Warhammer 40000 Rogue Trader is the newest game from Owlcat Games, a studio known for its two Pathfinder Games. They are very passionate about adapting TTRPGs and very particular about the quality of their games, and just like with their previous works, Rogue Trader is based on a TTRPG system of the same name.
As a Rogue Trader, a player is granted permission by God, the Emperor of Mankind, to explore the most distant reaches of the galaxy and claim them for the Imperium, where a regular army with centralized command fails. You are allowed full autonomy in actions you take as long as they do not directly harm those you work for, which is why in a xenophobic world of Warhammer 40k, rogue traders are some of the few people who can both appropriate technology of other species, as well as work together with representatives of other species to accomplish the same goals, which is something that is heavily covered and explored in the game’s story.
STORY
The story of Rogue Trader follows an offspring of the von Volansius dynasty, as he inherits the above-mentioned title after the mutiny on the ship kills his predecessor – Lady Theodora. The title of rogue trader is hereditary, and usually, entire dynasties form out of their family. Children of rogue traders inherit their parents’ titles and become family heads. Some rogue traders, however, do not rely on building a family and just pass the title to distant cousins, which is what happens to the player’s character at the beginning of the game.
Otherwise, the game follows a rather simple storyline, which initially focuses on you repairing your battered ship, then reconnecting your dynasty by traveling through the Koronus Expanse and solving local issues as they appear, and then discovering new secrets about your cryptic predecessor. There are a few more underwater stones on your journey, but you would have much more fun if you discovered them yourself. All I will say is that Owlcat has put an insane amount of detail into every faction and culture that they represent in the game, making you feel as if you are there in the moment and not behind the screen. Only people with a passion for what they do and love for the franchise are capable of such levels of particularity.
One of the ways in which this particularity is illustrated is by companion interaction – another staple of the CRPG genre in general and Owlcat Games more specifically. Your party members aren’t just puppets for you to control; they are real humans within that world who have a direct effect on the story and many side quests that you may embark upon.
Idira, your adopted witch, also hears the warp, a chaotic parallel dimension that unleashes daemons and chaos upon the material world. Warp gives Idira prophecies, which may tell you what the future holds. But because the Warp is the quintessence of Chaos, or as people in the Imperium call it, the Archenemy, it messes with your head and never tells you anything straight. Warp is fuelled by people’s emotions, and so it plays with them to sustain itself, which is why what Idira is able to do is also highly illegal in the world of Warhammer 40k. However, you, as a rogue trader, can keep her without much consequence from greater authority.
Another cool companion whose interactions are very fun to observe is your seneschal Abelard. In the early game, when your name is just starting to fly around the Koronus Expanse, if you have him in your party and someone asks you who you are, you can put them in their place by refusing to answer that yourself and ask Abelard to inform the common rabble of your presence.
There are many other companions in your crew, each of whom has an interesting storyline, with their own quests, character interaction, drama, betrayal, and much more. There is even an antihero companion who initially serves as one of your enemies but then switches sides and becomes your sidekick. The interactions are so well thought out that talking in detail about them here would not do them justice, as you should discover many by yourself, but what I will say is that the conflict between a sanctioned psyker Heinrix, your eldar sniper Ilrieth, and your unsanctioned psyker Idira is very interesting to observe.
Another staple of Owlcat’s story is the secret ending, which is much more intuitive this time around. No more backtracking to the beginning of the dungeon after beating a final boss, waiting for a certain date to enter the final dungeon, or killing an Act 3 boss in a very specific way to make sure that an artifact from him doesn’t get into the wrong hands so that you can loot another artifact in the last Act 5 dungeon. This may attract some people but push away others. What I like about this change is even though I obtained the secret ending relatively easily and without needing a 12-step guide, I do not feel as if I am fully done with the game, which was not the case for Kingmaker or Wrath of the Righteous, where after getting a secret ending I felt as if the game has nothing else to show me.
The big reason why I also feel that way is that the game keeps track of every quest decision. At the end of the game, it will tell you the long-term outcomes of all your decisions. From your choices in the main quest to the long-term outcomes of a small side quest you randomly stumbled upon while walking around one of the local hubs. What is even more interesting is that it will show you how your decisions in the main quest affected some side quests, too. Your companions’ or your trade partners’ fates will severely depend both on how you handle yourself when dealing with them in trade and also on which key story decisions you make. That is why you have to choose wisely and navigate whether you want to be a dogmatic follower of God Emperor’s light, a heretical worshiper of Ruinous Powers, or an iconoclast who tries caring for people of the Koronus Expanse to the best of their ability.
