Warhammer Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader Pre-Release Thread [GAME RELEASED, GO TO NEW THREAD]

[Infinitron]

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/cr...to-matter-says-warhammer-40k-rogue-trader-dev

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).

 

[sebas]

From everything I've seen in the Beta this game looks like a love letter to Fallout (from a gameplay pov). Great stuff. See you all in release date+2years when they're gonna have most of the bugs ironed out.

 

[Desiderius]

It's not in your face beyond being there at all.

It's there because sexuality (including deviant sexuality) was injected into the genre, but it's easily shut down because even the devs know its wrong on some level even if their brainworms won't let them think about why. It has nothing to do with inclusion.

If you're going to have deviant sexuality an Orcish prisoner is the natural place for it, as is a decadent noble scarred by a powerful entity taking advantage of a situation that left him vulnerable to enter him and exploit him for its own purposes. Similar story with Astarion. These of course are real things, but not all real things belong in every genre. Sosiel was fake on multiple levels.

I'm sure Infinitron will remove this post, but will still be interesting to see if Rogue Trader can avoid this trap altogether. Probably not. Yet.

He invites you to a threesome 5 minutes after you've met him and Octavia. He also leaves the strong impression that he wouldn't mind banging/getting banged by the MC solely. On top of that his favorite food is a Succulent Sausage which is also pretty gay. Not that much in your face tho.

Is anyone actually playing the beta for this currently?

I've been watching Retcon Raider on YouTube. He has 16 parts of 45~ minutes each uploaded currently. Hasn't released a Rogue Trader video in awhile but his style should be to the liking of most codexers.

And he’s easily shut down at which point he switches to bad dirty puns, as a Orcish half-wit would be expected to. You can even eventually get him to CN from CE and reconnect him with his clan/dad.

BG3 just made it much harder to barge in on the Bugbear rutting the Giant Ogre.

Doesn’t belong there at all and they’re slowly cluing in to that.

 

[The_Mask]

It is rather sad that WOTR curbed my enthusiasm for any day 1 purchase. But I sincerely hope everything turns out well for Owlcat. As far as I can tell, most of the people working there are nice people.

 

[Dishonoredbr]

I'd probably pick Kalikke or Kanerah.

 

[Aarwolf]

If I had to do it again I'd probably pick Kalikke or Kanerah.

You can have both, but it's little buggy. Sometimes you have to bang one sister many, many times, to trigger the other one (they literally switches on the fly when you're in bed) and their romance spans nearly all game.

 

[Axel_am]

You can have both, but it's little buggy. Sometimes you have to bang one sister many, many times, to trigger the other one (they literally switches on the fly when you're in bed) and their romance spans nearly all game.

Maybe this game is better than I thought.

 

[Infinitron]

 

[skaraher]

You can have both, but it's little buggy. Sometimes you have to bang one sister many, many times, to trigger the other one (they literally switches on the fly when you're in bed) and their romance spans nearly all game.

Maybe this game is better than I thought.

You can only bang one of the sister tho (evil fire one) the other is more of a platonic thing. You still end up married with both in true Islamic style in the slides.

 

[Space Satan]

DARK ELDAR FELLOWSHIP BUILD

 

[Infinitron]

 

[razvedchiki]

i wonder how they will balance the space marine companion, i have seen necrons as enemies so he will come around when they wake up?

 

[Trithne]

i wonder how they will balance the space marine companion, i have seen necrons as enemies so he will come around when they wake up?

One way is that he takes up a 2x2 space, so manoeuvring around him will be trickier and more enemies can melee him.

 

[mediocrepoet]

You can have both, but it's little buggy. Sometimes you have to bang one sister many, many times, to trigger the other one (they literally switches on the fly when you're in bed) and their romance spans nearly all game.

Maybe this game is better than I thought.

You can only bang one of the sister tho (evil fire one) the other is more of a platonic thing. You still end up married with both in true Islamic style in the slides.

It's been awhile, but I'm pretty sure that the writing implied that they shift while you're in her, so...

 

[skaraher]

They dont shift into another they teleport. So unfortunately no switch sex with arabic sisters.

 

[mediocrepoet]

They dont shift into another they teleport. So unfortunately no switch sex between arabic sisters.

I prefer my head canon, thankyouverymuch.

But I think you're right.

 

[frajaq]

need this game to come out to wash my mouth out of Starfield

 

[Jaedar]

He invites you to a threesome 5 minutes after you've met him and Octavia.

Yeah, I remember this. I dumped him and Octavia from the party immediately at that point. No big loss for him since he's shit, but octavia is the closest to a full arcane caster among the companions.

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/cr...to-matter-says-warhammer-40k-rogue-trader-dev

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).

And yet ITS games manage to have good CnC while being 10 hours. VtmB is famed for its clan reactivity, and it's also short.

I think it's an especially poor argument for RT because the very nature of the beast is that you spend weeks/months travelling between every planet, which gives situations a long time to develop/resolve after you interact with them.

I'm also a bit afraid because iirc they said wrothfinder was only made to take 60 hours or so, and it can easily take double that. Please owlcat, I'm not asking for a 10 hour game, but maybe you could find it within you to cut down the pointless combats and massive dungeons and make a 30-40 hour game?

 

[SpaceWizardz]

i wonder how they will balance the space marine companion

First and foremost he's HUEG as Trithne said.
Secondly, it seems like he's too aggressive/short-fused to tolerate diplomatic/coercive outcomes, there's a part where I skill checked my way into getting two dark eldar cabal representatives to fight eachother instead of me and he stepped in, said "nope, this shit is boring" and pulled us into a fight.

 

[Nortar]

i wonder how they will balance the space marine companion

First and foremost he's HUEG as Trithne said.
Secondly, it seems like he's too aggressive/short-fused to tolerate diplomatic/coercive outcomes, there's a part where I skill checked my way into getting two dark eldar cabal representatives to fight eachother instead of me and he stepped in, said "nope, this shit is boring" and pulled us into a fight.

So what is the downside?

 

[Reinhardt]

oh, another romance thread on codex. not surprised.

 

[Irxy]

i wonder how they will balance the space marine companion

First and foremost he's HUEG as Trithne said.
Secondly, it seems like he's too aggressive/short-fused to tolerate diplomatic/coercive outcomes, there's a part where I skill checked my way into getting two dark eldar cabal representatives to fight eachother instead of me and he stepped in, said "nope, this shit is boring" and pulled us into a fight.

So what is the downside?

Your protagonist looks like a manlet next to him. He also get Argenta.

 

[Reinhardt]

Secondly, it seems like he's too aggressive/short-fused to tolerate diplomatic/coercive outcomes, there's a part where I skill checked my way into getting two dark eldar cabal representatives to fight eachother instead of me and he stepped in, said "nope, this shit is boring" and pulled us into a fight.

based fleabag

 

[HeatEXTEND]

Secondly, it seems like he's too aggressive/short-fused

I fucking hate ooga-booga Space Marines, they should be disciplined warrior monks (room for specific exceptions obviously), not gears of war meatheads damnit.
Astartes nailed this vibe nicely.

 

[Trithne]

Secondly, it seems like he's too aggressive/short-fused

I fucking hate ooga-booga Space Marines, they should be disciplined warrior monks (room for specific exceptions obviously), not gears of war meatheads damnit.
Astartes nailed this vibe nicely.

You're right, but he is a Space Wolf specifically, and I'll accept that nonsense from them because they are, without a doubt, the worst chapter.