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

[Yosharian]

Alright, I may not agree with your verdict but I will grant you that you've earned the right to pronounce it

 

[ga♥]

Little harsh...

Let's just say I've played Owlslop for a bit.

So far, haven't noticed any tactical depth.

And are you one of the guys who left a negative review on steam with the over9000 hours played?

 

[Lyre Mors]

I can hardly understand putting 500 hours into a singleplayer game over the course of a few years, let alone 2000. Absolutely batshit insane. Play the plethora of other games out there and enjoy varied experiences.

 

[Cryomancer]

Little harsh...

Let's just say I've played Owlslop for a bit.

So far, haven't noticed any tactical depth.

The game was launched in December 7, 2023. 222 days ago from this message. 2040/222 means 9.18 hours on average per day playing Rogue Trader since its launch.

IDK about "tactical depth" but certainly the game worth your time.

I have 2.3k hours in DDO.

Not to judge you. I have 1,314.2 hours on it. But I play DDO in almost a decade.

I can hardly understand putting 500 hours into a singleplayer game over the course of a few years, let alone 2000. Absolutely batshit insane. Play the plethora of other games out there and enjoy varied experiences.

If the game is highly moddable, I can understand. Mount & Blade is already a masterpiece. You have mods for everything, WW1, Star Wars, Phantasy...

 

[Heroic Liberator]

I can hardly understand putting 500 hours into a singleplayer game over the course of a few years, let alone 2000. Absolutely batshit insane. Play the plethora of other games out there and enjoy varied experiences.

If you enjoy the gameplay loop, why not? Easier to play more of a good thing when you just want to relax rather than taking risks with other stuff. Doesn't mean that you should only play one thing, but it's nice to have the video game equivalent of a comfort food that you can go for when you feel like it.

 

[Lyre Mors]

If you enjoy the gameplay loop, why not? Easier to play more of a good thing when you just want to relax rather than taking risks with other stuff. Doesn't mean that you should only play one thing, but it's nice to have the video game equivalent of a comfort food that you can go for when you feel like it.

I get that, and more power to you if that's the case. I just feel like a lot of people who get burnt out on gaming in general fall into this comfort loop, with their growing disdain of gaming to be attributed to their own unconscious unwillingness to try new things.

 

[Harthwain]

The game was launched in December 7, 2023. 222 days ago from this message. 2040/222 means 9.18 hours on average per day playing Rogue Trader since its launch.

IDK about "tactical depth" but certainly the game worth your time.

The screenshot is for Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous though, not Rogue Trader? But even so, 2040 hours = 85 full days spent on nothing else but playing the game.

But I play DDO in almost a decade.

What's DDO?

 

[Heroic Liberator]

What's DDO?

D&D Online.

 

[Heroic Liberator]

But even so, 2040 hours = 85 full days spent on nothing else but playing the game.

One must imagine Sisyphus happy...

(And probably that time is doubled for EUIV & CK2 since I've also played them a lot in pirated version.)

 

[Cryomancer]

I get that, and more power to you if that's the case. I just feel like a lot of people who get burnt out on gaming in general fall into this comfort loop, and end up attributing their hatred of gaming to their own unconscious unwillingness to try new things.

Yes, this I can't understand. Not liking something and keep playing it for literally thousands of hours.

I play good games a lot of times. I would honestly rather replay Dragon Age Origins than play Failguard. And with mods, the replayability of certain games increases exponentially. Wrath of the Righteous: I did three runs. One in the week that it launched, another after the first DLC, and another when they launched Shadowcaster. I know that even decades after OwlCat stops supporting WoTR and RT, someone, somewhere, will make a mod that will make me want to try it.

What's DDO?

Dungeons & Dragons Online: https://www.ddo.com/home

It is based on 3.5E, but not as faithful as Kingmaker and Wrath. What is interesting in the game is the quest and dungeon design. What made me invest a lot of time in it is that even pre-proton, running it in Linux was trivial. At that time, I was dual booting, but the less I need to use M$ spyware/bloatware, the better

 

[MjKorz]

The good part of WotR that ensures very high replayability due to an overabundance of character archetypes has nothing to do with Owlclowns, they just copied the already existing content from tabletop and whatever homebrew archetypes they introduced were either complete garbage or ridiculously OP, which shows they have no idea how to work with the ruleset. The one and only thing Owlclowns introduced that has any value are the mythic paths since the mythic abilities in the original adventure path were handled so poorly that literally any change would've been an improvement. Still, Owlclown implementation of mythic paths is extremely imbalanced in terms of game mechanics with abilities ranging from extremely OP ones acquired early to useless ones acquired late, which, once again, shows that Owlclowns have absolutely no clue how to work with the ruleset.

