Ship customization
If you’re more interested in the space parts of Starfield rather than all the talking, you’ll want to learn more about Starfield ship customization
Starfield dialogue lets you talk to the characters you meet and can let you persuade them with a mini game similar to the Oblivion system. It uses limited turns to score points using answers weighted with different points. This is a separate, distinct part of an NPC interaction that you can opt into during normal dialogue, usually when you need to win people so they do something for you.
I’ve got everything we currently know about Starfield dialogue system here, and how persuasion works.
How Starfield dialogue and persuasion works
The Starfield dialogue system is a more classic Bethesda-style set up according to Todd Howard, and from what we’ve seen it certainly looks like a reworked version of the classic Oblivion system – players are presented with a list of choices, while you can look at facial expressions to judge mood and responses to your attempts so far.
In Oblivion that involved trying to get the biggest wedges of a circle on the ‘good’ faces and the smaller wedges on the bad. Those pie slices effectively represented a score and you wanted high points on best reaction and low points on the worst ones. Because each choice rotated the circle you had to think ahead to try and score well and avoid making people hate you more.
In Starfield we’ve seen a few examples of it in action. In particular when speaking to what appears to be a space pirate who has boarded the player’s ship. The initial options are as follows:
- Persuade the NPC by saying there’s no treasure aboard [Persuade]
- Attack the NPC to try and defeat the whole crew [Attack]
- Agree to disagree.
Skills
Having the right Starfield skills might also really help you out during dialogue and persuasion attempts, so learn about those here!
If the player opts for the [Persuade] option the conversation switches to the persuasion minigame where you have three turns to score enough points to ‘win’ the conversation.
From what we can see, all the persuasion dialogue minigames include a ‘persuasion bar’ you need to fill, and answers with both a point value and a traffic light danger rating – green options appears to indicate safe and usually low scoring responses (+1 point), while red marks riskier but higher scoring options (+5 points).
By the looks of things here the difficulty of the challenge will be dictated by the size of the persuasion bar you have to fill. Hitting three or four points won’t be hard, but managing 12, as in the shot above, would require you landing three four point answers – effectively a ‘perfect’ conversation. Although as you can see, if you chose the Cyber Runner option from the Starfield backgrounds and starting skills you would have an advantage.
This might mean there’s a surprising amount of strategy involved in Starfield’s dialogue system, but there’s no doubt that your character’s Starfield traits and their background will affect things – we did also notice an Auto-Persuade button featuring in the clip though, so you might be able to skip through your persuasion attempts.
There’s a lot of Starfield dialogue
We know Starfield is big, with the main quest lasting approximately 30 to 40 hours – but Game Director Todd Howard revealed in a Q&A video that there are over 250,000 lines of dialogue, well over double the number of lines in Fallout 4, and more than quadruple the number in Skyrim!
Lead Quest Designer Will Shen says, in this ‘Into the Starfield’ episode on YouTube, that the designers didn’t want the dialogue system to be one “where there was definitely the right thing to say”. The resulting system has drawn inspiration from The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion (more on that below) and early glimpses indicate Starfield’s dialogue will be comparable to other Bethesda games as you try to pick options to win people over or glean more information.
