Starfield is Bethesda's chance to redeem themselves in the persuation check game

Starfield, Bethesda Game Studio's upcoming sci-fi role-playing game, comes out this November.

The game's release date aligns with Skyrim, and it just so happens that Starfield is Bethesda's most ambitious project since the Skyrim series. Thus far, the big talking point, at least as far as the mainstream gaming crowd is concerned, has been Bethesda's technical strides in the new Creation Engine 2.

The small glimpses of the work-in-progress footage in between their promotional Starfield content indeed displays great developments since Fallout 4, or Fallout 76, even with its purported elusive '16 times the detail.' After the highly-unexpected Microsoft acquisition, this is also the first BGS game that feels in tune with the current-gen graphics and high-fidelity photogrammetry textures that are used.

As any RPG enthusiast will know, however, a skin-deep overhaul is not the be-all and the end-all in a game like Starfield. Skyrim's milestone seems like a difficult bar to top. After all, Skyrim was heralded in its time as a revolutionary impact on the genre across the board.

But even into its third decade of maturity as a genre on its own, there are avenues in RPGs that are sorely lacking some revolutionization, dialogue being one of them.

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Persuasion in Starfield may yet be more than a simple stat check

Bethesda are among the top developers to have been trendsetters in the RPG formula at one point or the other. Specifically, the developers have shown at least some form of innovation in each of their Elder Scrolls games. Barring Arena, all of them - Daggerfall, Morrowind, Oblivion, Skyrim - have had at least some points of interest that set them apart and ahead of their predecessor.

For Morrowind, it was the interactable 3D clutter that allowed for complete immersion into the game's world, something attempted at that point only partially by the likes of Arx Fatalis. For Oblivion, it was the ambitious attempt at creating 'lively' NPC day/night routines for emergent interactions. For Skyrim, it was the sheer scope of a beautiful handmade sandbox, completely filled to the brim with engaging content, a world which exemplified the 40-second rule in open-world games.

Yet, one criteria where Bethesda seems to be lagging behind is in writing dialogue with any meaningful player agency. Both Elder Scrolls and Fallout games have had their dedicated speech skills, but their application at the gameplay level feels very contrived. The most obvious way that 'speech' can be weaponized for mercantile purposes is through a character's persuasive skills.

Skyrim's iteration of persuasion was simply a few isolated instances of stat-gauging that felt tacked on without any organic context. Oblivion, in comparison, at least tried something new with the dynamic through a minigame. However quaint in hindsight, this was only its own puzzle minigame that was far removed from how persuasion should ideally work.

Starfield is shaping up to be the hopeful saving grace for Bethesda in making persuasion more than just a granular stat check.

The first pillar of this hope, surprisingly, originates from a tech standpoint. In one of the Starfield dev diaries, "Made for Wanderers," Starfield director Istvan Pely spoke about how photogrammetry is being used to create lifelike characters with an all-new believable facial animation system. Gone are the infamous potato faces of Oblivion, but along with it, Bethesda also means to do away with the stigma of their infamous minigame.

They also highlight their return to the root of cRPGs, to character motivation, background, and trait-driving their roleplaying momentum. This is a great callback to the classical heyday of Bethesda's other big sci-fi IPs besides Starfield, namely: Fallout.

The first two Fallout games, made by Interplay Entertainment, championed character-driven dialogue in their time. Character-driven dialogue here means that the player character's background will determine additional choices provided to them in dialogue trees. Disco Elysium took this same formula to its comprehensive extreme, where each element of the player's cop-persona, as well as their previous actions, set the scene for appropriate dialogue - both interior and exterior.

Bethesda mimed the immersion of a close-up camera that zooms in during dialogue, both in their own attempt at the first 3D Fallout project, and even in Oblivion. In terms of actually integrating the character skills into dialogue, Fallout 3 fairly underutilizes its potential. Fallout 4 commits an even further regressive sin to completely streamline the system into a binary Mass Effect mock-up.

These missed opportunities are thrown into greater highlight when we look at how successfully Obsidian has managed to one-up Bethesda in this department with Fallout: New Vegas. Starfield is therefore Bethesda's chance to go beyond the veil of perceptible gamification in dialogue, where success comes not from putting points into one skill, but from an overlapping utility of all of the player's stats and traits.