Your kingdom doesn't go to shit, if you don't go into the final act.
Drukhari Companion Confirmed.
https://roguetrader.owlcat.games/news/en/28
MARAZHAI AEZYRRAESH: THE CREED OF A TORMENTER
The Drukhari are considered among the most cruel and malicious of xenos that threaten the Imperium. They are a degenerate society of the ancient Aeldari xenos race, a dark culture of torturers and raiders, striking out at the galaxy's inhabitants from their labyrinthine shadow-realm of Commorragh. Selfish, prideful, arrogant and murderous, the Drukhari are a self-serving people. Their rulers reign over their kindred with the utmost cruelty and intimidation, for only the fear of death can keep the Drukhari in line. Their subjects are torn between their own ambitions that urge them to backstab their own and a hatred of their common enemies that pushes them into fragile alliances and shaky agreements. The laws of this fractured society are known only to the Drukhari themselves - and even they often become victims of their own intrigues and games, having faltered in their judgment or one of their plots.
Marazhai Aezyrraesh, the Dracon of the Kabal of the Reaving Tempest, is a true scion of Commorragh, who is driven by an insatiable lust for violence and power over others - things which he achieves through subtle cunning, shady deals, and — to his great delight — carnage and the agonizing torture of his enemies. Everything changes when another raid in realspace goes awry, and Marazhai realizes that this time it was he who was being hunted. It's time to strike back, not wait for the enemy to get ahead. But the intricacies of Commorragh's intrigues and machinations are different from the rules of these rampant and bloody raids, and the most sophisticated plan can fail if one of your tools is an overly feisty and underestimated Rogue Trader... or if one of the apex predators of Commorragh, with whom you struck a dark alliance, decides not to hold his end of the bargain up.
Stripped of everything that once belonged to him, Marazhai receives one final favor - to perish to the delight of his kin, feeding their insatiable hunger with his exquisite pain. This fate is unlikely to suit the proud Kabalite of the Reaving Tempest, and he has one last chance to avoid it - to enter into an alliance with yesterday's enemy. If this uneasy union holds together, if the doomed find their way out of Commorragh, if this Drukhari, a child of the Webway, survives in realspace... then the fallen Dracon will have a shred of hope: one day reclaim the shards of what he once considered his own or follow the path of bloody revenge as someone with nothing to lose.
The rut of daily life on a Human voidship can be unbearably dull for a creature of such different customs - and there is none more inventive in devising twisted entertainment than a bored Drukhari. Since only the Rogue Trader is worthy of any attention amid the surrounding rabble, it will not be difficult for them to attract Marazhai's special consideration. A former preything can just as easily be turned into an amusing plaything... or, if the chosen rules dictate, roles can change completely. For a reckless – or unwary – Rogue Trader willing to indulge Marazhai’s debauched nature, he has much to share on the subject of depravity and cruelty – things might just leave a permanent mark on the soul of a willing and receptive “mon-keigh”.
I'd guess that he goes both ways and that they wanted to avoid getting the kind of criticism they got over the only gay male romance option in Kingmaker being a chaotic evil bisexual.
Nyrissa starts a fey invasion no matter what to force your hand. Besides, what I actually mean is that even a perfectly well run kingdom isn't more resilient to her bullshit than some backwater hellhole. There really aren't any story incentives to Make The Stolen Lands Great Again other than feeling good about the ending slides. The best features are the weapons and teleport circles.
To be fair, deldar sexual preferences should be ridiculously depraved according to the lore. They are the actual survivors/inheritors of the people who made Slaanesh after all (unlike craftworld eldar who were basically the hippies of the eldar race).
Exodites are really the Eldar hippies.
Killing Nyrissa kickstart the final act, no ?
You know what I mean. The endgame where you're forced to go to the House. Technically it's the fifth act I guess.
It doesn't really matter how well-run a country is if there's an active magical menace trying to make it collapse.
SoZ was cool, eat a dick.
