Tracking of Ryder's decisions

It's funny because there is no one answer. The idea of the tone system is very much for you to make that choice. If you choose casual, the bottom left option, very frequently, you're going to be kind of a Chris Pine Captain Kirk. If you choose the professional option on a regular basis, you're a mixture of Picard and, honestly, Shepard. If you choose the analytical option it's much more Picard-oriented with a bit of Spock mixed in. And if you choose the emotional option, it's a bit of Sisko, a bit of Kirk.

It's funny, because when we talk about things internally, it's like okay, is this the Picard option or the Spock option?

The flirt option is always Riker, by the way.

He does have sex with every alien.

If it's possible.

What you'll find, we let you switch whenever you want, so even if you've been playing for 40 hours, always making jokes, you're like 'nope, I'm serious now, hitting the Picard button,' we'll let you do that. But the game is tracking under the hood how much you've chosen those different options, and we build a little psych profile for you based on that. Now it's not that everybody you walk up to is like 'you're that guy that's always joking!' But it may come up in conversation, and particularly specific things you've chosen over the course of the game, may come back to haunt you in either a good way or a bad way. Folks will remember certain decisions. Not in a more systemic way, but literally this one specific decision's going to get referenced back at this point later.

The other thing we have, to let you keep track of what sort of character you've built. In the codex, the codex at its core works the same as the trilogy, but there's a section at the top called The Journey So Far. What that does is track your particular experience, what's been happening with your Ryder, what are the main story decisions you've made, what kind of relationships have you formed with your family, squadmates, and crew, and some other key characters, and finally your psych profile, which is tracking 'okay, you have only ever taken the casual option every single opportunity.' Or 'you take every single interrupt or narrative action the moment they're available. You're super impulsive, super casual.'

It'll give you that clear feedback on what you've chosen to be. But it's purely there so you understand what you've made. It's not feeding back into a system somewhere else. So there's no sense that 'if you want to get the golden gun, you're going to need to take the serious option every time.' We're trying to keep it open.

We have deliberately removed that. We wanted you to feel like, at any time—there are things you can't say if the story doesn't give you a reason to say it, like you haven't done that thing or met that person, therefore you don't have this option—but only cases like that where it would be nonsensical for you to have that option. We don't have a thing where it's like 'you could tell him to back down but you can't because you haven't paragoned enough.' That concept doesn't exist.

No, there's no dialogue skills in that sense. It's purely: you can choose what you want to say, and sometimes the specific choice that you've made, not systemically, but the specific choice you've made might piss someone off or cause repercussions. But it's not that you had 15 points in bribery. It's that you chose to try to bribe someone who was not a smart person to try to bribe. [laughs]

I'm pretty sure the psychological profile was written by Dr Lexi, so odds are you get if after you unlock the Tempest.