WH40k: Rogue Trader - Review After 100%

[Music] what's going on everybody morm here this time bringing you my review after 100% for Warhammer 40K Rogue Trader the most recent crpg from alcat games and the first crpg for Warhammer 40K but to get my usual stuff out of the way first I review games after 100% all the time to set me apart from other reviewers on the platform and while that does include the achievements it also includes a lot more than that my steam profile is public and linked below as well if you'd like to learn more alongside a video that explains everything that I cover that said for this game in particular it would appear that on Steam at least two of the achievements I cannot seem to obtain and I believe they are bugged these are the uncover the ice achievement and don't stop the exploration which is exploring all the optional areas as we're about to get into the game does have a variety of bugs that I think are preventing these to from being attainable but if you have any information on them definitely drop a comment down below but it's certainly not the first time it's happened and bugged achievements aren't worth holding up this review for another important thing to note is that I did receive a review copy of this game from alcat games back in November a couple weeks before it officially launched so I did have it in my hands quite a bit longer than most people have though I did actually pay for a collector's addition of this one at the same time moving right along however the first thing and probably the most important thing in this review that I want to talk about is the technical state of the game as always talking about new releases these days it's especially important to mention how they are running both in terms of bugs and overall stability in my initial launch review for the title I mentioned that I didn't run into anything gamebreaking but I did run into a host of minor things that got very much so in the way now since that launch review I have encountered quite a bit more and while my general impression from that initial video Remains the Same in that it's the least buggy of the three games they have released there are quite a few things you need to be aware of starting with gamebreaking stuff now again personally I still have not run into anything gamebreaking however a quick look at user reviews will show that other people have and alcat has already put out a couple of patches and hot fixes this month aimed at fixing the most prominent of those but people are definitely still running into them unsurprisingly most of this occurs in the later acts of the game which were not fully beta tested as the beta test and the pre-release versions all stopped at chapter 3 until I got the review copy now in addition to that stuff though I have since encountered a lot of major bugs mostly in relation to Companions and their quests finishing properly in my initial playthrough I played as a character that due to his convictions which we'll get into killed a fair few of the companions in response to their heresy however had I not killed some of them I likely would have encountered problems with their quests resolving as many of the companion quests in Act 4 can run into a host of issues that stop progression or keep them from even starting at all and that is I would say a much more serious problem than all the minor bugs I've yet to get into now on the minor side of things they are plentiful but unlikely to affect your ability to complete the game in any way things such as the percentage chance to hit or the damage previews ahead of enemies just disappearing forcing a reload your character can sometimes get stuck sitting on your ship Bridge which breaks a few of the animations the damage preview for most enemies is always wrong which I imagine is due to all the stacking effects there's a few few I would say visual bugs that I've encountered personally I've encountered bugs with menus that cause them to overlap and kind of freak out for a minute so in summation I would say my initial playthrough was a mostly smooth experience with a lot of I would say minor problems that added up over the total of the game these days having played through the game a few more times I still haven't run into anything gamebreaking but other people have and I have run into more major issues that are still going to get in the way of your enjoyment which means for some people I could definitely see the Merit in simply waiting until they get that fixed as there will be some DLC coming for this anyway so while the game certainly isn't unplayable and you can finish it it does have some serious issues that bear to mention now moving along from there I want to talk about the story setup for the game and my thoughts on it on top of the conviction systems now in Warhammer 40K Rogue Trader you play as a rogue Trader as it work the entire game is adapted from the tabletop version of a 2000's ttrpg set in this area where you also played the role of a rogue Traer and their retinue a rogue traiter is someone with the Imperium of man in the Warhammer 40K universe that is tasked with expanding the imperium's borders essentially by any means necessary given leeway and privilege to do that far beyond what any normal citizen would have and this is caused for all sorts of unique situations that other people in the Imperium would simply never see which is a ripe playground for an RPG of course so with that in mind we after character creation start the game as our freshly made Rogue Trader who is an heir to a rogue Trader Dynasty as these things are genetic and passed down during the prologue of the game and by the way we are going to be getting into a fair few spoilers here so if you don't want any of those maybe just skip ahead or go watch my launch review but with that in mind our Rogue traitor just in the prolong winds up becoming of course the Rogue Traer after your predecessor dies a mysterious death being assassinated during some warp travel as another member of the crew proves themselves to be a heretic involved with a cult to chaos that causes you no small amount of trouble after taking up the Rogue Trader Dynasty your job is to essentially get your house in order while navigating the mysterious events of the coronus expanse now while I don't want to go