The Oblivion Remastered persuasion minigame is one of the most complicated and poorly explained elements of the game, based around four options: to Joke, Coerce, Boast or Admire. Not only that, but they're set into a four-sided pie interface that keeps rotating, and immediately most players will find themselves confused and bewildered, before just deciding there's easier ways to play Oblivion Remastered and pouring money into the character via the "Bribe" option.
To help you understand the dialogue minigame and how to persuade characters, we've put together this guide that explains how the system works in Elder Scrolls 4 Oblivion Remastered, as well as the secret personal preferences of each NPC character and how they play into things.
If you're having trouble with the Oblivion Remastered lockpicking minigame, we also have a guide for that so you can crack the toughest locks.
Oblivion Remastered persuasion explained
To explain the Oblivion Remastered persuasion minigame, you have four responses you can make – Admire, Joke, Coerce, and Boast – and you need to choose the order you use them in. You can only use each response once per round of the minigame.
Each NPC will also have a secret personal preference assigned to each response, divided between Love, Like, Dislike, and Hate. To match up their preferences to the responses, you need to start the minigame and then point the cursor at each one to see the reaction in their face, which will go from a broad smile to a grin, then a frown to a grimace. This can be harder to assess with certain Oblivion Remastered races, so you may need to look for a narrowing of the eyes with Argonians or the height of the ears on a Khajiit, for example.
Helpfully, this process has been simplified for Oblivion Remastered, so after the first round of persuasion the central wedges will be color-coded as follows:
- Blue = Love
- Yellow = Like
- Brown = Dislike
- Red = Hate
Those central wedges are the other key component of persuasion in Oblivion Remastered, as they determine how many disposition points you gain or lose with the NPC. They are randomly assigned between one and four at the start of each round, and the more wedges that are against a response when you select it, the more disposition increases or falls – represented by the small number with + or - which appears in the center.
However, crucially these wedges rotate clockwise after each response, so you need to try and plan ahead so you're ideally hitting four wedges on the positive responses and one wedge on the negatives, or as close to that as possible. You also lose more disposition points for Hate (Red) responses than you gain for Love (Blue), so prioritize hitting Hate with as few wedges as you can. Don't spend too long thinking about your responses though, as the NPC's disposition points will also gradually decrease while the minigame is running.
If you can increase your Oblivion Remastered Skill in Speechcraft to 25 (Apprentice), you'll have one chance to rotate the wedges per round without selecting a response, which can make the process significantly easier. You can keep repeating this for as long as necessary, but if you reach the maximum disposition for that character then you'll no longer be able to start the persuasion minigame, and if you exit then reenter persuasion a message will appear on screen confirming the same.
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