Respect Was All That I Have Wanted

"I don't know why

You're blaming me
I think this time you've lost

Your sense of reality"

 

Neuroticfish - Waving Hands

 

 

Having given the devs some weeks to fix the inevitable slew of bugs they'd introduce with their latest DLC, I picked up my Rogue Trader campaign where I'd left off, toward the end of Act 2, breaking into Exemplar levels just as the drow shit the fan. Seems a good moment to take stock of my roleplaying.

I set out with no preconceived path guiding my dialogue choices, though my fundamentally Chaotic Neutral personality asserts itself clearly enough. The Puritan vs. Radical axis slides easily toward the latter. On one topic in particular I prove consistently Dogmatic, and that's the execution of traitors. Otherwise I have no use for the Imperium or the human race writ large, and really wish we'd focused on any of the setting's many more interesting factions.

 

Strangely, though RPGs' more saccharine elements and cheap Disney-grade moralizing normally push me toward the antipodean reaches of the great wheel, 40K's "grimdark" stylings here prod me time and again in compensation to better these locals' sorry lot. Lots of sorry lot. Thus I've spent the first couple of acts bouncing between Heretic and Iconoclast but the lure of forbidden knowledge is gradually tipping those scales. My warpward slide is buffered, if anything, by the childish puppy-kicking pettiness of many of the "evil" options and by the equally childish supplication before masters dark or light. If my actions are to serve the forces of chaos, I would rather they do so... chaotically, and not subserviently. One way or another, in one multiverse or another, seems I'm still headed for Pandemonium.

 

Merely giving it this much thought indicates this game's immersion has hit a steadier stride than either of its two predecessors'. Which puts me in an awkward position having voiced repeated criticism of Owlcat over the years, not least for their writing. At least one of their staff appears to be again deliberately mocking my tirade against weird magic things:

But the old laziness and unevenness I thereby bashed is restricted pointedly to this one location as a raised middle finger. I can live with that. They're also handling their new trinary alignment better than they did Pathfinder's, with fewer choices or character traits feeling forced for the sake of artificial balance and none of the three underdeveloped - so far. Such improvement is visible everywhere. They're refraining from out-of-character asides or feigned nonchalance. There are problems with the pacing of mission/event text, but it is at least uniformly pointed, entertaining, relevant or illustrative. Only one of the NPC companions (J. hey-dearie) made me want to toss her into a volcano as opposed to half of Wrath of the Righteous' roster.

 

Doubly awkward for me to write about such progress being made within the Warhammer setting, which I've repeatedly derided as derivative, campy tween power fantasy not be to be confused with any worthwhile worldbuilding. While it would take a wider effort to raise 40K in my esteem from such depths, Rogue Trader (more than Gladius' few flavor texts) is the first incarnation I've seen <not> insulting its audience's intelligence at every step. It does a pretty good job of both preserving the grandiloquence of the basic power fantasy and also portraying a wide gamut of minor characters across social strata to better illustrate the massive and oppressive power-base your sci-fantasy heroics mandate.

 

The Void Shadows mission chain even surprised me by its quality, not only plumbing the lower decks but the degree to which Imperial piety may be twisted while remaining perfectly consistent with its greater scope of amor fati. Add to that the missions written from Kibble's demented viewpoint, and her later struggle to reconcile the antagonist's life path with her own, and at least this portion of Rogue Trader can stand against the best cRPG writing we've seen to date.

 

Yet that appreciation was immediately marred upon seeing the selfsame chain abruptly sidetrack me into a nonsensical romance subplot with Kibble. Two steps forward, one step back. The same routine was repeated in Lex Imperialis, where from the very first mission your dialogue with Solomorne is written as if you've been corking each other for years and can't live without the carresses of this rando' burly meat shield you've just met - and his little dog too. Then there's Cass' wilting damsel routine, and even Yrliet's lines have some hint that she's expected to debase herself by such an act of bestiality. *Sigh* I'll have to return to the idiocy of RPG romance. For now, along with the cartoonishness of some of your potential Heretical villainy, it's just one more way Rogue Trader's genre conventions, its reluctance to relinquish an ignorant teen audience focus, hold it back from the more nuanced interactions of the field's classics. Don't delve motivations. Gratify.

 

Why?

