Warhammer Warhammer 40,000: Inquisitor - Martyr - WH40K action-RPG from NeocoreGames

[Fedora Master]

Looks

Spoiler

worth a pirate

ARPGs are more resilient when it comes to jank than some other genres.

 

[Renevent]

I'm a sucker for ARPG's and 40K...so they got me. Some random thoughts after playing a couple missions last night (2.0 alpha):

-Presentation, at least up to where you actually play levels, is actually pretty good. It's kinda cool looking around the 3D star maps, zooming into galaxies, then solar systems, then further into the playable planents/ships/etc. The home base area looks pretty good, though could maybe be a bit larger and/or have a few more cool props. Def feels 40K visually. Character/inventory screens have a crap ton of stats, items in your inventory will auto-compare with what you have equipped, and shit like that which is good, albeit pretty basic ARPG stuff these days.

-Graphics are fine for the most part. Looks the part for a 40K game. I like the player character designs, a lot of the level props looks great, the star map looks great, and most of the UI is nicely designed, though there are places where things are clearly not done. For instance, items in your inventory/store window/etc are just colored outlines/representations of that specific item, which is really shitty. While some of the levels look okay and the props look good, the way they are laid out (due to the randomization) just looks kinda shitty, haphazardly laid out, and sterile.

-Performance is shitty...kinda. I have a beefy computer (6700K i7, GTX 1080, 16GB ram, all SSD) and while the game overall looks like it's running okay it has strange problems. For instance, props, effects, and enemies will often look like they are missing most of their animations and just chug along, while everything else will be fine. Very weird effect and really doesn't look good. At all.

-Controls are, well, just not up to par yet. Button presses sometimes do nothing, guns will shoot in in the wrong direction occasionally, trying to move and fire or kite is clunky as hell.

-Speaking of guns, while some look/sound good some sound pathetically bad. I've only used a few so far (shotgun, plasma pistol, laser rifle, laser pistol) but the plasma pistol sounds comically bad, almost pew pew pew bad. None of the ones I used were all that exciting tbh. The good news is there appears to be a TON of different guns and different types of melee weapons.

-They are presenting the game as a "tactical ARPG" and that's kinda accurate I guess. You (and enemies) can take cover (done by holding the spacebar near a wall) and that works relatively well. At this point I'm not sure how fun that actually is in an ARPG. All the cover is destructible mind you, but it def slows down the game a lot since you move really slow already, and you either have to keep taking positions or draw enemies out to kill them.

-Seems to be a good amount of items and a lot of customization. There's a ton of places to slot stuff like different guns/melee weapons, tactical items (think grenades, shields, etc), customization healing/buff items, armor, implants. Haven't got far yet so no idea how deep individual character customization goes though.

-Same for leveling, there's like 10 skill trees, and it looks like when you start only 3 are open to each individual class. The others are unlocked via rewards.

-There's also crafting, and it looks kinda cool, but it's also tied to bullshit F2P mechanics. You can craft just about any item in the game but these take actual in game time...like to craft a new laser pistol it takes 30 minutes...some as high as an hour.

-Also this doesn't matter to me, but for those it does matter to I think it's an always online game.

Anyways I'll give it another crack tonight, and I'll probably end up enjoying it at some point, but for anyone thinking of picking it up after the 2.0 Alpha announcement know that the game is still very (and I mean VERY!) rough. There seems to be all the right systems in place for the game to be a fun ARPG but it's far too rough and clunky at this point.

 

[Darth Roxor]

i remember when neocore made cool games

 

[mikaelis]

i remember when neocore made cool games

Yeah, that's sad. I had this irrational hope that Van Hellsing was just a distraction and they will come back to King Arthur style games...

Well, it seems they will stick to Diablo-cloning (now with "always-online" component) for an unforeseeable future, so fuck them.

 

[Infinitron]

Now in Early Access:

Why Early Access?

