As in other Bethesda games, Starfield also gives you the ability to explore the game world at your leisure and have full control over the actions you decide to take. For this reason, being aware of how the Starfield persuasion system works can be a very useful thing when you find yourself facing certain missions or activities. Once you have read this article, the persuasion system will hold no more secrets for you and you will be able to prevail even in situations that may initially seem unfavorable to you.
How does the Starfield persuasion system work?
As you can surely imagine, relying on the persuasion system is a very useful thing in Starfield, especially if you prefer not to have a violent approach and therefore want to avoid unnecessary conflicts. For this reason, when you are talking to NPCs, you can choose the option to persuade them whenever possible. However, you will need to be skilled enough to carry out the persuasion successfully.
Once you select the option to persuade a character, you will have a certain number of turns to accumulate the points necessary to persuade him. It is therefore a full-fledged minigame, where you will have to be concentrated and give the right answers. To understand how you’re doing, you can keep an eye on the meter located to the left of the text, as well as being able to see how many attempts you have left.
To successfully carry out the persuasion, each bar must be filled completely, otherwise it will result in failure. Failing means that you will not be able to persuade that character and it is therefore very likely that you will have to resort to violence to get what you want. Obviously, it’s certainly not the end of the world, but if you’re trying to be as peaceful as possible, it could definitely bother you.
As a result, we advise you to pay very close attention to the dialogue choices you make throughout this minigame. Each correct answer will guarantee you points (which may vary) that will bring you closer and closer to your goal. Also, keep in mind that if you successfully complete each turn, you will get an extra turn. Obviously, the right choices aren’t that easy to spot and their difficulty can be guessed based on the score it gives you and its color.
But let’s go into a little detail regarding this aspect. The green options are the ones that will almost certainly work, hence the safer ones; unfortunately, however, they are also the ones that will guarantee you the least points. The red answers, on the other hand, have a big risk, but they are also the ones that will guarantee you the most points. Selecting an answer has the potential to immediately fill the persuasion meter in one turn, but it is very likely that you will fail.
As you can well guess, therefore, the Starfield persuasion system is very much based on chance and luck. For this reason, we cannot provide a specific guide that can be used in every case in which you want to try this thing. Also, there are no standard dialogue options for every character. This means that you could reload the save and make the exact same choices and get a different outcome.
How to increase the chances of persuading
Starfield offers a few different ways to increase your chances of persuading someone. The simplest way is to consume foods, drinks, or medicines that have among their bonuses that of increasing the chances of persuasion. By making use of these consumables, your chances of persuasion will be increased for a certain amount of time.
Furthermore, you can also unlock the specific social skill in the skill tree which will allow you to increase your chances. Once you’ve unlocked Rank 1, you’ll need to successfully complete a few persuasions in order to level up and thus have a higher success rate.
How to auto-persuade in Starfield
However, Starfield also provides the ability to self-persuade characters. To the right of your screen you can see a ring indicating this possibility. When the ring is full, you can press the X key to make the game do the whole procedure, thus increasing your chances of being able to persuade that particular NPC.
To fill the meter to perform an auto-persuasion on a character, you will have to choose some dialogue options. The green ones will allow you to fill the indicator a little, while the orange ones will fill it a lot, precisely because these are riskier choices.
How to unlock auto-persuade
As you might have guessed, having self-persuasion among your skills is certainly an added value that would make your life easier on many occasions. However, however, this feature is not available from the start, since to get it you will first need to unlock the persuasion skill. Some backgrounds have this skill among the default ones, so if you have chosen one of those you may already have it, otherwise, however, you will have to level up until you get skill points that you can spend to acquire this skill.
