazing."

Saucy.

That concludes this primer on how to romance characters in Starfield. Aside from girding your loins in preparation for some mild "suggestive material", you may also want to gird your PC for the task of running Bethesda's demanding new RPG with our Starfield PC requirements guide.