The narrative component in all Owlclown games is just infantile drivel aimed at endlessly fellating the player - a power fantasy for incels with plenty of "waifus" to "romance" and drool at. If you look at some of the owlslop discussion threads outside of the 'dex, most of them consist of endless waifu shitposting which paints a pretty clear picture of the audience Owlclown games are aimed at. Mentally ill Owlclown "writers" injecting copious amounts of cuckshit into their own romances only adds fuel to the trashfire.

The lack of tactical depth in Owlclown games stems from their inability to understand and work with the ruleset(s) and utter incompetence in designing encounters. Those who play Owlclown games on non-babby difficulties are well familiar with the fact that most of the difficulty stems from absolutely insane stat inflation. Instead of focusing on designing encounters against well-thought out groups of reasonably powerful enemies that work in synergy as an effective combat unit, Owlclowns just populate their games with endless piles of trash mobs with stats massively inflated relative to the source material and then they scale those same inflated trash mobs further by introducing higher difficulties that inflate the stats yet again.

Owlslop is the kind of gaming medium where you will encounter neither lower-level enemy parties challenging higher level player parties by working together like a fine-tuned singular organism, nor high level enemy parties using the full synergistic brunt of the ruleset to figuratively clobber the player into intellectual submission, something those well familiar with the genre could experience over a decade ago in BG2 mods such as The Ritual and Solaufein and some of the Tactics components like Kuroisan the Acid Kensai, or in games with actual tactical depth like Deadfire with its "Seeker, Slayer, Survivor" DLC that focuses on this kind of tactical party vs party combat. What you will find in Owlslop are just an endless sea of bloated trash mobs that get brainlessly chunked by auto-attacking martials, occasionally sprinkled with an extra stat-bloated "boss" that needs attack/AC/saves buffs/debuffs to defeat, depending on player party focus and composition.

While it is true that the player can build parties in different ways focusing on different tactics (e.g. martial vs caster focused) thanks to the abundance of archetypes Owlclowns copied from the source material, this does not create meaningful tactical depth for one simple reason: there is no reason to adapt your tactics, depending on the situation, no reason to be tactically flexible. Once you figure out a well-working party composition, you just steamroll the entire game with it. The biggest tactical change you might need to perform is switching one spell for another on your DC caster, depending on enemy immunities. This problem, again, stems from lack of synergistic enemy encounter design since Owlclown enemies work as separate statblocks and once you learn how to overcome those statblocks by pumping your AC/attack/spellDC/spellDamage and/or debuffing enemy AC/saves, the game's pretty much solved.

Returning to the topic of Rogue Trader, this game is a clear example of Owlclown incompetence when designing game systems. They refused to implement the tabletop combat system (which is not something I judge them negatively for), yet failed to design a competent replacement since all they did before this was copy already existing rulesets with meager attempts at homebrew additions that were mostly garbage. The result was a combat system revolving entirely around turn stacking and alpha striking, where you delete entire encounters in 1-2 game rounds by stacking endless buffs and turns on your dedicated damage dealer while the rest of the party just twirls their thumbs in terms of offense. It was so bad that Owlclowns are now desperately scrambling to redesign the entire combat system, starting with the elimination of turn stacking mechanics which should've never been in the game in the first place - proof that they never had any idea of what they were actually doing while designing the combat system.

The Rogue Trader character generation and advancement system is also heavily overburdened by an endless list of useless abilities: you have to wade through a sea of trash to find something that actually works well enough to be worth using. Why have so many abilities when most of them are outright trash? The answer is simple: they have absolutely no fucking clue what they're doing.

 

[Litmanen]

The good part of WotR that ensures very high replayability due to an overabundance of character archetypes has nothing to do with Owlclowns, they just copied the already existing content from tabletop and whatever homebrew archetypes they introduced were either complete garbage or ridiculously OP, which shows they have no idea how to work with the ruleset. The one and only thing Owlclowns introduced that has any value are the mythic paths since the mythic abilities in the original adventure path were handled so poorly that literally any change would've been an improvement. Still, Owlclown implementation of mythic paths is extremely imbalanced in terms of game mechanics with abilities ranging from extremely OP ones acquired early to useless ones acquired late, which, once again, shows that Owlclowns have absolutely no clue how to work with the ruleset.

