Starfield: How to Use Persuasion

Starfield gives players complete control over what they are doing in the game. Whether you are roaming around, completing missions, or fighting enemies completely depends on you. Even if you want to avoid a tricky situation without fighting, that is also possible. Only, you need to know the exact ways to do these things. 

The game provides players with around 82 skills, all relevant to the gameplay. Now, if you decide to settle a situation peacefully without fighting, you can do this by talking. Anyway, here comes one of the most puzzling skills of the game: Persuasion.

Initially, it doesn’t seem complicated at all. However, players will soon realize there is more to understand about Persuasion to use it properly during playthrough. In this Starfield guide, we will talk about this skill in detail. Let’s start with how it works in the game. 

Starfield Guides: How Persuasion Works

Choices are always interesting in role-playing games, and fortunately, Starfield has tons of chances to make choices, at least if you want to avoid certain tricky situations. Here you can use words to calm down NPCs instead of weapons.

The persuading system is a lot trickier than it seems. It requires some practice and a deep understanding of the character you are trying to persuade. Before you start persuading someone, you need to ensure that the skill is already unlocked. As you level up in Starfield, you will eventually unlock these skills from the skill tree.

Once the skill is unlocked, the next question that comes to mind is how to use Persuasion. That’s a valid thing. As soon as you choose the skill to use, you will get multiple dialogues to choose from. Remember, there’s nothing right or wrong among those dialogues. All are correct choices; it’s just that some options work better than others. 

As you get the Persuasion dialogues, you will see these come with different points and colors. That’s how the game is trying to help you with your choice. You will notice one option gives you +2 while the other one gives +4. The points increase based on the difficulty of the choice. 

Aside from that, choices have different colors on their left side. The green color indicates the safest choices. They give you fewer points, but they won’t have any risks. Next are the Orange choices. These are a slightly risky options but come with more points. Finally, you will have the Red options. These are the highest point-givers, but they come with the highest risk factors. 

In some cases, these colors even correspond to the tone of the dialogue. For example, the Green ones are mostly soft-tone dialogues, which show empathy. The Orange ones are dialogues where your character will appear as a rational person. Ultimately, selecting Red dialogue means you are most likely to threaten the other person. 

As you choose to persuade, you will see bars on the left bottom of the screen which indicate how many points you need to persuade the character successfully. For example, if you see four bars, you need four points for a successful Persuasion. Sometimes, it is even harder with six bars.

Additionally, the turns are limited, and the game will show how many turns are left to complete the persuasion. Each failed attempt will lower your turn of persuading a specific character.

Precisely, in Starfield, Persuasion is based on luck. All the choices you make have pros and cons. It’s like rolling a dice without knowing which number will come. Your choice may work smoothly, or it may cause unexpected responses.

In that case, we would suggest saving the game before you start persuading someone. If things go wrong, you can reload the game from that point to give it another try.

With players unlocking other skills like Negotiation, Manipulation, and Intimidation, they will find the Persuasion process a little easier with different types of dialogues unlocked to tackle different types of NPCs.

Starfield Guides: How to Increase Chances of Persuading Others

The more you progress, the more frequently you will need this skill. In that case, it is understandable that you want to increase the chances of persuading others in the game. Even Starfield gives you a few methods to boost your Persuasion ability temporarily or permanently.

The first thing you can try is to upgrade your persuasive skills. The more you upgrade the skill, the more you will become a smooth talker with increased chances to talk you out of any tricky situation.

While the level 1 upgrade has a 10% increased chance to persuade people, with each further upgrade the chance increases by 10%, and the final level has a 20% increased chance. So, at the point where you reach the level 4 upgrade, you will have a 50% higher chance to persuade someone.

The next method you can try is to drink alcohol or take some specific medicines to boost Persuasion possibility. Therefore, if you drink certain alcohol, like beer and wine, your Persuasion skills will get a temporary boost.

The same thing is applicable to a few medicines and chems. Med-packs will be found randomly here and there, so you can get them easily. If you consume these drinks or medicines before starting a conversation, the chances of smooth Persuasion will increase. 

That’s more or less everything that you should know if you are confused about how to use Persuasion in Starfield. 

What do you think of Starfield’s skill tree and its relevance to the game? Don’t forget to share your opinions with us in the comment section!