Warhammer Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader - turn-based Warhammer 40k RPG from Owlcat Games - now with Void Shadows DLC

[ArchAngel]

the designer could not be arsed to make an interesting map or good placement, simply drop 3-4 of them, inflate stats and you're gold.

It's Owlcat, their last 2 games should have told you to expect this

Some people might have assumed that if it was their own system and a full turn base, the design would be better.

They inflated PF enemies's own stats to the point where a humie bandit has 21 AC.

Owlcat is russian. They love da pain.

That is OK because in PF you do not murder everyone on turn 1.. Also enemies do not murder half your team on turn 1 if you give them a turn..

In pathfinder if you don't pre-buff your party, the enemies will murder everyone on turn one.

The only difference is in Rogue trader there is no pre-buff.

Not really. They might more easily disable some of them with CC abilities but not murder.

 

[Rhobar121]

the designer could not be arsed to make an interesting map or good placement, simply drop 3-4 of them, inflate stats and you're gold.

It's Owlcat, their last 2 games should have told you to expect this

Some people might have assumed that if it was their own system and a full turn base, the design would be better.

They inflated PF enemies's own stats to the point where a humie bandit has 21 AC.

Owlcat is russian. They love da pain.

That is OK because in PF you do not murder everyone on turn 1.. Also enemies do not murder half your team on turn 1 if you give them a turn..

Fight with reflections - one of the enemies got the initiative, ran halfway across the map and killed practically the entire team except Ulfar with one pistol burst. Of course, the place was such that you couldn't spread out properly.
In terms of mechanics, it's probably the worst turn-based game I've ever played.
I already prefer the armor and chains CC system in DoS2 10 times more than this shit and that says a lot how good this system is.

I wonder if any designer has played even one fight beyond the first act and said it was a good design.
If he did this, it means he is an incompetent idiot who has never seen the TB system in his life.

 

[Rhobar121]

A guide on how to properly implement an enemy that can one shoot your character.
1) You don't do it.
2) If you really have to, don't let him do it in the 1st turn.
The solution is simple. In the first turn, he chooses the character he is aiming at and at the beginning of the next turn he shoots. Thanks to this, you have the entire turn to hide safely behind the obstacle.
That's how the fuck you design enemies like that.

 

[ArchAngel]

A guide on how to properly implement an enemy that can one shoot your character.
1) You don't do it.
2) If you really have to, don't let him do it in the 1st turn.
The solution is simple. In the first turn, he chooses the character he is aiming at and at the beginning of the next turn he shoots. Thanks to this, you have the entire turn to hide safely behind the obstacle.
That's how the fuck you design enemies like that.

They gave enemy same weapons with similar damage bonuses to players. They also gave enemies 400 to 2000 HP while players go from 100 to 150... balancing with Vodka..
Even funnier is that if you get a first turn you still kill everyone before they get a turn.. how did they expect us to live with 150 HP tanks if we do not abuse going first tactics where you do not even need tanks in that case :D

 

[Dayyālu]

The only difference is in Rogue trader there is no pre-buff.

To avoid pre-buffing, you have to buff every party member every turn. Operators have, what, 10-12 skills at level 40? At a certain point you start playing suboptimally because repeating the Litany of Combat Buffing For Optimal Striking every goddamn turn gets bothersome. Again, less noticeable on lower levels when you don't have 12+ buffs.

balancing with Vodka..
Even funnier is that if you get a first turn you still kill everyone before they get a turn.. how did they expect us to live with 150 HP tanks if we do not abuse going first tactics where you do not even need tanks in that case :D

There's no middle ground in combat: or you die as the enemy combo engine starts (that's often not a combo engine, merely broken rules that apply only to that specific enemy because coherency is apparently absurd) or they die as YOUR combo engine starts. Essentially the proof of poor balancing, poor playtesting, poor design. The Wounds inflation is the result of the desperation of having designed a system that's completely lethal with a completely braindead AI: the opponents can't make a combo engine work, can't be scripted for a battle because that will require effort, so they get tons of HP and weirdo rules in a desperate attempt to cope.

Reminder that an Avatar of Kaine in the Tabletop Rogue Trader has 145 wounds. Here a Greater Demon has 7000. And nonetheless it melts in a single turn of concentrated fire. I repeat, I'd pay money to speak with the guy who "designed" this.

 

[AwesomeButton]

simply drop 3-4 of them, inflate stats and you're gold. It's not that they are difficult, it's that they make obvious the guy behind the combat encounters didn't give a shit/didn't have a clue.

