During a recent interview, Todd Howard gave some details about the Starfield dialogue system that points towards the return of persuasion, a common conversation tool of Fallout and The Elder Scrolls games. The Elder Scrolls and Fallout fans continue to benefit from dialogue systems in their respective franchises, but Starfield looks to evolve the formula in a key way.
Conversations have played a prominent role in many Bethesda Softworks games over the years, with Luck and Charisma attributes often playing a role in getting more beneficial results. Based on some Starfield screenshots shared alongside an internal Todd Howard interview, this may continue to be the case with the big next-gen Bethesda RPG. In a YouTube video posted to the Bethesda Softworks channel, Howard went further in-depth on multiple Starfield features, including the aforementioned dialogue system.
Taking some questions from Reddit, Discord, and Twitter, Bethesda Softworks Community Director Jess Finster sat down with Howard to reveal some details about the anticipated Starfield. When asked about speech checks in prior Bethesda games and the dialogue options, Howard took a moment to focus on the return of persuasion, which has been changed to use points in a mini-game to dictate the success of convincing an NPC of something. Like in Skyrim or Fallout, players will walk up to a Starfield NPC to initiate a chat sequence with them, selecting one of 3 or 4 options in a menu that looks more like Fallout New Vegas than the controversial Fallout 4 system.
According to Todd Howard, Starfield is going "back to a classic Bethesda-style dialogue," with emotive characters speaking a few of over 250,000 lines of dialogue which dwarf that of the other major franchises. The video interview continues with a graph that highlights a comparison with Skyrim which only had 60,000 lines of dialogue and Fallout 4 at a heftier 111,000. This means that combining the conversations from Skyrim and Fallout 4 would still pale in comparison to the available options in the latest RPG from Bethesda.
Although many Bethesda fans anticipating the next big RPG from the studio are enthusiastic about the dialogue teaser and the hint at a changed persuasion system, others on social media remain skeptical of how it will turn out after the adjustments. The majority of responses to the Bethesda Softworks YouTube video are overwhelmingly positive and point to big moments in Fallout and The Elder Scrolls, but it remains to be seen what the big step-out moments of Starfield will be.
Starfield releases for PC and Xbox Series X/S in 2023.