into detail on every possible plot thread here there are some things I want to mention for starters much of the story can feel a little disjointed until you get to act five which is sort of the wrap-up chapter where everything comes together and all of the bits and pieces you've been experiencing suddenly Pro to be part of a larger plot personally I did enjoy this but my first time through especially I was a little confused how it was going to wrap up narratively but I do think they did a really cool job of weaving all those plot threads together into something that made sense with that in mind I really did not enjoy act three of the game you are essentially kidnapped and sent to kamur which is the dark city of the duwari that is to say dark elves who are masters of torture and suffering and and how they put you in chapter 3 is a bit railro and then they take all your companions your gear for a little while you have to get all that stuff back and overall it's just not a chapter of the game I enjoy very much and while I can see what they were trying to do with it I personally think they could have gone about it in a few different ways to make that less of a headache in terms of player enjoyment but it's by far the weakest part of the story in my opinion not to mention it's where some of the game's problems start to pop up before becoming more prominent in Act 4 overall though I do still really enjoy the story and how it plays out now another thing in relation to the story I want to talk about though is the conviction systems as they play a pretty heavy role a lot of your bigger choices are defined by your convictions you can pick three different convictions dogmatic iconic class or heretical which align with certain viewpoints in the Warhammer 40K Universe dogmatic being all about fighting chaos and serving the emperor no matter the cost and destroying any mutants heresy zenos that get in your way at the same time iconic clast on the other hand is someone who is more about preserving life where it is possible to do so this doesn't necessarily make them a good person however simply that they aren't so quick to throw lives away when it is potentially unnecessary whereas the heretical path just sees you fully embracing chaos and can lead to some potentially different outcomes now all of these conviction options will open up new avenues of choice through individual encounters spread throughout the game that isn't to say they are the only options in spite of these you will generally have a few other options as well so not everything boils down to these convictions however each of these convictions is separated out into ranks 1 through five and higher ranks of these convictions unlock both abilities as well as more and more options in dialogues ETC provided you meet the minimums once you reach rank three in an individual conviction you become locked into it other convictions can no longer progress past that point and it makes a pretty big difference on your ship in terms of how everything looks and how people talk to you so to speak now a few notes on the conviction system itself for starters I think the point spread for the convictions is a little too tight while there are five ranks for each you're almost certainly going to end the game in rank three or four unless you do absolutely everything and adhere to that specific conviction as much as possible and even then for iconic class and heretical actually I still wasn't able to get the final rank for those but I was able to do it with dogmatic just barely by like a few points so I would be surprised if the point spread there doesn't get loosened up a little bit as it is very tight which can cause you to lose out on some options if you're not fully devoting yourself to it and because you can mix and match a little bit up to rank two of the other convictions makes that A system that just doesn't have a lot of wiggle room where realistically I think it should now another portion of this is that the uh heresy one in particular is borderline unrealistic and I'm going to get into a heavy spoiler to explain reasoning on this in many ways I think this particular conviction path is where the game feels the most like a game that is to say unrealistic heresy in Warhammer 40K is a big deal you will be executed for it and while you do have some leeway as a rogue Trader which is someone with an enormous amount of privilege you are still not immune to the repercussions of pursuing heresy and in order to make the heretical path work they have to jump through a lot of Hoops to allow a lot of people to just let you get away with it that almost certainly certainly would not do so that is to say they would Cut You Down in a heartbeat and in fact we see them do exactly that with someone of a similar status namely arenta and Theodora you see when your predecessor Theodora is killed in the opening act it's left a mystery for quite some time however if you take one of your companions sister arenta with you into act three she will confess that she is the person who killed Theodora another Rogue traitor and if you you know inquire as to why arenta went to find the Rogue traitor during the attack on your ship in the prologue with the warp travel and found her in possession of a heretical object and arenta immediately and almost without thinking murdered both her and her Arch militant in an effort to purge the heresy which is of course what sisters of battle are all about and meanwhile that then same character goes on to watch you do aund heretical things and just doesn't do anything about it simply doesn't track for me so in some ways I think the heresy playthrough while certainly unique and fun doesn't make a a lot of sense from a lore perspective and you know just generally people's reactions to it and while I'm fine with some of those things because this is a game not everything's going to line up perfectly I do think that becomes more of an issue when we start talking about companions which we'll get to here in just a moment because first I want to talk about the endings a little bit now there's technically a few different I would say major endings to this game one of which is secret though the secret ending is super easy to get as opposed to alcat previous games where it was honestly a huge hassle but one really