The biggest personal criticism I have of the story is the fact that at one point, around mid-game, it locks you into a chapter-long dungeon without much forewarning. You set off to do a side quest, thinking you would be done with it in an hour, and are forced to spend the next day playing through an intricately and well-designed plot twist with one of the toughest boss battles in the game by its end. The big problem I have with it is that I wanted to do some other things before committing to the story, and I was not allowed a chance to reconsider. Also, once the game locks you into that dungeon, you only get to keep companions that tagged along with you for the rest of the chapter. This means that if you thought it was just a casual side quest and brought only companions who do not get along together build-wise for fun, you are stuck with them for the next seven hours. I will not make the same mistakes on a second playthrough, but it may straight up discourage another player from continuing with the game.
MECHANICS
The main way in which you affect the world around you is through mechanics of alignments and trade. There are three general alignments in the game. Dogmatic players will have to follow the strict tenets of their emperor and engage in a strict ‘no negotiations with Xenos or the archenemy’ policy. Heretic players will have to collect an artifact that makes them hear voices from the warp, and later, they can swear their allegiance to a Chaos God and even get their own cult. Iconoclasts choose the path that dabbles in both extremes with the goal of saving the people around you; they are the most diplomatic path and have no problem working with Xenos or even including them in their retinue.
On top of your alignment, since you are a trader, it is very important who you make trade deals with. The mechanism of trade is unique in the way it is implemented. As a wealthy merchant, money is not a problem to you, so at no point in the game is it important to make them. What matters, though, is the relationship you maintain with each faction, as well as the Trade Factor, which is an indicator of how reliable dealing with you is. Essentially, instead of making money in this game, you need to acquire rare resources from combat and exploration and then exchange them with factions you like the most. Choose wisely, however, because you will only be able to build solid trade relationships with two of them at most. You can attempt to dip into more than that, but that would lock you out of the top-tier gear that either faction could provide.
The list of your potential partners includes:
- Imperial Fleet, an army of the Imperium set on patrolling trade routes and collecting battle trophies.
- Drusians were Imperial missionaries whose goal was to colonize new planets in the name of their god, who was conveniently the ruler of the Imperium.
- Exploration fleet, who worship machines as if they are gods and explore the expanse in pursuit of ancient technology.
- Kasbalicans built a whole black market out of selling alien weapons to human buyers.
- Void Brotherhood is a group of pirates stealing loot from other convoys and reselling it as their own.
Trading with those factions heavily incentivizes you to manage your resources critically and solves the eternal problem of hoarding in isometric CRPGs. There are very few games out there that make you approach selling trash loot critically, usually just forcing you to either dump it all at the nearest vendor or, if a vendor has limited funds, exhaust all funds of vendor 1 and then exhaust all funds of vendor 2 and 3, or wait for vendor 1 to reset his inventory to default and exhaust all money again. In Rogue Trader, you do not get enough trash loot to raise your reputation with all factions to the maximum, so you have to choose who you want to appease the most carefully. Mindlessly dumping your loot to one guy will lock you out of very powerful late-game items instead of allowing you to acquire them, so you have to choose wisely who it will be that you want to dump because reputation with certain factions may allow you to construct unique buildings, that will yield unique narrative and mechanical rewards directly affecting another mechanic, which is colony management.
Colony management allows you to feel like a proper feudal lord who has five planets under his command. You need to choose how your planets progress, and as you authorize new projects, new, unusual dilemmas will arise. Your miners may accidentally stumble upon an ancient tomb of an extinct alien race, or your priests on a clerical planet may have a schism that would put a planet on the brink of civil war. Your companions may give you advice on how to solve such dilemmas, which is yet another level of complexity in building relationships with them, as having a certain companion in your party may affect how one of your colonies progresses.
At this point, it is important to underline one important criticism: the current pace at which you can improve relations with factions is a little broken. Even if you ‘farm’ loot from enemies and obtain artifacts from every nook and cranny, it is impossible to achieve a good reputation even with two factions, which is what the game clearly wants you to do. The mechanic is very interesting but needs value adjustment, and the same is true for a mechanic of alignments because even if you commit to one alignment, it is nearly impossible to max it out, which locks you out both from story content and the ability to wear some cool items. I am certain, though, that it would be properly addressed with future patches, and as a matter of fact, by the time this article is published, Owlcat has just released an update that changed values for the accumulation of alignment points.
The game, in general, is very good at introducing a multitude of unusual and difficult mechanics in a way that incentivizes the player to actively engage with and attempt to properly understand them, which is very important when combat in the game has a foundation in a TTRPG. On the table, players use a d100 for skill checks and attack rolls and other dice, like d6, d10, and so on, for damage rolls. Similar mechanics are implemented in the videogame, with progression tied around you choosing stats that you want to put points into, which in turn improves your skill checks and grants you proficiency in certain weapons or armor, allowing for a diverse range of builds.