“Inquisitor – Martry is a complex, multi-layered ARPG with a long-term game cycle planned, with many online features that’s hard to finalize with a small internal team. With Early Access, we hope to gather real feedback from a wide range of players, then polish and balance all the features based on that feedback.”

Approximately how long will this game be in Early Access?

“We expect the game to be in Early Access for about six months.”

How is the full version planned to differ from the Early Access version?

“With most of the gameplay elements lacking real polish, we estimate this game to be 60-70% complete. It has 80% of planned features with around 40% of the planned content. The game will be expanded and polished in the near future, but we don’t plan on big, fundamental changes, and there are no game breaking problems.”

What is the current state of the Early Access version?

“Some mission types are playable both in single player and co-operative mode (including new Defend and Endless modes), now with general and combat tutorials. A basic PvP mode is included, another PvP mode will be added for testing. Story campaign will be added at full release.
Two character classes are playable (Crusader and Assassin), each with three specializations and melee / ranged loadout options (Psyker will be added throughout the Early Access). Both classes can utilize all their weapons, skills and both have a full passive skill tree. Skill customization (Inoculator), crafting and Uther’s Tarot missions can be used. Glory system and Protector system is also integrated in the game. Seasons and Global Events are not part of Early Access.
Factions include Nurgle, Worldbearer and Rebels, more will be added at full release. The Star Map starts with the first subsector fully playable (others will be unlocked at release and afterwards). The first subsector will be expanded during Early Access. It includes points of interests with multiple terrain settings with several subsettings and 40-40 levels each. Investigations have multiple story modules, Early Access expands on them. Players can create, upgrade Cabals and complete Cabal missions.
Early Access starts with reset characters for all players, including Founders.

Please also see the roadmap we have for the development process here: https://static.neocoregames.com/images/roadmap/W40K_RoadmapMilestones.jpg”

Will the game be priced differently during and after Early Access?

“There won’t be any changes in the full price.”

How are you planning on involving the Community in your development process?

“Each month, a week after each update we’re doing an ingame survey, and we’re very active on the game’s forums and on Discord, and we’re streaming the changes regularly on Twitch.”

 

[Major_Blackhart]

Man, I just wanna play Necromunda.

 

[Citizen]

Covers, turrets — it's even more pop-a-mole then other ARPGs.

 

[Darth Roxor]

50 eurobucks for an early access diablo clone is one of the most absurd things i've seen lately

 

[Serious_Business]

Man, I just wanna play Necromunda.

Nothing new on the game, is it?

I really like Mordheim but the technical aspects brings it down. Too slow. Hope they'll work around that

 

[vonAchdorf]

The Necromunda tabletop will be released soon.

 

[Sore Loser]

.

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/20...0-inquisitor-martyr-is-as-clunky-as-its-name/

Warhammer 40,000: Inquisitor – Martyr is as clunky as its name
John Walker on September 5th, 2017 at 7:00 pm.

It’s hard to imagine a game clunkier than Warhammer 40,000: Inquisitor – Martyr[official site]. Even the name is a lumpen boulder. (We’ll call it “Martyr” for our sanity’s sake.) This doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a bad game – there’s probably something decent enough behind it all – just the clunkiest festival of clunk since Professor David Clunkington invented his Clunkatron 3000.

A few months into early access, and with a lot of its features now locked down but for tweaking, Martyr is still in alpha and a good way from finished, so assume everything I have to say about it is constructive criticism for developers NeocoreGames (even their company name is clunky!), makers of the well liked King Arthur and the fine-but-immediately-forgotten Van Helsing series of aRPGs. Their foray into the Games Workshop sees them take a more tactical approach to the action RPG, in a bizarrely sprawling (or perhaps, aimless) collection of confined missions in restricted levels.

What this essentially boils down to is entering a procedurally generated dungeon of interlocking room tiles, and killing everything. Or surviving by running away!

That’s my tactic, anyway. The game’s levels, very small compared to the wide open lands of your typical action roleplayer, are also tougher. Your Power Rating is a guide used to determine how tough a mission might be, comparing your number (based on the loudout you’re currently carrying, improved by drops or bought items, more significantly improved by increasing your Inquisitorial Rank) to the number of the level. If you’re at a disadvantage, your rewards will be greater, and vice versa.

