The Starfield dialogue system will have more than four times as many lines of dialogue as Skyrim, and it also has game director and executive producer Todd Howard's "favorite speech persuasion system."
Bethesda outlined Starfield's speech systems in a new video of Howard answering some questions about the game. An infographic (around 3:52) confirms that Starfield is currently hovering around 252,953 lines of dialogue, dwarfing Skyrim's roughly 60,000 and more than doubling Fallout 4's approximate 111,000.
"We've done a lot of different dialogue systems. We've gone back to, I'll call it, a classic Bethesda-style dialogue," Howard says of Starfield. "You're looking at the character and how they emote, there's a series of choices there. 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, the depth of some of this stuff with the dialogue.
"We just passed 250,000 lines, so that's a lot of dialogue. But we've gone through it and the impact is really there, and that includes my favorite speech persuasion system," he continues. "It feels like it's part of the dialogue but you're spending points to persuade them. It feels natural, not like I've entered some other mode where I'm not doing regular dialogue and I'm in this mode of persuading you to get what I want."
Video of the speech system in action shows our character talking down a crew of treasure hunters. At one point in the conversation, they're given four dialogue choices with different point values – one, three, four, and five, all seemingly color-coded to indicate how risky they are or how likely they are to succeed.
Choosing the three-point option gives the player three persuasion points in a bank at the bottom-left, presumably to spend on future dialogue choices which would turn things in their favor or net some kind of reward. Choosing this line also ticks down a turn counter on the conversation from three to two, which could represent the limited number of exchanges you'll have to persuade people. This system is subject to change, but together this video offers an interesting look at the "classic Bethesda-style dialogue" Howard describes.
Starfield backgrounds and starting skills will no-doubt play a critical role in speech and beyond – here's everything we've seen so far.