 

You've got a license to print money. Millions of braindead fanboys will buy anything and everything with the Warhammer logo, which they'll pretend to enjoy to justify their sunk cost of shelves full of $50 plastic toys. So make good art. Stop sexualizing it or homosexualizing it. Don't go meta for a cheap laugh. Don't try to feminize it. Don't try to justify it to focus groups. Don't crank it up to 11 for attention. It need not be a romance or a farce. Stop piling more cheap pandering and instead whittle down the existing pile. Make good on the meaningless haystack of pop culture cliches you've already plagiarized into it over the decades. There may just be a needle of passable SciFi warmongering in there somewhere. Rogue Trader proves that potential, even if it sabotages itself here and there.

 

This may just be what outgrowing Betty Boop looks like. Sure, it's not the only RPG moving on from the genre's goofy beginnings. Though the RPG revival of the mid-2010s was undercut by feminist script rewrites and underfunded over-reach for blockbuster AAA status, and though BG3 stuck to the generic sword&sorcery adventuring of its Infinity Engine precursors, others like Cyberpunk 2077 or Vagrus have struggled to flesh out their worlds and character personalities beyond stock dragonslaying heroics. In particular I've been enjoying the atmosphere in Colony Ship. (You can't enjoy the atmosphere outside it because it's in space.)

Your mid-game revolves around three deadlocked factions, a familiar enough RPG plot backdrop on its face. Yet here, none are the good or bad guys, none are wholesome innocents whose cause you can champion without guilt, none cackling villains, nor are they simple misguided idealists your hero gets to set right by the light of your just cause.

- The militaristic remnants of your mission's original leaders are running a minutely regimented police state, but also prove the only ones capable of maintaining a decent standard of living as your orphanage in the sky breaks down around you.

- The egalitarian rebel faction has turned into a decrepit Russo-Communist state in all but name, complete with round-the-clock state brainwashing and a ruling council of cut-throat self-promoters. On the other hand, they're the only ones who even seem to remember what humanitarian principles sound like.

- The religious faction wastes its efforts on ridiculous monuments while constantly on the edge of schism as every new preacher spins a new yarn the gullible masses are only too happy to turn into a noose. But they're the only ones with any hope for the future (albeit false) and they do raise one of the few valid points in defense of faith: that the big religions are the only form of leadership humanity has ever produced capable of long-term planning.

 

Why is it so hard for other developers to do what Iron Tower does, and look at the flip-side? When T:ToN came out I remarked its alignment system fell too predictably into a traditional consensus of good and evil with id-linked choices (red/silver) viewed as violent and negative while the two superego colors (purple/gold) result in "nice" outcomes like happy orphans. (Kudos once more to Avellone for bucking the trend with a character (Erritis) exemplifying the perversity of superego.) Compare to a beautiful scene in Baldur's Gate 3:

I criticized the spin put on Astarion's quest toward the end, straining a bit to frame the question of vampiric ascension in idiot-friendly good vs. evil terms as either saving or sacrificing lotsa liveses. Thankfully you can indeed take a middle road and simply have Astarion wash his hands of the whole mess, but the text still felt a bit off the mark by my ken. However, the artists and voice actor picked up the slack. On winning the boss fight you're treated to Astarion going absolutely apeshit and very thoroughly murdering his enslaver for the past two centuries past the point of redundancy... then suddenly collapsing into a cathartic wailing puddle at the realization his nightmare's finally over.

Glorious.

By the way, Astarion is evil. You're not forgetting that, are you? He is, undeniably, a self-indulgent serial murderer. Whatever's happening in that scene, whatever makes you catch your breath at our companion's every anguished snarl, it's not the triumph of good vs. evil. There are added dimensions, cross-axes in play, some more dignified than others. Figure out which ones (sex appeal? freedom? social climbing? repression? contamination?) and you'll see both potential and its hobbling.

 

I'm just saying, I wish the rest of BG3 had been that good. It's looking like I'll end up a heretic in Rogue Trader, but when I do I doubt quest text will bear out anything resembling my character's real motivations. More likely I'll be treated to yet another shallow "I just hate life" puppy-kicking insult to any player not toeing the line of plains-ape mores. But why is that a harder sell than the complexity of squad management?

 

Any company will tell you they need to sell in order to stay in business, and only the lowest common denominator sells. But to whom? Consensus does not disprove dissent. Here I am: aloof, perverse, cantankerous. Sell me something for the abhuman, not Dating Dramedy 40K. For fifteen years developers refused to make any difficult games... until waves of low-budget titles like FTL proved the market was starved for punishment. And they refused to make turn-based tactics, until kickstarted RPGs proved XCOM was not a one-off. I really do think that if you add complex roleplaying to that list... well, you may not out-sell Call of Duty, but you will find a sizeable niche market as starved for moral challenge as they've proven starved for tactical challenge.