There are plans, they say, for a series of game-led tutorials to come, to explain the basics of the game. For now it requires reading a few dozen pages of tutorial text screens, and boy-oh-boy does it put its clunky cards on the awkwardly shaped wobbly table. As you pick apart the Account Level, the Inquisitorial Rank, and the Power Rating, and realise each is a different means of measuring and improving the level of your character, each with their own skills, some affecting just one character, another all characters in your account, and then each affected by Fate, a skill gained by completing or competing in the ‘different’ mission types, each selected through the Starmap that has four different view levels… well, you start to get the picture. However, rather problematically, this complexity is almost entirely confined to the menus between actually playing.

The first time I played I rushed in, as you would, and got completely trounced. It took a moment to get the hang of things, to realise that I was going to have to be more careful when controlling my lumbering tank of a Juggernaut Crusader. Mobs need to be managed, not triggering too many at once, using scenery to block attacks, and your limited range of attacks (four per weapon setup, plus a couple of extra bits) need to be deployed at a sensible pace. Then there’s both your health and your Suppression Resistance bar to monitor (the latter being how much you can cope with incoming attacks, depleted by taking on too many, or too large enemies). Both are quickly refilled with a bit of tactical legging it, to a quieter area, then charging back in. And there’s destructible scenery, exploding objects, and the like, which you’re supposed to try to use as tactics against enemies.

The problem is, the fighting doesn’t match the complexity all that suggests. The tutorial texts encourage you to lead enemies toward explosive barrels or similar, but they rarely seem to want to budge from their location in my experience. The larger enemies I’ve encountered – such as a dubious AT-ST-alike – would only follow me a very limited distance, and the random layout of the level meant there was no cunningly scripted mannable turret for me to lure him toward. Running away is so effectively because mostly they can’t be led to follow.

Even less realistic is the tutorial’s belief in “Dodgeable Attacks”, where larger enemies are supposed to flag their big hits, and you’re supposed to be able to dodge them. But this is a game controlled by mouse, and to aim you need your cursor over targeted enemies, and using it to click a spot away from an enemy becomes massively impractical, and far more often, the game is too slow to respond anyway. (The Assassin characters, the only other type alongside Crusaders at this point, have much more nimble dodges, but Crusaders need to avoid attacks too!)

There’s a cover system, which is you’ll be shocked to learn, incredibly clunky. You have to hold down the Space bar to use it, rather than toggle, and you can then fire from cover. But your character is ridiculously exposed, and enemies destroy cover incredibly quickly. It’s often far safer not to use cover at all.

The camera is, well, the word for it is “clunky”. It’s agonisingly fixed at the stupidest angle, not letting you see particularly far ahead of you (where your guy could obviously see), with your character in the very middle-middle of the screen. That’s a deeply weird place to put the place, who is far more used to being about 1/3 from the bottom, and only makes the inability to tilt the camera all the more infuriating. To rotate you need to use the middle mouse button, and there’s no intelligence putting the camera anywhere sensible for you. You have to do all the work for that, basically, not least when it regularly fails to make pillars and walls translucent as it’s supposed to when they block your view.

But clunkiest of all is something that feels like a cross between running out of memory, and lag, but I think is neither. There’s lag in co-op, I understand, but playing on my own, in a game that’s only online in the sense that a bloody text chat box pops up for about three seconds every time another player playing on their own writes something, I’m not sure it’s that. Despite the framerate coping in a very busy battle (running 45-52 at full whack, so not brilliant, but a steady 60 on the next highest setting), the game looks as though it had dropped to the teens, with staggering and juddering making it deeply irritating to play. And this happens in every mission, about two-thirds in, as if the game can’t cope with remembering the weeny level. I’ve checked my my machine, and the 32GB of RAM isn’t even half-used, all is running beautifully. But every single mission starts to chug and stagger until it’s grim to play.

