Warhammer Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader - turn-based Warhammer 40k RPG from Owlcat Games - Void Shadows DLC coming August 8th

[Donald Gordon Lord]

and there's too much back to back unavoidable combat with no alternatives

Dude, you are playing Warhammer 40k, what did you expect, a My Little Pony story where you tell bad guy to stand down and be good?

(Iconoclast) Calligos, you shouldn’t kill the Aeldari

<plus>

Gov Dykeo, murder orgies with kids is like bad, you shouldn’t do that!

<plus>

Faglord EdgeElf, killing is bad you know so don’t do it, k, now let’s go visit the planet you just attacked


Choose your flavor of stupid.

 

[Infinitron]

 

[Jermu]

glad this shit is not in owlcat games...

 

[Sunri]

 

[Tyranicon]

Smut

 

[processdaemon]

It's bad, sure, but it's not that much worse than all the barely restrained hornyposting about Yrliet and Marazhai that's shat up the sub for the last month so they have no right to judge

 

[Fedora Master]

It's bad, sure, but it's not that much worse than all the barely restrained hornyposting about Yrliet and Marazhai that's shat up the sub for the last month so they have no right to judge

We have horny xenofuckers in this very thread.

 

[GloomFrost]

It's bad, sure, but it's not that much worse than all the barely restrained hornyposting about Yrliet and Marazhai that's shat up the sub for the last month so they have no right to judge

We have horny xenofuckers in this very thread.

 

[Stoned Ape]

'Love Can Bloom' was already gross, why is anyone indulging in creating another episode of this degraded crap.

Xenophilia is another form of bestiality. The Aeldari literally see humans the same way we see chimps.

 

[ArchAngel]

'Love Can Bloom' was already gross, why is anyone indulging in creating another episode of this degraded crap.

Xenophilia is another form of bestiality. The Aeldari literally see humans the same way we see chimps.

Only for the Eldars.

 

[Infinitron]

4/5 https://www.eurogamer.net/warahmmer-50k-rogue-trader-review

Warhammer 40K: Rogue Trader review - gloriously faithful, if complex RPG​

Adept mechanics.

Rogue Trader nails the 40k setting and provides an appropriately massive narrative filled with meaty tactical combat, though some bugs and poor performance hold it back.

Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader is a game that I have been waiting a long time for. It's not quite the first 40k video game that I dreamed of - that'd be the Primarch fighting game my friends and I dreamed up at age 11 - but ever since getting over my youthful "wow, cool Space Marine" phase, I've wanted a 40k game that really gets into the finer details of the setting.

The Imperium, the form that human society takes in the grim darkness of the far future, is by far the best thing about 40k - but it's frequently obfuscated. 40k adaptations tend to either go all in on the action, or stick with the warfare and high level strategy of the tabletop game. On top of that, I suspect Games Workshop's need to market to children conflicts with how truly horrible the Imperium is. After all, it's much easier to get Little Timmy's Mum to splash out on toy soldiers when they're depicted as heroic defenders of humanity, instead of the brainwashed fascist enforcers they truly are. As a result, the darkly satirical elements of 40k tend to be buried in the novels and other ancillary media, making it all too easy to take the surface at face value.

Owlcat Games' Rogue Trader is based on the 2009 pen-and-paper RPG of the same name, which should come as no surprise; the studio made its own name with adaptations of the Pathfinder RPG. If you've played Kingmaker or Wrath of the Righteous, the broad strokes of Rogue Trader will be immediately familiar: a party-based CRPG that hews closely to the pen-and-paper original, combining a sprawling narrative with deep turn-based tactical combat. After creating your character, you'll play through an introductory section before being thrust into a position of power - one that conveniently allows for both agonising decision making and gallivanting about the place on adventures. The big difference this time is one of scale. 40k is all about maximalism, after all. Everything is bigger and badder and defined by an urge for more.

The position of rogue trader, meanwhile, is a unique one within the Imperium, with freedoms unattainable by the heaving masses of its strict, theocratic society. As the name suggests, they're merchant princes empowered to do just about anything in the name of creating profit for the Imperium and expanding its borders, sort of like Del Boy Trotter in charge of the East India Trading Company. Your character in Rogue Trader, then, isn't some newbie adventurer; instead the origin you select makes you a high-ranking military officer, a crime lord or a noble, someone already accomplished and important. Not only that, you're a potential heir to the Von Valencius rogue trader dynasty. (Spoilers: you quickly get the job thrust upon you.)

As a result, your character isn't just schlepping around Fantasy France or something; instead you have an entire galactic sector to explore, with decisions changing the fate of planets inhabited by millions. Your ship is crewed by tens, if not hundreds of thousands of people, entire clans of serfs who are born, live, work and die on the ship without seeing more than a deck or two, let alone leave the ship. You'll engage in space battles, manage colonies and direct massive planetary assaults. But this is also still very much a party-based tactical game at heart. The majority of the time is spent traversing dungeon-like environments and shooting lots of people in the face.

And, oh boy, is that some crunchy face-shooting to get your teeth into. At its best, Rogue Trader's combat is an intricately brutal brain-teaser that is solved by taking down your opponents before you can be overwhelmed by the weight of fire - though it can take some getting into.

