How to use persuasion in Oblivion Remastered

Using persuasion in Oblivion Remastered to increase the disposition of another character towards you is a tricky business, and the whole process is built on a fiddly minigame. This is accessed by speaking to an NPC, then selecting the 'Persuading' icon underneath the dialogue options, and if you're unfamiliar with how it works then it will be incredibly confusing.

Thankfully, the minigame has been made somewhat simpler in Oblivion Remastered with the addition of some handy color-coding, but if you're looking for some help to improve your standing with other characters then here is a full explanation of how Oblivion Remastered persuasion works.

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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