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I've spent last two months playing the roughly 2 year old CRPG Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader.
TL;DR: "What if X-com was an RPG, had a personality, Doom levels of gore, brain-melting amount of builds and a few waifus that drop you if you flub one dialogue option?" (also husbandos, ranging from nice chekist to a sadistic serial killer elf)
I really, really enjoyed it. I'm not 100% sure of it, but it seems to me to be almost as enjoyable as classics like Jagged Alliance 2 or Baldur's Gate 2.
Short review, no spoilers here:
It's an A production game, so the budget was probably <20 million$. There is one DLC -it's a must have, seamlessly integrated, makes the game better, very high quality. There'll be more later I'm told. The story is pretty simple: you are a distant relative of a Rogue Trader, and because said relative learned that you're a fairly capable individual, recruited by the same to act as a middle manager for someone who is basically a dictator of a fairly large tributary empire. Something like 40 billion people over five planets. Yes, in the grim darkness of far future, it's tributary empires all the way down.
Fans of the setting say that lore wise, the game stays pretty true to the setting. I enjoyed it bigly. I'd say moreso than BG3, perhaps almost as much as I enjoyed BG2 or Jagged Alliance 2 when I first played those absolute classics. If you liked either, I think you'd like this one, so don't read the spoilers here!
Looks pretty nice - almost as nice from tactical view as BG3, but character models are much less detailed up close, there's no face animations etc and it's almost always drone's PoV. The explosions, magic effects and blood look just fine. The only thing that's missing is human/ xenos torches but the game has a 'T' rating which is really funny as it's, at times, very grisly and a heretical playthrough requires doing stuff that makes Auschwitz look like a tea party. Generally the really grisly stuff is only in dialogue / decisions so, off screen. Indeed, being in charge of a large starship, there are gigadeath decisions at times.
It's a combination of tactical combat, two layers of it - personal(95%) and ship (5%), the personal part being pretty much like BG3 or X-com, though more convoluted if not greatly more complex and of a fairly decent RPG with ..lots of text and pretty good writing. And also has a light 3x layer, where you manage planetary development. That part is almost completely optional.
It's no Disco Elysium but it's actually quite good. I'd say it's easily on par with BG2, perhaps better at times. It has a three variable alignment system, with the axes being dogmatic, iconoclast and heretic. Iconoclast here means being a bleeding heart do gooder, too good for the setting.
There are romances, and they're notably well more done than in BG3. E.g. there's a few horny characters who will make advances, but generally the romance options are believable. E.g. the noble lady will drop you like a bad transmission if you violate propriety, the attractive religious fanatic has no time for romance, the century old magical chekist is of course straight and an option but it'll take time. The incredibly arrogant (optional) eldar party member sees people as little more than animals and has a hilarious sequence of complaining about having had advances made toward them. etc.
Overall, the party members are well written, generally not annoying, sorta believable and in some cases incredibly voice acted. If the game has any weaknesses, it's mostly technical - the engine is not well optimized, there's sometimes 20 second loading times on a PC that can run C2077 in RTX at 4k / 40 fps. There are a few bugs still, there were a lot on release.
After playing through it, I discovered that with the exception of voice acting, it was written entirely by Russians. Coded too, ditto for graphics iirc. That explains the refreshing paucity of marvelesque dialogue and cringe, something that marred by enjoyment of Baldur's Gate 3.
Tried it, hated the combat. "Use a dozen skills to completely cheese the action economy, then stack a million buffs on your guys and pulverize the enemy in one turn. Else, die.", repeat ad nauseum for every fight.
That was my experience with Mechanicus, a game that I really enjoyed until I was beating every fight in a single turn. Except it was so easy to fall into that part of character-build-space that you didn't even have the "else, die" to worry about.
I went into WH40K Rogue Trader blind except with the experience of having played Underrail three times and have gotten 3/4 through it on the 'Dominating' difficulty. Underrail is actually not that hard .. if you're an RPG veteran and listen to the advice to optimize and not waffle. Apparently RockPaperShotgun doesn't have such people reviewing Underrail and panned the game for being 'too hard'. Kek.. It's really not.
Unless you're playing on Dominating where you're always one slightest misstep from getting killed and it's actually somewhat tedious.
Rogue Trader - The second hardest difficulty level (with saving) was pleasantly difficult, at first, but got not that difficult as game passed. It's probably pretty doable on the hardest if you don't mind save-scumming a bit.
Underrail has a .. complicated build system but that's nothing to Rogue Trader lol. But RT's is.. not really balanced. There's nothing much in the way of infinity turns like there was at the start I think..
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..there were some exploits like that early but it's not like that now. Seems to me, based on what I've read. People said something about infinite turns.
You can extend everyone's turn by 50% now using the officer class. But not more, because after being targetted, the beneficiary gets 'overxerted' for 1 round. Unless you use a heroic act right out, but that's only doable late game with a specific build. Then you can have 2.5 turns for one character. There's a few other abilities but I don't think any is equally powerful.
Certain psykers also can take slightly more turns by time related fuckery but it's like 3 turns when others have 2 and also a mid to late game thing.
The big problem I noticed was that it took forever to fight battles bc buff animations are turned on by default. Once I turned it off, it got a lot smoother.
If it's like that you can just up the difficulty. It was getting like that for me on my first playthrough towards the end unless it was a boss fight.
