Dialogue choices are a huge part of any great Bethesda RPG, so fans have been wondering what kind of system the developer would implement in Starfield. Now, thanks to a new video from Bethesda, director Todd Howard has shared some details of what to expect in your conversations in Starfield’s star systems.
“We’ve gone back to kind of a classic Bethesda-style dialogue [system]”, Howard said. “You’re looking at the character and how they emote, you have a series of choices there.”
Howard also talked about the persuasion system, saying players will spend points to persuade characters to get what they want. The example shown had four different dialogue options on screen, with each one costing a different amount of points. The +1 option was passive, with the +5 option being very aggressive. This lines up with what we’d previously heard, when Bethesda said Oblivion’s dialogue mini-game was inspiration in Starfield.
Starfield will have more branching dialogue paths than any previous Bethesda game. Howard also spoke to the volume of content, saying the team worked to make sure depth was still present in conversations even though there are so many of them.
“The scope of the game, the amount of content we’re making is a bit more than we’ve done before in terms of quests and things like that,” Howard said. “But the depth in some of this stuff with the dialogue… We just passed 250,000 lines, and so that’s a lot of dialogue. But we’ve gone through it and the impact is really there.”
For comparison, Bethesda said Skyrim had about 60,000 lines of dialogue, and Fallout 4 had 111,000. So Starfield’s current amount of dialogue is over quadruple that of Skyrim’s.
We still don’t have an exact release date, but Starfield is set to launch sometime in the first half of 2023. For more on Starfield, check out our interview with Todd Howard, and our Starfield performance review based on what we’ve seen so far.
Logan Plant is a freelance writer for IGN covering video game and entertainment news. He has over six years of experience in the gaming industry with bylines at IGN, Nintendo Wire, Switch Player Magazine, and Lifewire. Find him on Twitter @LoganJPlant.
About Post Author
