WH40K: Rogue Trader

"Searching for the answers and running from the past
Frightened by the towers that are standing in his path
Burdened by a hundred failures from the days gone by
And still entrenched in sorrow from a hundred people's eyes
Louder than the ocean and brighter than the sun
Alone in his perception of what he's said and done"

 

Interface - Nobody's Hero

___________________________________________ 

 

 

Yo no un dolcinito eretico, no soy un eretico fraticello! 

 

I hadn't planned to jump on Rogue Trader (both due to WotR's annoying characters and wanting to steer clear of WH40K for a while) but with reviews beginning to sound more positive a year post-release thought, what the hell, I'm already a marcher baron in Bannerlord so let's run with that. Warhammer though is a squad management setting. Actual roleplaying? With class/level development and backstory and ethical alignment and character interplay and all that? Beyond its scope in the computer adaptations I've seen thus far and though there are some tabletop RP systems floating around for 40K, I get the feel the game's devs mostly made shit up as they went along. So I found myself boggling at the character creation screen for a bit before just jumping in blind.

In keeping with 40K's "only war" aggressiveness, it's fairly light on healers and crowd controllers. The most obvious choice "officer" sounded too tied into leadership at first glance, so I instead gambled on "operative" as more suggestive of the back-row support style I prefer. (Hell, let's admit if I'm anyone from this game it's Inscribia but "nitpicky old bitch" wasn't made an official class.) While operatives are indeed the most reliable armor/dodge debuffers, I was not expecting them to double as snipers. However, either the class' creators saw me coming or I got lucky with the itemization, since many long-range weapons are lasers with accuracy bonuses allowing me to still prioritize support abilities. So for once I got to give the "fire l4z0rz, pew-pew" routine a fair try. After the early game I instead pivoted more heavily toward Strategist as my main preoccupation anyway.

 

Basically this ended up as my most confused character progression in my past dozen RPGs.

I'll split the roleplaying discussion off into its own rant, but I started as Iconoclast then pivoted toward Heretic then again to Iconoclast toward the end-game, and ended up giving our resident star-child the win. Turns out I'm as resistant to the lure of the dark gods as to any other hue.

I started as a preacher for lack of bookish origins, but my anti-religious sentiment reasserted itself in my faction rep contributions. 

For NPC companions my "no filthy hu-mons" tendency denied me early tanks or heavy gunners. Pasqal, Yrliet and Kibellah found permanent places in my party from the moment they were recruited. Only after mid-game did Marazhai and Ulfar increasingly replace first Idira, then Cassia (hard to let go of Cass' bonus turns) giving me a fairly beefy end-game party since I'd built Pasqal as placeholder tank in early chapters alongside Kibble.

By the same token I started as sniper but all through mid-game I was running a three-operative, two-bounty-hunter firing squad group (with Cassia as another sniper to boot since I hadn't known about the existence of net guns and upped her gunnery) so I slotted a laser repeater for a while to improve my AoE.

I used few or no consumables after Ch.1 until discovering the grenadier skill late in the campaign.

My Logic/Tech starting investment overlapped too much with Pasqal, so I dropped Tech, then ended up overlapping on Xenolore with Yrliet, only to throw up my hands in resignation and make my character an all-purpose skill-monkey toward the end.

 

Yet through all that vacillation I never got stuck. While the class system forces more redundancy than I like (you end up buying pretty much every useful skill there is on every similar character) it also allows for a lot of synergy. With myself and Pasqal as Strategists juggling mobility zones and Kibble's acrobatics, Cass' bonus turns then Ulfar/Marazhai's charges late game, mobility won most fights by dropping the enemy back row - even if it got Kibble overpenetrated by friendly fire with some regularity. (Shut up baby, you love it.) Other fights worked out because my multi-operative debuff stack tore through bosses' defenses. Others because trenchline stratagem turned my squishy firing squad into Matrix-grade artful dodgers. Others because my Strategist zones and other buffs let Ulfar switch up and reposition his fat ass to actually make use of all his attacks. Others because Bounty Hunter bonus turns let Idira buff up my entire party.

 

So maybe Rogue Trader's just a bit too easy, overcompensating for justified complaints about WotR's sky-high enemy stats. On "daring" difficulty only a few fights like Uralon or the drow's displacer beast arena fight required a second try despite my lack of optimization. But I can't damn well pretend I haven't delighted in such an assload of tricks to pull out of my... redundancy.

 

Progression also feels rushed. Tutorial/prologue powerlevels you to lvl 5, lvl 9 by the start of only the second away-mission, the first chapter consists of half a dozen missions but 16-17 character levels, exemplar before the end of Ch.2, and max out well before the final chapter. While, sure, I run fairly exhaustive campaigns, I'll still call bullshit on something like Quetza Temer (consisting of three fights and four dialogues? if you play your RP cards right) netting three levels' worth of XP. And for all the freebie consumables you find, you get almost no opportunity to spend action points on them before they're more or less obsolete, as grenades overlap with weapon attacks and it's harder to make a character without powerful weapon skills than with. The enemy groups could've also interwoven a bit better. The cult you initially fight for example (much like the Dorseys in Wasteland 3) drops off the map after the first act and only shows up in one location toward the end of the fourth to be defeated. See my previous Warhammer posts for complaints about timesinks and pacing issues.