It’s worth noting that this is that most loathed of gaming categories – “always online” – for seemingly no sensible reason. Leave the game idle and it’ll log you out of your mission and drop to the opening menu. Good times!

This really isn’t helped by some of the weirdest pathfinding code I’ve ever encountered. As in most aRPGs, you move with the mouse, either clicking to a destination, or holding down and guiding. Bu with the latter, vital in the scraps, it tries to “help” in some deeply peculiar way. The character will run in the opposite direction to the one you’re clicking in, usually when trying to reach cover, presumably because it thinks it’s aiding you in running around the obstacle, when all you bloody want to do is duck behind it. Which of course means it runs you directly into the fray – utterly hateful when you’re super-low on health and just trying to hold up.

And as I plough through mission after clunky mission, one thing becomes achingly apparent: they’re all the same. It doesn’t matter if they change the textures, perhaps have you on some grey rocks instead of grey metal corridors, or whether they pretend the goals have changed from “kill everything” to “click on three objects while killing everything”, you’re just doing the same thing over and over and over, with no variation. That might, in fairness, quite accurately describe the aRPG as a genre, but there are usually at least an array of baubles to distract: plentiful loot drops, inventory tetris, characters to chat to, villages to visit, and most of all, a sense of exploring a large world. Martyr has precisely none of these features.

Much is yet to be fixed, of course. Much is yet to be added, including story campaigns. More still is to be tweaked. Dear Chaos Gods, I hope this includes letting you re-angle the camera to be able to see more than five steps ahead. But what’s here so far does not inspire me at all. It’s a leaden affair, a deeply clumsy game at its very core, and while it could absolutely revolutionise itself before final release, I can only write about the game that’s current on sale at full price.

(The Steam page for the game is at huge pains to stress the game is unfinished, and practically begs people not to critique it. But writing a disclaimer like this doesn’t work – the game is for sale, for a significant amount of money, and paying customers are a very different thing from paid employees.)

I’ve now encountered quite the bug that doesn’t allow me to click on anything on the screen, nor pull up menus, which impressively persists after shutting down and restarting the game. So I think that’s my time over for now. I’m genuinely still interested to see if this can coalesce into something more interesting, because it’s a genre I like. But right now, this is a beta program you’d want to be paid for taking part in, not charged for the honour.

Warhammer 40,000: Inquisition – Martyr is in early access for Windows for £34/$50/50€ via Steam

 

[Background Character]

Looks
worth a pirate
ARPGs are more resilient when it comes to jank than some other genres.

So I guess you could say this is an ArrrrrPG

Nice early access cinematic btw

 

[Infinitron]

 

[Neanderthal]

I'm a fucking Inquisitor, I have people to do this kinda shit for me, specifically Sororitas, Deathwatch or Grey Knights.

Or Arbites, Rogue Traders, few million Imperial Guard or PDF, Inquisitorial Stormtroopers yadda yadda.

 

[Storyfag]

Technically, if its something concerning sensitive secretive stuff, I can kind of imagine an Inquisitor going in personally with a small retinue and secretly, instead of deploying kill-teams and/or armies. But that other component should be in there too.

 

[vonAchdorf]

Eisenhorn (and various other inquisitors in the BL novels) also had a more hands-on approach.

The "This is your captain speaking" didn't sound very 40k-like, though.

 

[Elex]

Inquisitors can litterally do what they want.

 

[Commissar Draco]

Inquisitors can litterally do what they want.

They can do whatever their prestige allow them and there is always at least three Inquisitors who are waiting to discredit or kill them. They are conclaves, factions and Inquisitorial Lords too. Intro is nice and I wish we could cleanse and claim this battle barge as your own base but something that big? No Inqusitor would land there unless with company of Terminator Squad Space Marines or/and few thousands of Storm Troopers unless you RP as Inqusitor John Smith freshly promoted and with no prestige. Even such could at-least dunno take Imperial Guard regiment for a ride. For solo missions Imperial Assassin, Imperial Church Zealot or Interrogator this could work but Full fledged Inquisitor? Still worth pirating watching cutscenes on Jew Tube its still Warhammer 40K after all. Al though proper RPG/X-Com like game with Inquisitor or Adeptus Arbites investigating cults, gathering intelligence and clues, infiltrating noble houses and then making purges (with Hilarius results if your detectives do shaby work) would be much more interesting. This game is some one man with strength of company of Space Marines/Primarch action shlock.