The narrative component in all Owlclown games is just infantile drivel aimed at endlessly fellating the player - a power fantasy for incels with plenty of "waifus" to "romance" and drool at. If you look at some of the owlslop discussion threads outside of the 'dex, most of them consist of endless waifu shitposting which paints a pretty clear picture of the audience Owlclown games are aimed at. Mentally ill Owlclown "writers" injecting copious amounts of cuckshit into their own romances only adds fuel to the trashfire.

The lack of tactical depth in Owlclown games stems from their inability to understand and work with the ruleset(s) and utter incompetence in designing encounters. Those who play Owlclown games on non-babby difficulties are well familiar with the fact that most of the difficulty stems from absolutely insane stat inflation. Instead of focusing on designing encounters against well-thought out groups of reasonably powerful enemies that work in synergy as an effective combat unit, Owlclowns just populate their games with endless piles of trash mobs with stats massively inflated relative to the source material and then they scale those same inflated trash mobs further by introducing higher difficulties that inflate the stats yet again.

Owlslop is the kind of gaming medium where you will encounter neither lower-level enemy parties challenging higher level player parties by working together like a fine-tuned singular organism, nor high level enemy parties using the full synergistic brunt of the ruleset to figuratively clobber the player into intellectual submission, something those well familiar with the genre could experience over a decade ago in BG2 mods such as The Ritual and Solaufein and some of the Tactics components like Kuroisan the Acid Kensai, or in games with actual tactical depth like Deadfire with its "Seeker, Slayer, Survivor" DLC that focuses on this kind of tactical party vs party combat. What you will find in Owlslop are just an endless sea of bloated trash mobs that get brainlessly chunked by auto-attacking martials, occasionally sprinkled with an extra stat-bloated "boss" that needs attack/AC/saves buffs/debuffs to defeat, depending on player party focus and composition.

While it is true that the player can build parties in different ways focusing on different tactics (e.g. martial vs caster focused) thanks to the abundance of archetypes Owlclowns copied from the source material, this does not create meaningful tactical depth for one simple reason: there is no reason to adapt your tactics, depending on the situation, no reason to be tactically flexible. Once you figure out a well-working party composition, you just steamroll the entire game with it. The biggest tactical change you might need to perform is switching one spell for another on your DC caster, depending on enemy immunities. This problem, again, stems from lack of synergistic enemy encounter design since Owlclown enemies work as separate statblocks and once you learn how to overcome those statblocks by pumping your AC/attack/spellDC/spellDamage and/or debuffing enemy AC/saves, the game's pretty much solved.

Returning to the topic of Rogue Trader, this game is a clear example of Owlclown incompetence when designing game systems. They refused to implement the tabletop combat system (which is not something I judge them negatively for), yet failed to design a competent replacement since all they did before this was copy already existing rulesets with meager attempts at homebrew additions that were mostly garbage. The result was a combat system revolving entirely around turn stacking and alpha striking, where you delete entire encounters in 1-2 game rounds by stacking endless buffs and turns on your dedicated damage dealer while the rest of the party just twirls their thumbs in terms of offense. It was so bad that Owlclowns are now desperately scrambling to redesign the entire combat system, starting with the elimination of turn stacking mechanics which should've never been in the game in the first place - proof that they never had any idea of what they were actually doing while designing the combat system.

The Rogue Trader character generation and advancement system is also heavily overburdened by an endless list of useless abilities: you have to wade through a sea of trash to find something that actually works well enough to be worth using. Why have so many abilities when most of them are outright trash? The answer is simple: they have absolutely no fucking clue what they're doing.

Played 2000+ hours one of their games.

You're sick. Mentally.

 

[Haplo]

Owlslop is the kind of gaming medium where you will encounter neither lower-level enemy parties challenging higher level player parties by working together like a fine-tuned singular organism, nor high level enemy parties using the full synergistic brunt of the ruleset to figuratively clobber the player into intellectual submission, something those well familiar with the genre could experience over a decade ago in BG2 mods such as The Ritual and Solaufein and some of the Tactics components like Kuroisan the Acid Kensai, or in games with actual tactical depth like Deadfire with its "Seeker, Slayer, Survivor" DLC that focuses on this kind of tactical party vs party combat. What you will find in Owlslop are just an endless sea of bloated trash mobs that get brainlessly chunked by auto-attacking martials, occasionally sprinkled with an extra stat-bloated "boss" that needs attack/AC/saves buffs/debuffs to defeat, depending on player party focus and composition.

