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Notes -
"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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