 

[vonAchdorf]

Inquisitorial Lords too.

Didn't they ditch the Lords idea in favor of "all Inquisitors are equal"?

 

[LESS T_T]

Full release in May 11th: https://neocoregames.com/en/community/hub/inquisitor-martyr-release-date-revealed

A small information with a huge impact on the Caligari Sector's Chaos presence: Inquisitors will be deployed on...

May 11, 2018!
Mark your calendars, because Warhammer 40,000: Inquisitor - Martyr will be released on this date, on PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One simultaneously.



Founders and Early Access users might already have some understanding of how the game plays (it's an Action-RPG), although it's still shaping and changing according to feedback, inching ever closer towards completion. But let's summarize briefly what to expect from the game on all available platforms on Day One:

• The full single-player campaign story
• All three playable character classes (each with three expertises)
• A persistent, open Star Map with multiple mission types, investigations and other activities...
• ...which can be played alone or in Co-Op!
• A detailed progression system including various active and passive skills, crafting, loot
• Various enemy factions such as Nurgle, Rebels, Word Bearers and Black Legion (and others we'll reveal later)
• Multiple languages (some of them to be confirmed)
• Various improvements over Early Access builds (such as improved terrains, lighting, but we'll detail these later)
• Enhanced game modes that support the PlayStation 4 Pro and Xbox One X (performance, balanced, cinematic)
• Achievements on Steam and Xbox One, trophies on PlayStation (including a platinum!)

Also, the full release doesn't mean that our work is done, more features and improvements will come in future updates, mainly with the story driven free content patches called Seasons.

So, that's it for now, as this was just a quick roundup, we'll cover all features and more once we can confirm everything, including retail covers for console editions, and other news.

Stay tuned for more updates soon!

 

[Sykar]

I still hope that the game will turn out fun.

Covers, turrets — it's even more pop-a-mole then other ARPGs.

Not so sure about that since they say that all cover is destructible. One of my big gripes of pop-a-mole games for me is that cover is often indestructible making them almost 100% safe in most cases. With destructible cover they will buy you breathing space but won't protect you forever.

What I mean to say it, it might be a refreshing alternative to the usual "make a two button build like in PoE and just tank almost everything" alternative.

Inquisitors can litterally do what they want.

They can do whatever their prestige allow them and there is always at least three Inquisitors who are waiting to discredit or kill them. They are conclaves, factions and Inquisitorial Lords too. Intro is nice and I wish we could cleanse and claim this battle barge as your own base but something that big? No Inqusitor would land there unless with company of Terminator Squad Space Marines or/and few thousands of Storm Troopers unless you RP as Inqusitor John Smith freshly promoted and with no prestige. Even such could at-least dunno take Imperial Guard regiment for a ride. For solo missions Imperial Assassin, Imperial Church Zealot or Interrogator this could work but Full fledged Inquisitor? Still worth pirating watching cutscenes on Jew Tube its still Warhammer 40K after all. Al though proper RPG/X-Com like game with Inquisitor or Adeptus Arbites investigating cults, gathering intelligence and clues, infiltrating noble houses and then making purges (with Hilarius results if your detectives do shaby work) would be much more interesting. This game is some one man with strength of company of Space Marines/Primarch action shlock.

Come on guys most games take quite a few liberties when they take a board game or novel world as a basis.

 

[Darth Roxor]

lol i thought this was out already

 

[Sykar]

Gameplay vid of the Heavy Gunner:


Psyker/Aetherwalker:

 

[Citizen]

Meh. Waiting for firewarrior2.