Comparing vanilla game chalenge with fan created difficulty mods for another...

 

[MjKorz]

Owlslop is the kind of gaming medium where you will encounter neither lower-level enemy parties challenging higher level player parties by working together like a fine-tuned singular organism, nor high level enemy parties using the full synergistic brunt of the ruleset to figuratively clobber the player into intellectual submission, something those well familiar with the genre could experience over a decade ago in BG2 mods such as The Ritual and Solaufein and some of the Tactics components like Kuroisan the Acid Kensai, or in games with actual tactical depth like Deadfire with its "Seeker, Slayer, Survivor" DLC that focuses on this kind of tactical party vs party combat. What you will find in Owlslop are just an endless sea of bloated trash mobs that get brainlessly chunked by auto-attacking martials, occasionally sprinkled with an extra stat-bloated "boss" that needs attack/AC/saves buffs/debuffs to defeat, depending on player party focus and composition.

Comparing vanilla game chalenge with fan created difficulty mods for another...

It's not about the difficulty level per se, it's about encounter design. Encounter design that was implemented by people over a decade ago.

 

[ga♥]

or in games with actual tactical depth like Deadfire

 

[MjKorz]

or in games with actual tactical depth like Deadfire

Deadfire has a whole DLC dedicated to tactical party vs party combat:

Looks like someone never played the game.

 

[Cryomancer]

I have 5000 hours in Owlcat games. Here is a 50 page essay about why they sucks.

A Tldr version of your post.

Only a nitpick about the homebrew stuff. I liked some homebrew stuff on wotr. Like shadowcaster.

About rt, I agree 100% with your critique. But I am waiting for someone to fix the gamea

 

[Elttharion]

Will this only have one season pass? Or is there more DLC planned?

 

[Heroic Liberator]

Will this only have one season pass? Or is there more DLC planned?

Given their DLC model for WotR, I'm assuming that it depends on how well those two associated with the current season pass will sell.

Paging Owlcat_Eyler in case he can confirm though.

 

[MjKorz]

I have 5000 hours in Owlcat games. Here is a 50 page essay about why they sucks.

A Tldr version of your post.

Only a nitpick about the homebrew stuff. I liked some homebrew stuff on wotr. Like shadowcaster.

About rt, I agree 100% with your critique. But I am waiting for someone to fix the gamea

Knowing Owlclowns, you'll be waiting for years.

And they completely butchered Shadowcaster by making its Profane INT bonus not stack with the Profane Ascension buff.

 

[Wulfric Pinewood]

What the fuck you all quarelling at? Owlcat made fine rpgs, both Pathfinders are great and Rogue Trader is just sweet.
Details like +5 or - 3 to a stats doesn't really matter.

 

[MjKorz]

What the fuck you all quarelling at? Owlcat made fine rpgs, both Pathfinders are great and Rogue Trader is just sweet.
Details like +5 or - 3 to a stats doesn't really matter.

Fine RPGs with near-zero class/race/background reactivity? More like fine WEGs.

 

[Cryomancer]

And they completely butchered Shadowcaster by making its Profane INT bonus not stack with the Profane Ascension buff.

There is still a lot of cool stuff in a class, besides profane ascension only comes in late chapter 3, you still benefit from increased int before ch3. I also don't pick a (sub)class because it is powerful; I pick when it is interesting to play. I have played Kingmaker on unfair as a Thassilonian necromancer (link to the thread with videos). And this subclass is considered the worst wiz subclass.

What the fuck you all quarelling at? Owlcat made fine rpgs, both Pathfinders are great and Rogue Trader is just sweet.
Details like +5 or - 3 to a stats doesn't really matter.

Yes!!! They are perfect masterpieces? No.

They are way better than any AAA sh*t? Yes.

Simple as that.

As much as WH40K has problems, it still plays better than Forspoken, Forspoken 2 (aka Flintlock), Dragon Age Failguard, etc.

 

[Yosharian]

Details like +5 or - 3 to a stats doesn't really matter.

Ok now you went too far

 

[Haplo]

I have 5000 hours in Owlcat games. Here is a 50 page essay about why they sucks.

A Tldr version of your post.

Only a nitpick about the homebrew stuff. I liked some homebrew stuff on wotr. Like shadowcaster.

About rt, I agree 100% with your critique. But I am waiting for someone to fix the gamea

Knowing Owlclowns, you'll be waiting for years.

And they completely butchered Shadowcaster by making its Profane INT bonus not stack with the Profane Ascension buff.

Maybe consider not being a simp