It's Owlcat, their last 2 games should have told you to expect this

All triggers broke at the start of Ch 4 for me. Lots of zipping around on my invisible hoverchair and nothing else.

Yes, this is completely within the range of my expectations from Owlcat in particular, and from contemporary RPG designers in general.

Here is the question though. If I'm going to sit down to play Badly Designed RPG X, what am I hoping to get out of the experience?

Some people say "the story is shit, but who cares, the gameplay is great", others are on the opposite pole - "combat is unbalanced, the RPG systems are not tested, it's buggy, but the story makes it worth going through it all". Some are in a third camp - "it's set in a very cool, or very rarely used setting (WH40K), so forgive all its sins".

But at the end of the day neither part of said RPG X is up to par, nor even works properly. The story is a formulaic refuse-bin-level Young Adult novel drivel, where neither plot, nor characters, nor style are above mediocre. But on top of that mediocrity, you are also settled with a ruleset that's overtly broken. You have to house-rule against exploits left and right, and ruleset features are aded with no thought given to a general vision.

You all know what I mean because you've all played those games - not only Owlcat's Pathfinder RPGs, but also BG3, the PoEs, and I guess InXile's games too. I also know the regular excuses brought up by both devs and apologists of these games, so I won't go over them.

The conclusion I draw from what seems to be the "new normal" since at least the KS era is that if I'm going to waste my time on a videogame, I have two sane options. The first is some AAA interactive movie pseudo-game, where I can at least gawk at production values and eye candy. The second, if I'm in the mood for an actual "game" RPG, play an indie project with a core development team of no more than 20 people - Battle Brothers, Underrail, Iron Tower Studio games, Vagrus, etc. The middle ground between these extremes seems filled with developers who can't manage their scope, and games that feel too samey and are too expensive for the quality of the experience.

 

[CthuluIsSpy]

So how is it? Is it gud or ghey?
At least compared to OwlFinder?

 

[Dayyālu]

Some are in a third camp - "it's set in a very cool, or very rarely used setting (WH40K), so forgive all its sins".

, play an indie project with a core development team of no more than 20 people

I'm in the third camp, but I agree with you wholeheartedly. I don't have much time for gaming nowadays, this year I kinda finished what.... probably 2-3 games. If I wasn't almost bedridden during my winter vacations I would probably not have reached Chapter 5 of Rogue Trader. To make a comparison, I bought Wrath at the beginning of the past year and managed to get to Act 2.

Now I'm here to finish this because I have 100 hours, of which roughly 50 were....adequate. I'm now here to see how deep the rabbit hole goes. Even if they are completely different games, my brain is making comparisons with The Troop, a WW2 strategy game with a delightful combat system and very good AI developed by what, two guys, and I wonder how the fuck you can have a 450+ development team and no one has any clue or no one cares.

So how is it? Is it gud or ghey?

ITS AN EXPERIENCE MY BROTHER

 

[Dishonoredbr]

What puzzles me is how often enemies keep hitting despite certain character having agility or melee leveled up to the max

Sometimes I wonder if the game is actually rigged towards the enemies because yesterday some weird shit happened.

I shoot at a Sniper 5 times , 35% hit chance , yet not a single one hit the target.

Same sniper shot at me with 11% chance and actually hit me.. In the same fight , some enemy was able to hit Cassia despite having literaly NEGATIVE hit chance.

But the worst offenders are any enemy that burst fire. They have DEADLY accurate aim , it doesn't matter if you have full or half cover, sometimes they kill your characters before you can take a turn, from 15 cells or more burst firing with 5% hit chance.

 

[ArchAngel]

What puzzles me is how often enemies keep hitting despite certain character having agility or melee leveled up to the max

Sometimes I wonder if the game is actually rigged towards the enemies because yesterday some weird shit happened.

I shoot at a Sniper 5 times , 35% hit chance , yet not a single one hit the target.

Same sniper shot at me with 11% chance and actually hit me.. In the same fight , some enemy was able to hit Cassia despite having literaly NEGATIVE hit chance.

But the worst offenders are any enemy that burst fire. They have DEADLY accurate aim , it doesn't matter if you have full or half cover, sometimes they kill your characters before you can take a turn, from 15 cells or more burst firing with 5% hit chance.

