Starfield dev diary details dialogue choices and persuasion system

Starfield arrives this year, but there are still a few months for us to learn more about Bethesda’s spacefaring RPG. We haven’t really seen the game in action yet, to be fair. Fortunately, the latest of the game’s dev diaries offers some insight into what we can expect.

Into the Starfield: Made for Wanderers is the latest in Bethesda’s series of dives into the game. This video features game director Todd Howard, design director Emil Pagliarulo, lead quest designer Will Shen, and lead artist Istvan Pely discussing the game’s character-building elements. “The [story] the players tell themselves is the one they think about and love the most,” Howard points out.

Thus, Starfield offers a wide range of options for role-playing the hero as you see fit. “We want all the personal interactions with NPCs and other characters in the game to be as impactful as possible,” adds Pely, “and for that, you have to believe these are real people.” To that end, Starfield’s dialogue system will take a cue from Oblivion and include persuasion options, which can go south if your character can’t sway NPCs to their side. “We didn’t want it to be a system where there was definitely the right thing to say,” explains Shen. This goes for tertiary NPCs as well as your own companions.

This dev diary is a bit more substantial than the previous one we saw in November 2021. The Endless Pursuit, as that video was called, was full of concept art and general ideas about the game. While this new video doesn’t feature actual gameplay either, there’s something more tangible about the persuasion system that was described. We’ll get more of these dev diaries as Starfield gets closer to launch.

That release date is this fall: the game comes to Xbox Series X/S and PC on November 11, ten years to the day after Skyrim. It is indeed an Xbox exclusive on console, but the PC version will still have mod support, Todd Howard confirmed.