Starfield’s persuasion system is the equivalent of a bad Dungeon Master

polygon.com:

[Ed. note: The following contains light spoilers for Starfield’s main quest.]

Starfield has been building toward one particular moment in its main quest: the culmination of the collection of the universe’s mysterious artifacts. I spent 20 hours working toward the final artifacts, and with two button clicks, I was able to persuade my way out of the entire scenario — suddenly, the main quest was basically done. The fight that the whole storyline was building up to just didn’t happen.

Without risking any further spoilers, let me just say that Starfield’s persuasion system is broken. Throughout dozens of hours, I've come up against dozens of persuasion checks, and nearly every time, the system has led the conversation in bizarre or situation-breaking ways; there are just some scenarios you shouldn’t be able to talk your way out of.

The mainline mission climax is one of them, but there are a bunch of others, too: One quest takes you and your companion Sam Coe to his father’s house, despite his reluctance. He’s been in a decades-long feud with his father, but we need a family heirloom, which his father won’t give him — not ever, the patriarch implies. But with the persuasion system, I was able to obtain it easily by arguing that giving me the item will stop my annoying persistence. I erased an ancient family feud by simply threatening to annoy the man!

Another, more minor instance happens in a little side quest where someone sends me off to kill a former partner — I’m to bring back her gun to prove I finished the job. Instead of killing her, though, I decided to try and persuade her to give me the gun, which she just said she’d never let go of. And yet, I left her ship with the gun in my possession, and its previous owner