Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader - a new cRPG from Owlcat Games

Cahir

Cahir

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Played some more Rogue Trader lately (just finished act 1 and closing to 30 hours) and while the story, writing and characters are top tier, this game suffers from 3 major problems for me to be able to compete with the big league.
  • Lack of full voice acting - I realise not everyone will agree with this, but for me, it's mandatory. I would be even less annoyed, if the game did not have voice acting at all. What we have now is of a very good quality, but it's just a teaser.... I felt teased by what we've got.
  • Overcomplicated character progression - it reminds me of Pillars of Eternity, but I think it's ever more complicated. Sometimes I need to study other feats to understand how the feat I want to pick affects my gameplay. I am definitely not a fan of feats that boosts the effect of other feats/attacks. It's great for master planners and tacticians, but definitely not for casual players.
  • Combat encounters - while combat itself is quite fun, encounters are a bit dull. There are far too many fights and each of them throws hordes of similar mob enemies (literally one shot enemies) at you, which gets old pretty quickly. These fights sometimes feels like random encounters.
I'm still having a ton of fun playing it and I really love my team. They are diverse and interesting bunch and I really want to learn how their stories unfold.
 
Cahir

Cahir

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I've been playing more Rogue Trader lately and I'd like to share couple of thoughts how I see it in comparison to WoTR. Of course everything below is just my subjective opinion and anyone feel free to disagree.

First of all, Owlcat managed to improve lore presentation and overall writing since WoTR, which is already a big accomplishment, because both were really good in WoTR already. I always loved crpgs with massive walls of text, but I noticed, lately I often lack the patience to go through it. Yet, in Rogue Trader it's so well written and interesting, that I virtually read every bit of dialogue, infopoint or book. It 100% hit my sweet spot.

Secondly, not sure if it's by design, but Rogue Trader feels much smaller in scale than WotR, both from a world map and individual locations point of view. Exploration is not as engaging as in WoTR, because locations are usually small, with large rooms and very few secret or hidden spots (Persuassion checks are easy to pass). Also, even if there are quite a lot of star systems to explore, there are just a few worlds on each of them and only small fraction contain anything special (usually location to explore or dialogue-like event). Quite a rudimentary world exploration, which I actually like.

The more I play the more I like combat. Each level gives you something you can utilize in combat, expanding your set of options. My main gripe is encounter design. There are far too many mob enemies, that can be killed with one shot, and enemy placement is quite lazy. I dearly miss verticality, which adds a lot depth to combat encounters.

Overall, not sure if I can rate Rogue Trader higher than WoTR. Probably not, although I really appreciate smaller scale, because I find WoTR too big. It's a solid 8/10 to me so far.
 
mlnevese

mlnevese

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