They would have made it into something close (they even had the actual HoMM devs) if all you phaggots hadn’t made it so obvious that you’d bitch and moan about whatever they did that they didn’t bother.
I found it best of the 3 NWN2 games. It felt most like BG1 which is my favorite IE game.SoZ was cool, eat a dick.
"Minigame Suxxors!" is a different kind of nerfbat but that's what it is all the same. If you don't want your Trading Empire/Spaceward Ho! piece of this game strangled in the crib before it can get the development it needs to function properly you're going to have to revise the conventional wisdom on the previous games.
Regongar, Daeran was the update. And Sosiel.
If you got more romance point with Octavia than him, he offers her to you in an unavoidable capital dialogue.
CRPGs need to be vast for your choices to matter, says Warhammer 40K: Rogue Trader dev
"That's the reason why our game is so long."
Earlier this week I attended a hands-off preview for Owlcat's forthcoming CRPG Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader, which is shaping up nicely, inasmuch as there's anything "nice" about a Warhammer 40,000 game. Rogue Trader is a party-based affair in which you play a sort of Warhammer East India Company, tasked with flipping outlying worlds to the Imperium. In order to carry out this goal, you're granted a lot more individual license than most human residents of the 40K universe. You can, for instance, recruit ungodly xenos to your grimdark troupe, operate a private armada, and even colonise planets and turn them into your own personal piggybank. Just watch you don't push the whole "heresy" thing too far.
I'll have more for you on the subject soonish, but here's an interesting advance snippet from my interview with Owlcat's creative director Alexander Mishulin, in which we discussed what really distinguishes a CRPG from other kinds of role-playing game. According to Mishulin, it's all about designing for choices with consequences that genuinely run the entire length of the game, without (somehow) getting lost in the narrative undergrowth.
"In our opinion, the focus we put in our games is on crises, consequences and reactions," Mishulin told me. "So when you make a decision, you should be able to see what it leads to, and you should be able to see your companions react to your particular decision, whether they like it or not. Sometimes the consequences should be rather harsh, or hard to deal with." He gave the example of Space Marine and Inquisitor characters leaving your Rogue Trader party, and even becoming ferocious enemies, if you flirt a little too conspicuously with aliens and blasphemers.
"I'm not saying that all of your decisions have so much impact on your party and other characters - it would be rather difficult to play!" Mishulin added. "But there are some very important decisions you can make and face the consequences throughout the gameplay that go all the way to the epilogues."
Having choices that take a while to play out naturally requires Owlcat's CRPGs to be on the lengthy side: Rogue Trader is designed to last 100 hours or so. "That's the reason why our game is so long, because we have to have space for this, if you're making those kind of decisions," Mishulin said. "Of course, there are some direct consequences, but it's far more interesting when some of the consequences are delayed, and you face them further into the game, and you understand how it is all connected together. Of course it's not the only reason - another is that we just like to have a lot of features and content, but yeah, we're really interested in decisions, consequences and reactions."
One question all this leaves me with is: what's the most effective way to ensure that we can always trace the evolution and outcomes of choices we've made across 100 hours of play, particularly if we take a break? I've had to pause my Baldur's Gate 3 playthrough, for instance, what with all the Starfield in the air right now, and with every day that passes, I'm aware that certain cause-and-effect chains are dissipating from my grey matter. At the very least, when I fire the game up again, I'll have to reacquaint myself with the logic behind my character progression and equipment. Give it a week, and I'll probably have forgotten who I'm supposed to be romancing, or why exactly Gale keeps eating my gloves.
RPGs do have various, well-established generic means of tracking or mapping the bespoke narrative you piece together in the course of playing them: from bog-standard conversation and quest logs, to more colourful lingering effects such as your good and bad deeds being writ large in a character's appearance, a la Fable, or the player acquiring certain gear from particular decisions. I'm not sure any CRPG or other-RPG developer has ever nailed this, however, and the bulkier the game, the greater the stress I feel about keeping all my nested good/bad calls in view. Anyway, I'll have more for you on Rogue Trader in the grim darkness of the far future (next week).