At almost every level-up, which happens extremely often, sometimes two or three times per dungeon, you have to make some sort of a choice, whether it is a choice for which stat to upgrade, for which skill to upgrade, or for which feat to take. You have an insane level of control over each companion in your party and the build potential. Combining your player character and ten companions, there is no single companion that has a build identical to the build of another, which is impressive considering how diverse the system of character creation is. When you build your character, you have to choose their background, their archetype, which planet they come from, what was their moment of triumph, and so on, and each of those choices directly affects the kinds of feats and abilities that you will be able to choose from. It also greatly affects how you would perform in combat.
Speaking of combat, Owlcat succeeded in capturing the feel of Warhammer 40k through the momentum mechanic. In the tide of battle, when you manage to tip the scales slightly in your favor by killing just enough enemies, you can trigger a heroic act ability, which grants you a buff strong enough to tip the scales of victory in your favor, leading to a mass slaughter of epic proportions. Momentum mechanic is a double-edged sword. It is very hard to master and, in some boss fights, almost impossible. Once you catch momentum, there is no stopping you because your warriors will start endlessly attacking, your commanders will allow powerful units to do a second turn, your assassins will straight out kill a target on the spot, and your psykers will unleash the warp on all enemies. Sometimes, however, when there are not enough easy enemies to pick up on, you may need to resort to desperate measures, which act much like heroic acts but impose a heavy debuff on you until the end of combat, which heavily disincentives their use, since if you fail to utilize it properly, not only will you not yield desired results, you will also heavily hurt one of your core units.
The tradeoff, however, is that if you pull a desperate measure off properly, you may turn a loss into a victory, which may come in handy more than once, considering the sheer difficulty of fights you will inevitably get yourself into. Warhammer 40k is the universe where life is worthless, and slaughtering packs of enemies to survive is an inevitability. You will have to wage war if you want to survive, and personally, I advise those who do not have much experience with the TTRPG system to start at an easy mode because even the normal mode in this game is ruthless and brutal. The game tells this to you from the start and for a good reason. Your ability to come up with creative builds will be tested quite regularly and against fearsome foes, and there is absolutely no shame in admitting that you may not be able to address those challenges properly on the first try. Also, take generous use of the respec function because you will be wrong in your builds, you will misunderstand how certain abilities work, or just in general, you will notice that some of the core mechanics of your player character or companions are underutilized. For the first few times, you will be allowed to respec for free, but then you will have to sacrifice some of your trade factor. However, there is a very simple way to negate that: install Toybox and click on a few buttons there, and you will want to respec a lot.
FINAL THOUGHTS
When I started my playthrough of Rogue Trader, the game was impossible to complete properly without using a toolbox. On at least four separate occasions, I had to rely on a debugging tool to complete a broken quest. However, at the moment of my writing this review, all of the serious bugs have been fixed, which speaks to an impressive level of passion and hard work that developers put into refining their game and making it an overall player experience. The rate at which new patches come up is truly impressive.
If you were afraid of getting the game on launch because of bugs but still wanted to get it soon, do not hesitate to buy it; almost all the worst bugs that I had in my playthrough are now fixed, and you should have a good experience with it. I would still recommend installing a toybox mode just in case, and if you do spot a bug, feel free to report it, as every bug report helps make the game better.
There will also be two DLCs coming out in June 2024 and December 2024, which will add even more content that will be directly intertwined with the plot, including space battles, new companions, and new archetypes for your characters to use in combat. This game is a product of love and ambition, created by TTRPG nerds for TTRPG nerds, and you can see that love in every pixel on the screen.
PROS/CONS
Pros:
- It is a wealthy story with many profound and insightful characters and plenty of mystery to keep you on your toes, with surprise twists waiting around the corner.
- Mechanics of combat, exploration, and colony management are very thrilling and deeply designed, which incentivizes replayability.
- Faithful to Warhammer 40 000 lore and serves as a good introduction point to those interested in discovering this universe.
- Impressive pace of bug fixes.
Cons:
- Despite the good bug-fixing pace, the release version was still unplayable with very un-completable quests.
- Once, a game locks you into an entire chapter without warning signs, which is a fun twist, but it could impact the user experience badly.
- Some archetype abilities are either fully broken or do not work in the intended way. And even if they are not broken, there are many abilities that sound confusing.
- Values for trade reputation and alignment need adjustment.
- No Ork Boyz, I hope Owlcat adds them in the expansion.
Score: 80
NEXT: The Finals game review: Good game, but there is room for improvement