 

Still, overall the campaign flows better than Owlcat's previous two attempts, with kingdom-building minigames feeling less like chores and big act transitions less like gratuitously punishing fragmentation of what should be a coherent campaign. (E.g. losing your armies in WotR.) Much like Bioware, Owlcat's trying to establish a winning formula, and there's a real sense they've finally been nailing down its working elements. Act 3 here for instance is the same as Act 4 of Wrath (or Kingmaker's fairy world jaunt) a confusing, alien, broken landscape to which you're temporarily exiled, but features a more satisfying narrative trajectory to success and bears more fitting proportion (in terms of both time and development budget) to the rest of your campaign.

 

That growing expertise shows in finer grain as well. Level design has improved considerably, maps never feel like a slog, have an excellent mix of combat encounters varying in difficulty, interspersed with exploration and loot pickups and the odd RP encounter to keep things fresh. Unfortunately their idea of puzzle-solving is still hit-or-miss, nothing as frustrating as the Secrets of Creation from Wrath but still tending towards brute-forced sheer nonsense with lots of red herrings (the warehouse safe puzzle on Rykad Minoris jumps to mind, or pentagram puzzle in the "unidentified ruins") but others like the Footfall funeral fare better for incorporating your environment: a kid hiding behind a crate, a few tiles NOT electrified, etc.

As far as aesthetics, I've said time and again I fundamentally dislike derivative pop culture kitchen sink settings like 40k or Shadowrun. Plus if I'm in a universe full of every trope from the past thirty years, I'd much rather be playing a xenomorph or terminator than a boring old filthy hu-mon. Nevertheless there's no denying 40K inspires a lot of gamers and Owlcat's made better use of it than it ever did of Pathfinder, lending a far more consistent feel to all of your interactions with none of the old gratuitous digressions like the infuriating Trickster path. Writing is more poetic than Kingmaker's, more consistent than Wrath's, and what flaws here linger appear to stem from the Warhammer setting itself, lines like "blessed us with the Canis Helix" serving as uncomfortable throwbacks to campy '90s young adult fiction.

 

I'd complained companions in WotR had too few interactions outside their personal quests. Remedied, and expanded to your other shipboard cast as well until it meshes quite satisfyingly into a coherent image of the Koronus expanse, from mores and strictures to politics and economy. I thought Cassia's interjection of painting metaphors into every description would grate after a bit, but it's played just heavily enough to give her a distinctive voice. I'd thought Pasqal would fall into the denigrated nerd role in the cast but instead he maintains a welcome sense of dignity and purpose, even if his quest was a bit predictable. And in direct contrast to BG3's randomness, many side-quests touch on the Koronus expanse's central conflict in some way, at least illustrating if not driving the plot.

 

I am both slightly dismayed and amused at attempts to feminize the setting from its ultra-macho teenage boy fight-fight-fight grimdarkiness. Will you have anything left if the process continues? Also, are we seriously trying to get chicks into Warhammer now? That's adorable. Best of luck, but a million disappointed boyfriends over the past thirty years will tell you It Does Not Work.

 

Aside from that, the adventure book illustrations take the best lessons from Pillars of Eternity's implementation of such interludes -

- with both skill implementation and point-of-view shifts.

 

The music... not quite as good as Wrath's more memorable ctracks (Lord of the Dead especially) and in 40K terms Guillaume David's Mechanicus score's a tough act to follow. Still a track or two on Footfall or during Ulfar's quest sounded decent, and do I detect some E.S. Posthumus inspiration in Comorragh? Specifically Pompeii?

 

And sure, some incompetence persists.

One piece of flavor text early on goes OOC to talk about combat turns.

Some tooltips are uninformative, missing or blank.

Though Owlcat's come a long way from their unplayable Kingmaker release, they're still one of the buggier companies out there, like this mission in which the NPC was supposed to get resurrected, not infinitely cloned.

If you're wondering, the second lens went invincible

Even some major mechanics don't work. I like the injury system, missed it from Pillars of Eternity, but it's terminally undercut by the ability to return to the flagship at any time to heal and just doesn't come up often enough to be relevant.

I've already complained about the inexcusably moronic "cargo" timesink mechanic. 

Or if all that's not enough for you, consider that Rogue Trader features a keyboard shortcut to reorient your camera northwards to quickly get your bearings vis-a-vis the presumably north-facing map.

It points you west!

I... I can't even...

Nevertheless great progress has been achieved. When Owlcat Games first came out with Kingmaker, they were a bunch of unmitigated fuck-ups, their list of bugs stretching longer than the game text itself, their content (like characters' gear or town management) blatantly incomplete, descriptions phoned in, characters well conceived but of uneven quality.

By Wrath they were mitigated fuck-ups.

Rogue Trader? Cargo aside, it lacks any of the pervasive misdesign pitfalls, like Wrath's nigh-infinite stats. Here, everything from single-digit damage numbers to Kibble/Ulfar/Yrliet breaking a thousand per round can be tactically relevant. The kingdom management ties into your adventures more than it serves as a gratuitous minigame hurdle. Weirdly its storytelling even seems to have improved during and after production. Much of the side content reads better than the skeleton of the plot, with Comorragh especially showing a marked jump in quality, and let me reiterate that though I poke fun at S&M zombie girl Kibble, she and the rest of the Void Shadows DLC display some of the best cRPG scripts in the business. This is no longer a product line you buy for lack of competition among turn-based, plot-driven RPGs but a worthy competitor.

 

Which is not to say I won't soon spend another lengthy post bitching out Owlcat's plot choices, RP paths and character gamut.

Inscribia's gotta nitpick after all.

 

Still, congratulations and many happy returns.