It is because Burst fire has 100% hit chance and only checks if bullet goes in your direction and then checks your character dodge. Since those same characters usually get high perception and other difficulty bonuses your dodge is usually really low or 0.

 

[Takamori]

Guess math is lost in video games. With very few exceptions.

 

[Shaja]

How healthy is chapter 4 after the latest hotfixes?

 

[Yosharian]

What puzzles me is how often enemies keep hitting despite certain character having agility or melee leveled up to the max

Sometimes I wonder if the game is actually rigged towards the enemies because yesterday some weird shit happened.

I shoot at a Sniper 5 times , 35% hit chance , yet not a single one hit the target.

Same sniper shot at me with 11% chance and actually hit me.. In the same fight , some enemy was able to hit Cassia despite having literaly NEGATIVE hit chance.

But the worst offenders are any enemy that burst fire. They have DEADLY accurate aim , it doesn't matter if you have full or half cover, sometimes they kill your characters before you can take a turn, from 15 cells or more burst firing with 5% hit chance.

Owlcat would never completely fuck up the display of hit chances in the UI, nope

 

[Saark]

Reminder that an Avatar of Kaine in the Tabletop Rogue Trader has 145 wounds. Here a Greater Demon has 7000. And nonetheless it melts in a single turn of concentrated fire. I repeat, I'd pay money to speak with the guy who "designed" this.

I think this is a general issue that is present in most if not all cRPGs these days. Progression of the story and a rising challenge rating of enemies is not enough to make the video-gaming crowd feel more powerful and make them happy as the game progresses. Instead they need to have noticeable and visible progression in their stats as well. It's why just upgrading to a +1 or +2 weapon felt meaningful back in the day, because players weren't expecting double the damage from a powerful weapon.

But with all the dogshit non-RPGs in the past that introduced systems like equipment and gear and took liberties in adding basic RPG system to their game, gamers are now conditioned to bigger upgrades in their gear and character progression. As a result, you need to bloat most enemies with their stats and/or damage. Combine it with the inability of developers to create a new storyline that doesn't start with you immediately fighting enemies that should kill you in a single hit, and gamers' low attention span that requires an instant feeling of "OMG THIS IS SO EPIC", and what you're left with is games where you end up fighting githyanki or space marines 5 hours into the game -- even though these enemies should mop the floor with you in a single round of combat.


More on topic: Finished the game, restarted from scratch at the start of Chapter 4 after noticing that I bricked my game on multiple ends (no Foulstone locks you out of multiple capstone buildings on other planets, for example). Got about 140hours out of it, so not too shabby. Bugs are annoying and noticeable, but I didn't run into anything game breaking. Left Ulfar and Marazhai in Commoragh, killed Idira the first chance I got, and bee-lining for Yrliet made me miss out on Jae as well on my second run. No big loss on any of them since I saw almost all of their side content in my first run of the game already. Ending slides were majorly bugged though, which is a bummer.

I still quite liked the game, and breaking the combat is part of the fun for me in Owlcat games. Watching my Psyker clean up entire battlefields in a single turn felt silly but also kind of appropriate. The pacing of the game is quite off, sadly, and many of the planets and zones that are accessible in Chapter 2 could've been moved into Chapter 4 in order to make the chapters somewhat similar in length. Necron appearance was nice, but sadly also underwhelming. Could've needed at least one sentient Necron character.

One of my biggest gripes isn't with the bugs, but with how the story is being told in the last ~10 hours of the game. Vast amounts of exposition are thrown at you via characters on their deathbeds, which spend 10 real-time minutes explaining intricate plot details to you. Whereas you previously pieced them together bit by bit, you suddenly had a few NPCs you never heard of or interacted with before, tell you a bunch of information you had no way of knowing (and theres no way you're finding it out by yourself if they took this information with them to the grave). This is just... shoddy writing, really, and they can do better.

Still enjoyed the game more than BG3. Toybox makes up for some of the balancing or resource scarcity issues, which is fine by me. It's like slightly adjusting a campaign as a DM to remove some player frustration.

Good game, and in ~6months time it'll be one of the most fun experiences you can have playing cRPGs, imo. Hope we get to see more 40k RPGs as well, Dark Heresy or Deathwatch would've been a better pick though I think.

 

[REhorror]

Decided to spare the xeno, because she DID lead us outta there.
Give her the lashes tho.

Heinrix seems more concern of the Dark Eldar I have brought onboard, and he's goddamn right, too bad I can't pull a fast one on him before leaving Commoragh.