cool thing about the secret ending that I liked is that it is colored so to speak by your convictions in order to obtain the secret ending you have to talk with an NPC and how you talk to it and the lessons you impart will dictate how it acts after the fact so not only is there a secret ending there are multiple variations of it based on your convictions as the Rogue Trader and that was a really cool way of handling that that I thought was interesting and different than their previous work and then you combine that with all the individual outcomes for Companions and the coronus expans at large and you've got the a potential for a pretty satisfying outcome in terms of the ending which is all done with various slides Etc that show off what you've accomplished or didn't as it were which was certainly nice now as much as I enjoyed the story though the companions of this game fell a little bit flat for me now I will say I enjoyed some of them most of them I was neutral about at best and then quite a few I just really didn't like not so much because they were uninteresting but rather because their characterization was provided so little that the character as a whole just feels flat so as much as I like this game overall the companions are a bit of a hit or miss situation now I think it's important to mention though that I won't be talking about every single companion individually mostly because there are a few secret companions you can get towards the end of the game that I don't want to spoil in this review but broadly speaking I think a lot of the companions lack a certain amount of interaction with the Rogue Trader that would have made them more interesting often times in these games and in Al cat's own previous work even companions in my opinion are at their best when they can be influenced by and interact with the main character in meaningful ways that then impact both You by default of course and the character themselves I think Rogue Traer lacks that in quite a few different cases with many of the companions to me feeling like a cardboard cutout representative of their faction and nothing more as I mentioned arenta for instance is probably one of the biggest cases of this as she is a sister of battle a nun with a gun as they like to say a lot of people are upset that you cannot romance her now generally I don't care about romances in game so that's not a big deal to me personally but beyond that Argenta just doesn't have a lot of characterization she's a sister of battle first and foremost and everything else about her is secondary which is kind of proven through her dialogue and things but even that is I would say counteracted by the fact that she doesn't even live up to what she was supposed to have done in the plot as I mentioned earlier during the story section she'll eventually leave your party if you engage in enough heresy but that's about it so even the personality they try to give her as just being an overly zealous sister of battle isn't really as impactful as you might want it to be if they are sticking purely to the lore and in the absence of things like a romance option or meaningful conversations arenta is just not that interesting she is the character that you see at face value her story is about the fact that she was supposed to guard some Relic but because of a warp anomaly that caused decades to pass she now kind of just doesn't have a job to do and is afraid people have forgotten about her and that she can still serve the emperor in some way this leads her on a quest to find a holy artifact and that's pretty much it she never grows or changes she stays the same static character from start to finish and you see that repeated with a lot of different companions that's not to say all of them some of them do have a bit of meaningful growth in my opinion such as Casia the Navigator of our crew she's probably the one you have the most influence over and because of that she's a much better companion your conversations with her and guiding her to the head of her house as a Navigator ultimately decides her fate and how well her house fares in the aftermath of the game and it can be provided even more context by her being a romanceable character giving you a lot more interactions with her now in between those two extremes you do have more neutral characters like abelard abelard is our loyal CA who served Theodora before you and his character is mostly that he's sad Theodora died and that he has a big family he's trying to take care of and bring honor to as a whole and he's a decent character he also doesn't get a ton of growth or change throughout the game but it's not outright contradictory or bothersome in any way and if that's not enough let's talk about a more I would say egregious example of companions you would have to just be let's say Living Dangerously to deal with and not even because they're xenos but these are iret and meizai the Eldar and duari companions we get respectively these are zenos companions that is to say they are alien species which typically people aren't supposed to hang out with but thanks to your status as a rogue Trader you can do however they look down on you to them you are an animal essentially and as a result of that iret who does actually have some growth over the course of her storyline that I think any sane person would be unlikely to see because she actually sells you to the duwari if you have her in her party at the start of act three which is what kicks that chapter off which sees you and your entire retinue sent to kamora to essentially be tortured to death and while she certainly comes to regret that decision I think a character that essentially looks down on you in every way it is possible to do so and then outright tries to get you killed for something you didn't even do yourself is beyond the point of redemption realistically the only reason to keep her around is because it's a video game and you want to see what happens and while there are other companions I think a lot of them fall into one of those categories they're either neutral to the point that they're uninteresting contradictory to the point that it's honestly just not very good or so hazardous to your well-being that you would have to be insane to keep them around and for all those reasons while I do think a lot of