Image credit: Owlcat Games / Eurogamer

Owlcat's Pathfinder adaptations were already bewilderingly dense at times, but the d100-based rules that Rogue Trader are built around are arguably much more complex. From the moment of character creation onwards, you're expected to choose talents and skills with text like "for the next attack against a target affected by an exploit, that target's cover efficiency will be reduced by -(5 + (PER bonus x stacks of exploit))%. This attack will have +(5 + PER bonus- x stacks of exploit)% hit chance". Even after hundreds of hours with the game, making sense of that kind of tooltip remains a struggle. The result is a feeling that I'm often just choosing things based on what makes the number go up.

Thankfully, the combat itself is much easier to get your head around. Acting in randomised initiative order, your six party members each get a number of movement points and action points to use each turn. You can move and use abilities as you see fit, but attacking prevents you from moving any further and you're limited to one attack each turn. Or at least you are to begin with. Much of the fun is in figuring out how to use various character's abilities to break those rules and deal out death and destruction as efficiently as possible.

Image credit: Owlcat Games / Eurogamer

Enabling this are abilities, particularly from the Officer archetype, that focus on buffing other party members and giving them extra opportunities to act. I've had entire encounters carried by two characters, one Soldier built around getting to make as many attacks as possible each turn, and an Officer that can happily give them three or four turns in a round. It's a good thing, really, because your characters tend to be fairly squishy and generally horribly outnumbered, with even super tough bosses accompanied by hordes of minions. And increasing the appeal for 40k fans, everything looks and sounds exactly as you'd expect. Tearing apart swathes of cultists with a heavy bolter is just as satisfying the hundredth time as it is the first.

This note-perfect recreation of the setting is evident throughout Rogue Trader, particularly in its take on RPG morality. Certain dialogue choices lead you along one of three different paths: Dogmatically toeing the Imperial party line, Heretically worshipping the Chaos Gods or Iconoclastically, well, trying to be a decent person. The default here is doing terrible things in the name of the Imperium, committing heinous acts to ensure that humanity survives one more day in a hostile universe. When some of your party inevitably leaves because you've been too heretical, it's not because you committed evil acts, it's because you did them for the wrong reason. Trying to be a hero is possible, but never made easy.

Image credit: Owlcat Games / Eurogamer

What would be easy is for Rogue Trader to take the grimness and darkness of 40k and simply become a misanthropic mess of unlikeable characters and general misery, but Owlcat has managed to make both the individual struggles of the NPCs you encounter and the overarching story (which can easily last over 100 hours) deep and compelling. The tough and inevitably horrible decisions being made feel justified by the narrative, but never excused, and you will always feel aware of them, without being punished for playing the game the way it was intended.

Unfortunately, the game is let down by some terrible performance and a lot of bugs. I was playing on PS5 (not my preferred platform for this sort of thing, but it just about works) and was met by an assortment of bugs, crashes and, on one occasion, a patch that rendered existing saves completely unplayable until it got fixed. Perhaps most egregiously, for an RPG, were bugs that broke entire questlines, particularly around companion stories. There's little worse than spending dozens of hours getting to know a character, maybe even engaging in a little romance, all for them to suddenly forget it ever happened, or decide that they actually hate you. Speaking to chums playing on PC and looking around the wider community, even high-end PC performance hasn't been much better.

It's a shame that releasing games in a clearly half-baked state has also become an Owlcat hallmark, as the studio historically does a damn fine job of getting them fixed up nicely given enough time. The combat's complexity is surmountable, and the overall bleakness of the dystopian setting is part of 40k's charm, so the technical issues are the only real sticking point for Rogue Trader. Owlcat has been hard at work tackling these problems, with regular patches that have already squashed the bigger bugs. It's still worth giving it a few more months, but if you can't wait, there shouldn't be anything stopping you from having a good time. Rogue Trader is bloated and maximalist, arcane and overwrought. In short, it's the perfect 40k game.

A copy of Warhammer 40K: Rogue Trader was independently sourced for review by Eurogamer.

 

[Tyranicon]

Honestly I think I just don't jive with Owlcat combat. It's been three games. Everything they care about is the opposite of what I care about.

Playing through Owlcat combat is like having someone take a belt to your dick while you're reading an excel spreadsheet.

I'm sure people like it, but I'm just like meeeeh.

 

[Lambach]

I don't think I've ever seen a game fall off this hard after a certain cut-off period.

Everything after Act 2 is just straight-up worthless garbage. And I'm not talking about bugs. In fact, I've had a largely bug-free experience (relatively speaking), but god damn, every single aspect of the game after Act 2 is just unbearably terrible. Every single plot point unravels in the most nonsensical, unsatisfying way possible, combat mechanics get absolutely broken, all reactivity is completely gone, the writing takes a plunge straight down the shitter etc.

Looks like Owlcat allocated their Special Needs team to work on this one. Past Act 2, anyway.

 

[Fedora Master]

Who, oh who, could have possibly predicted any of this.