This game has an issue with choices and consequences.

 

[jf8350143]

Decided to spare the xeno, because she DID lead us outta there.
Give her the lashes tho.

Heinrix seems more concern of the Dark Eldar I have brought onboard, and he's goddamn right, too bad I can't pull a fast one on him before leaving Commoragh.

This game has an issue with choices and consequences.

You can just give him to Heinrix the moment you back to your void ship.

 

[ArchAngel]

Abelard, tell the Owlcat_Eyler people that I want my patch now or they are going to be turned into servitors and be put to better use on lower decks of this ship.

 

[REhorror]

Decided to spare the xeno, because she DID lead us outta there.
Give her the lashes tho.

Heinrix seems more concern of the Dark Eldar I have brought onboard, and he's goddamn right, too bad I can't pull a fast one on him before leaving Commoragh.

This game has an issue with choices and consequences.

You can just give him to Heinrix the moment you back to your void ship.

Yep I know.

Would be a cool option tho.

He's stepping near the webway and we go "oh no you don't".

 

[Zariusz]

So how Marazhai recruitment goes "normally"? I refused cooperating from the start and resisted whole trial, told him to fuck off during anatomical opera visitation and slayed him on arena.

 

[REhorror]

So how Marazhai recruitment goes "normally"? I refused cooperating from the start and resisted whole trial, told him to fuck off during anatomical opera visitation and slayed him on arena.

You are supposed to make a deal with him during the encounter in the Opera.

Too bad you cannot betray him mid way and has to let him all the ways to the ship.

 

[Shaja]

So how Marazhai recruitment goes "normally"? I refused cooperating from the start and resisted whole trial, told him to fuck off during anatomical opera visitation and slayed him on arena.

Not much further into chapter 4 but so far he´s a trouble maker. And of course he becomes mad during the wrap jumping because Drukhari don´t have the enough healthy souls like the Craftworlds to meditate and avoid Slaanesh influence. So he goes murdering the personnel.
I appreciate the option to keep him as companion but from the roleplaying standpoint, it doesn´t make much sense because:

-Iconoclast: You would execute him because he goes murdering your staff.
-Dogmatic: You would execute him because He´s a filthy xenos.
-Heretic: You would execute him because Drukhari are also anti chaos.

 

[ArchAngel]

So how Marazhai recruitment goes "normally"? I refused cooperating from the start and resisted whole trial, told him to fuck off during anatomical opera visitation and slayed him on arena.

Not much further into chapter 4 but so far he´s a trouble maker. And of course he becomes mad during the wrap jumping because Drukhari don´t have the enough healthy souls like the Craftworlds to meditate and avoid Slaanesh influence. So he goes murdering the personnel.
I appreciate the option to keep him as companion but from the roleplaying standpoint, it doesn´t make much sense because:

-Iconoclast: You would execute him because he goes murdering your staff.
-Dogmatic: You would execute him because He´s a filthy xenos.
-Heretic: You would execute him because Drukhari are also anti chaos.

Chaos are not one united faction. Each does whatever they want and need to get more power. Getting more power (or freedom) is only common thing for them.

Also Iconoclast can keep him just so he can "stick it to the dogmatic types". Where did you get this idea that Iconoclast = good guy. It just means "One who attacks and seeks to overthrow traditional or popular ideas or institutions"

 

[Harthwain]

Where did you get this idea that Iconoclast = good guy.

Because often the Iconoclast is about the well-being of the people. You see it in the very first choice, when you can lead people away from danger. You can kill the rebel on Janus to spare him from torture. You can convince Heinrix to shut down the Chaos computer to prevent feeding it even more people, etc. It is the most humane/benevolent alignment of them all, although there are also some stupid choices associated with it as well.

Also, this:

Belief in the value of human life and freedom. Faith in the power of good will, capable of overcoming the horrors and dangers of the universe without the need for artificial prohibitions. The desire to seek out common ground and compromise rather than uncompromising destruction.

 

[Dishonoredbr]

Chaos are not one united faction. Each does whatever they want and need to get more power. Getting more power (or freedom) is only common thing for them.

In this case Drukhari don't do Chaos because otherwise they fucking DIE or more like , Slaanesh get a hold of them.

 

[Fedora Master]

Also a thing the game doesn't react to: Psykers are a big no-no in Commoragh.

E: I like how the Iconocuck gets benches on the bridge like this is some fucking Google office. Why not have soccer table there too?