people could probably enjoy enjoy these Companions and I'm sure many people do outside of one or two I just didn't like a lot of them and I don't think they're particularly well written which is interesting because I think alcat has written really great companions that are much more in-depth even when there have been restrictions in place from the IP holder which is likely what I think happened here to be frank the companions from their previous games I think were better overall now finally moving on a little bit let's talk about the difficulty of the game and start breaking down some of the systems now in terms of difficulty I think they did a pretty good job here I think alcat does a lot of things with difficulty that I enjoy seeing that involves a lot of modularity to their overall approach that is to say there are several different presets ranging from story all the way to unfair which is like super hard mode you can also play on a custom difficulty breaking down each individual mechanic those difficulties are made up of to tailor the experience to what you want to play with overall I will say that Rogue Trader thanks to some things we'll get into is a much easier experience than something like Pathfinder as the systems are a bit less opaque and overall it's just easier to get into you're still likely to find a pretty solid challenge all around that said what a lot of these difficulty modifiers do and mean will make a little more sense if you're familiar with the D100 system at play in the Fantasy Flight version of the tabletop game this is based on as some of the most important modifiers in this respect have to do with the penalty or bonus you are given to certain skill checks to make them passable and in that regard the one thing I want to mention is unfair mode if you're playing on unfair well certainly doable if you know what you're doing the skill checks on that mode are deeply imbalanced they need a balanc pass I believe alcat has actually said as much as even if you have a maxed out character some of the skill checks are just literally impossible thanks to a bug that has caused the penalties to those skill checks to be much higher than intended so if you're going to play on unfair do keep that in mind as you're likely in for a bit of a rougher time than was initially imagined now moving on to character creation character creation in Warhammer 40K Rogue traitor is in my opinion pretty solid you both have a ton of options but at the same time you'd be harder pressed to make a bad character so to speak than something like Pathfinder where that's real easy to do if you don't know what you're doing which results in a system that is much more approachable I would say than something like Pathfinder but it still manages to retain a bunch of depth because how a lot of these systems interlock and overlap has a lot of Versatility to it and you can do some interesting things with both the origin of your character the home World Etc of which Grant you Buffs now before we dive too much into character creation I did make a proper Deep dive video if you're curious about how everything works but here I want to talk about some of the most important stuff which is your home World your origin and the archetypes or your class now your home world is of course where you're from it decides some initial bonuses to your stats a main feature of sorts and then it also gives you access to a bunch of talents you can pick up as your character levels up and each world of course is a reference to what kind of world your character is born on whereas origin is like your career before you became the Rogue traiter this can be everything to a member of the ecclesiarchy or the priesthood if you will a crime Lord a Navy officer a noble a psycher which is like a space magician and each of these also comes with a host of different conversation options that will be presented to you that is to say people will speak to you a little bit different based on your origin pick in combination with your Triumph and Darkest Hour your Triumph and Darkest Hour also affect your stats a tiny bit but they are essentially the backstory for your character what is something prominent they did and what is something they failed at overall I do enjoy that system just because it changes a bit of how people speak to you so it'll mix up the dialogue a little bit it's not a major thing by any means but it is nice to see then we have the archetypes the archetypes are essentially your class at level one you'll pick from one of four that is to say the basic archetypes Warrior officer operative or Soldier and then at level 16 you can pick a specialization of sorts now based Bas on your initial Choice you'll only be able to pick a potential three of six you can only actually pick one of them but you'll have an option of three I mean and then lastly at level 36 everyone winds up with the Exemplar archetype which is effectively a continuation of the first two with a few extra options added in to make you especially deadly and because of this again sort of mix and match approach to various archetypes and things you can in combination with your character creation choices make a character that feels very unique though we'll get into a little a little bit more of that during the progression systems portion which we're about to dive into but overall I did want to say that I enjoy this system if you will because it's very versatile and how you can approach it so even if you don't know a ton about this system and you're worried about making a wrong choice if you're just playing on normal or something I think it's an approachable system that you can play around with and learn more about the game now moving into progression systems however after we leave character creation we start completing quests defeating enemies we will of course be leveling up which brings all sorts of progression with it I would say progression largely boils down to leveling up obtaining New Gear building up your trade ire upgrading your ship and enhancing your reputation with the various factions of the coronis expanse leveling up is fairly straightforward but still a few things to mention now based on your archetype you'll be set on a path where every time you level up you'll be given a host of options typically between abilities