 

[Lambach]

Who, oh who, could have possibly predicted any of this.

I haven't been keeping up with the development or anything else regarding the game at all, so I was completely in the dark. I expected the Owlcat standard of bugginess and jank, but this goes so much beyond that. It's a fundamentally poorly designed, shitty RPG, which is a first for Owlcat.

 

[Fedora Master]

Who, oh who, could have possibly predicted any of this.

I haven't been keeping up with the development or anything else regarding the game at all, so I was completely in the dark. I expected the Owlcat standard of bugginess and jank, but this goes so much beyond that. It's a fundamentally poorly designed, shitty RPG, which is a first for Owlcat.

The PF ruleset gave them a working system, against which they were clearly straining already. Since this is Rogue Trader In Name Only they were free to do whatever and came up with utter garbage. Perhaps Owlcat aren't as good at designing systems as they and everyone else seem to think.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

Who, oh who, could have possibly predicted any of this.

Not you. You produce pessimism, not predictions.

 

[Fedora Master]

Who, oh who, could have possibly predicted any of this.

Not you. You produce pessimism, not predictions.

Those are the same things.

 

[Tyranicon]

Perhaps Owlcat aren't as good at designing systems as they and everyone else seem to think.

Who ever said this? I thought everyone merely agreed they did an ok job of adapting pathfinder and all their own shit sucked.

 

[Mortmal]

Perhaps Owlcat aren't as good at designing systems as they and everyone else seem to think.

Who ever said this? I thought everyone merely agreed they did an ok job of adapting pathfinder and all their own shit sucked.

They did not do a good job adapting Pathfinder; being RTwP automatically disqualifies it. It's popular towards a starved, very easy-to-please audience like the Codex.
As long as they can see numbers, a character sheet, and it's a power trip bolstering their ego, they are happy. They do not look further.

 

[Ryzer]

I still maintain that the first two acts of Rogue trader are better than Baldur's gate 3.

 

[Shaki]

Perhaps Owlcat aren't as good at designing systems as they and everyone else seem to think.

Who ever said this? I thought everyone merely agreed they did an ok job of adapting pathfinder and all their own shit sucked.

They did not do a good job adapting Pathfinder; being RTwP automatically disqualifies it. It's popular towards a starved, very easy-to-please audience like the Codex.
As long as they can see numbers, a character sheet, and it's a power trip bolstering their ego, they are happy. They do not look further.

Yet it's still more fun than BG3 and all other mainstream RPGs. Not a high bar, but still, that's good enough job for me.

Owlcat generally has the right philosophy (we need more numbers and autism), which already puts them above most other devs, they just absolutely suck at implementing it and designing specifics.

 

[Harthwain]

Honestly I think I just don't jive with Owlcat combat. It's been three games. Everything they care about is the opposite of what I care about.

Playing through Owlcat combat is like having someone take a belt to your dick while you're reading an excel spreadsheet.

I'm sure people like it, but I'm just like meeeeh.

Story-wise it is bad. Combat-wise it is decent (although far from ideal). Atmosphere-wise it is great. I am certainly having fun with the game, despite it being hopelessly broken in many places (both story- and mechanic-wise). But Rogue Trader certainly falls on the combat-fag side of the spectrum, so if you are more of a story-fag you need to be prepared to walk down the road of disappointment.

 

[Mortmal]

I still maintain that the first two acts of Rogue trader are better than Baldur's gate 3.

No, it's just that the setting of Warhammer 40K, a grimdark and adult setting, is much more to your liking than the Forgotten Realms and Larian's lighthearted approach to the genre. Of course, we are really starving for settings like that. Owlcat does a very good job on the art part, atmosphere, and writing, except for the heretical path written for raging teenagers. However, in terms of gameplay and reactivity, Larian's game is way above it.

 

[Shaki]

I still maintain that the first two acts of Rogue trader are better than Baldur's gate 3.

. However, in terms of gameplay and reactivity, Larian's game is way above it.

lol, no

BG3 sucks in terms of reactivity, character class and skills barely matter, barbarian will be nearly as good at deciphering arcane runes as a wizard, wizard will be nearly as good at lockpicking as a rogue. Due to extremely shallow character building, the gameplay reactivity to your character class/build is non-existent, outside of some dialogue flavour that changes nothing.

As for story reactivity, Owlcat's Heretic/Iconoclast/Dogmatic playthroughs offer similar or even more varied experiences to anything you can do in BG3, where 99% reactivity comes down to "Kill character x and lose his content in next acts?" - other than that nearly every choice in BG3 is fake, the game offers great illusion of choice when you play through it first time, but it completely falls apart on closer examination. As I mentioned many times, Githyanki creche is a great self-contained example of it, that anyone can examine for themselves - just play through this short section multiple times, try making different decisions and see how much "reactivity" the game will offer you - absolutely none.

In terms of gameplay, it's not even close, I made hundreds of posts on the subject and don't feel like repeating myself again, but BG3 gameplay is literally one of the worst ever. Combat is bad, exploration sucks due to shitty itemization and economy resulting in no excitement, there is just no fun to be found in the game, unless you really enjoy the story/dating sim aspect.