But it's not unfair to say that the tactical gameplay is often
The problem with that is that by upping the difficulty, you shift the balance so that instead of merely being able to break the game with cheesy overpowerd builds, you are required to do so.
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"OwlCat makes least intuitive RPG level up system and perk tree, asked to leave".
Seriously. I played about a third of the way through the game before I gave up on trying to build my own characters up and just re-rolled them with an online guide. It's so damn unintuitive, and the vast majority of builds are underwhelming.
Another gripe I had with it was the gear system. A Rogue Trader, even one down on their luck, has more money than God. I should be able to buy the vast majority of weaponry with cash, no questions asked. I can understand very rare or heretical weaponry being gated behind the expenditure of influence or building rep with factions, but it pissed me off no end that Slightly Better Bolter/Lasgun was something I couldn't just buy.
The game also ends up with damage-spongy enemies the moment you cross the early game. You can ameliorate this to an extent, since the game has the great feature of letting you tune damage sliders in the settings with decent granularity. Even so, I think it ruins immersion for a bog-standard human Cultist to take more than a couple Bolter rounds to the chest and not be reduced to a puddle.
I enjoyed the writing, but I wished the game had a wider variety of recruitable characters, or that you had more freedom to choose back stories for your player character. You can recruit a member of the Mechanicus, but I want to be able to be one myself.
I would also have appreciated more in the way of enemy variety, beyond Chaos and flavors of Eldar. Where are the Orks? They should be everywhere.
Honestly, I would loved to have more DLC if it meant that we had more potential companions and enemy diversity.
It's a good game, but I ended up dropping it for above-mentioned reasons well before the end of the story, and I don't see myself replaying over 50 hours to get to that point without drastic additions in terms of new content.
I personally felt the gear system did a really good job of capturing that. There's no such thing as money for you, you can always afford to buy everything that the vendors have on offer. The only gating factor is rep and game progression (which is really what profit factor boils down to). The latter wouldn't be a thing in the fluff, but eh... the nature of video games requires that the player have a power curve, so I give them a pass on that one.
I'm happy to concede that RT does a far better job at diegetically gating stronger gear than the average RPG, and the setting of 40k makes rare relic gear and one-of-a-kind antiques very easy to justify.
I still felt that the profit factor was wack, a single gun could cost as much as you deciding to be merciful and preventing a planet from starving by providing subsidized grain. It very much wasn't the kind of gear where that would make sense, such as some kind of adrathic weapon or a set of Terminator armor.
I'd much rather have had some form of accounting, even if the units of exchange you had to bother to consider were millions of Thrones, or have the weapons be doled out through quests or loot drops in the kind of scenarios where that makes eminent sense.
Maybe I just didn't get far enough in the game (I'm only in chapter 2), but I never saw a situation where you spent profit factor to get gear. It was always a check where as long as you had enough profit factor, you could buy everything the vendor had and not take a hit (because as you said, rogue traders have more money than God). The only times where I would gain or lose profit factor were based on quest decisions I made.
It's entirely possible that I'm the one remembering things wrong. If that's the case, my criticism would lean more towards the rather disproportionately high profit factor that certain weapons were locked behind.
While I could see the gameplay justification behind doing so, there were things like krak grenades, explosive charges and standard med kits that were limited purchases.
I can only reiterate the level of ludonarrative dissonance that induced in me. Even an impoverished RT should be able to buy enough explosives to blow a factory sky high. They can certainly afford standard issue militarum medkits. It would have made far more sense to limit players in how many could be brought at once into a mission, which is already the case thanks to inventory limits.
If you do nothing with your planets, it's going to get impossibly high, but if you develop them which costs you only a little of time on decisions, you're going to easily have the profit factor.
It's not hard at all.
Also the weapons don't cost you anything - you simply unlock them by having
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...isn't it copied from the TTRPG ? I used no guides and ...enjoyed the finding out but I do admit to feeling a little overwhelmed with the variety.
There's a lot of stuff there, yeah. Too much? I don't think so.
Could be more balanced I think, could be harder/ longer fights.. I'd also enjoy a more realistic style with going prone etc but .. this is fine.
Depends on the armor. IF you're using a bad build and a low quality bolter, someone with high deflection can shrug off most of it. I saw the 'Annihilating Astartes Bolter' which increases your crit damage with every round or something equally insane. A burst was doing 8x 200-300 damage per hit and turning greater demons into bits very fast.
I had a different problem - the hardest fight was the mini boss at end of chapter 1 the first time through. After that the game kept getting easier bc with more levels, you can build more broken builds and I don't think I got wiped out at all until some difficult fights in chapter 3 and 5.
Especially psykers.
There's going to be 2 more DLC, not sure how much content each.
You can make custom fighters, but come on, how is this 'low variety' ?
very judgemental tech priest who's a holy terror with a plasma rifle
diviner/telepath psyker
slaughter nun
impossibly arrogant sniper
absolutely contemptible sadistic serial killer
actually pretty nice & reasonable magic chekist
young noble lady who's a bit snotty and sheltered but still a joy to have around because she loves seeing the world even if it's crap after a lifetime of boring study
-'what if Han Solo but a disabled MENA baddie and actually rich/successful'
-the very reasonable and very hinged death cultist
-a psycho space marine who makes Doomguy look like David French.
Personally my biggest complain is that there's so many awesome characters but you can only ever used six per one battle.
I'd not mind more party characters, sure, but ...too few? Nah.
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