talents increasing your skills your base characteristics Etc some of these options are pretty straightforward as they're just a handful of abilities to choose from but occasionally when you're picking your talents I think there's a decent amount of room for confusion as that list is very long and it's not I would say easily navigated they do have some sort options at the top of the available talents menu but a lot of these talents are so numerous that those sorting options aren't always super helpful and I could see people getting a little bit confused there especially if you're playing something like a psycher that has a bunch of extra talents in addition to all the regular ones so Discerning whether or not you need individual proficiencies or what to grab when is probably the most complicated part of this particular game so while I wouldn't say it's the easiest game to approach for a newcomer because of strictly this it still does provide it with a decent amount of depth I do wish this menu was a little more navigable though especially since some options that are available you wouldn't even really know or necessarily a bad idea for instance you can pick up power armor proficiency which sounds really good at first but there's essentially no power armor you can actually use in the game outside of one or two sets which means heavy armor is usually the much better way to go there because you'll actually be able to use it and there's things like that you wouldn't know at first glance so because of that I think even just a warning on the talent explaining that could be useful and it would certainly be nice to see now another part of progression is gear straightforward enough as you play the game you're going to find better and better items which will of course affect all sorts of things the main thing I want to mention here is that a lot of gear intera directly with the certain archetypes that enhances those abilities directly which I thought was a cool way to approach itemization on top of the more regular stuff like you know just more damage better hit chance Etc though when it comes to acquiring that gear you might be wondering how that works because as a rogue Trader we are impossibly rich richer than you would probably be able to Fathom as someone living here in the current day as a rogue Trader owns literal planets innumerable colonies and that is represented in the game by both your profit factor and Colony management as you make choices throughout the game and manage your colonies you'll earn profit factor which then enables you to buy certain things from vendors but those vendors will only sell to you if you have a high enough reputation with them that reputation is garnered by selling and trading them Goods as the Rogue Trader of our name would imply basically for a rogue Trader it's not so much whether or not you can afford something but rather is someone willing to sell it to you which means when it comes to acquiring gear it can often be more about buttering people up than it is actually purchasing something so basically all of the useless items will be picking up off of enemies instead of keeping them or selling them Etc they get transferred into your cargo system of your shipold where you can then once they are full trade them to vendors to increase your reputation to then buy the things you need which is how you'll be acquiring a lot of that gear this in combination with your colonies is how you're going to get the best stuff as you develop your colonies you can also earn some rewards from doing that as you start exploring the space system you'll ultimately encounter five different colonies that can be built up in different ways some of which will provide all sorts of faction reputation which is one of the main ways you'll be increasing that by the way and depending on the projects and things you complete in those colonies it will shape what resources you have available to you items you can procure etc etc now you can manage these screens from basically anywhere it's not something you have to go to a specific place to do if you want to trade with people there is an NPC on your ship Bridge which allows you to just go talk to them and do that so you don't have to go anywhere specific like actually tracking down the vendor for instance and the colonies can be managed from one of the menus in game with you only occasionally having to go there to involve yourself in an event and while colonies can actually be attacked forcing you to go engage in a space battle every once in a while that was pretty rare though another big part of progression is upgrading your ship we're going to be using a void ship to travel around space and the like which we're about to get into and keeping that ship in time shape is of course important we're going to be finding scrap from spaceship battles or potentially even just buying it which will allow you to repair your ship in case of damage from enemy ships or just simply traveling through the warp on top of finding all sorts of upgrades to weapons engines Shields Etc that make your ship perform better both in combat and the occasional text event so upgrading your ship is also quite important now this brings us to the gameplay and World section of the video as the I would say world of Warhammer 40K is deep while I have created a lore primer that covers the base subjects there's a lot to know about Warhammer 40K and I think the game does an accurate job of reflecting that alcat worked pretty closely both with the IP holder Games Workshop and several other people involved in the Lore space for this so it's perhaps unsurprising that the game is pretty faithful to what Warhammer 40K is which I'm sure fans of that will love I myself found it quite enjoyable though if any of that is intimidating or you don't know much about that setting in addition to my lure primer you can actually find an encyclopedia in game that will break down individual terms and how things work how people interact and it's all pretty convenient so at least in that regard the game isn't very intimidating in any way in regards to its setting and I think it does an accurate job of teaching you a wide spoth of information about what the setting is comprised of which is certainly nice to see now on a more practical level when it comes to moving and navigating your way through the coronis expanse that is primarily done of course with our void ship but it can be broken up into a few different parts now there is the I would say ground level where us and our party are actually on the ground walking around engaging with people taking part in combat where necessary Etc but once you're done in a given area you're eventually going to need to leave which typically also involves leaving the planet this brings up our system map this is an individual solar system where you can move around scan planets run into other ships for ship combat perhaps or simply talking to them just to name a few different things this is very would say Mass Effect in nature where you can go through scan planets see what's on them look for interesting things to explore either optional or for main objectives with landing on that planet where applicable really only being a small contained area that is very I would say to the point however we're not done yet because just above that we have the I would say world for lack of a better term map where we can see the entirety of the coronus expanse in the Min solar systems we can travel between in order to travel from solar system to solar system however we have to use the warp which is a dangerous Endeavor and to reflect that in game we have to chart courses showing the safe warp routes to our objective these individual routes however can be either incredibly dangerous just generally dangerous unsafe or safe that is to say green through red with red being the most hazardous orange resulting in a fight almost all the time unsafe being generally okay but often involving text events and safe being uneventful now generally speaking you want to get your routes down to yellow not green yellow allows you to run into events that can give you more Navigators insight for instance that will make making the rest of the route safer that much easier Navigator's Insight is what we're going to earn for charting new courses or running into specific events that give you more you then spend that Navigator's Insight on reducing the danger level of individual routes however while you will be charting courses and finding all of these routes on your own it is actually possible with Navigator insight to chart more specific routes directly from one solar system to the next but it is expensive to do so and I wouldn't recommend it in most cases but if you're looking to create a shortcut from two systems you have to travel all the time you can do that you simply have to know where they both are you just click one that is not actually connected via a route you know and then you spend three Navigators insight to create a dangerous connection and then you can spend more Navigators insight to make that a safe route which I thought was cool and as far as I know the game doesn't actually explain that anywhere which is why I wanted to mention it now on the ground level things are a little more I would say traditional crpg in many respects though you can enter the ship Bridge which is where a lot of interactions with your companions are going to take place this acts as a sort of main Hub on your ship where you can speak to Companions learn more about them many many events take place here and later on it will even be changed a bit to reflect your individual conviction path now off the ship bridge but on an actual Planet much of the gameplay is I would say typical alcat stuff where you're in charge of up to a party of six you can change their formation from The Game's main menu which is a little bit awkward rather than a specific submenu you have to pull up the options menu and then you'll navigate those six people through potentially traps hazardous effects and while there's no like stealth option or anything positioning your characters can occasionally be important in order to avoid them picking up wounds or traumas beyond that based on your character's skills like awareness for instance you can discover secrets to unlock the occasional puzzle here or there and again just very traditional crpg stuff overall though I would say many of the gameplay and the world of it is solid I enjoy what they did in terms of representing Warhammer 40K for the most part I think the warp travel system is easy enough to get your head around and then when you're actually on the ground the bulk of the more familiar systems for the genre are there as well but that finally brings us to combat the exciting Parts if you will and I think alcat has done some interesting things with the combat system in this one combat is a turn-based affair there is no real-time option and it is based on movement points and action points every turn your character will have a set amount of movement points and action points they can spend on abilities and attacking now most attacks will get rid of your movement points not allowing you to go any farther and then also force you to no longer be able to attack but rather just be able to use abilities now at the core of this that system means that a lot of what you're going to be doing is buffing your characters with various abilities before actually making your attacks now a little later on thanks to things like the officer you can grant yourself extra turns and a ton of stacking effects that make you able to take many attacks and many turns but it is something you have to be aware of now probably the coolest thing about it though is the momentum and the heroic act Warhammer 40K Rogue Traer and Warhammer 40K at its core is all about over-the-top coolness the rule of cool if you will and to that end in Rogue Trader there's a lot of little enemies that are designed to be killed in one hit doing so will often increase your character's momentum when the momentum bar to the right of your character's portrait in combat here either raises to a certain point or drops to a certain point you can activate either a heroic act or a desperate measure they are the same thing just opposite ends of the momentum bar the heroic Act is heavily based on your archetypes available to you though you will have a choice between a few towards the end of the game and then you can use that heroic act once per character per combat to unleash devastating abilities on bigger enemies which allows you to take them out now the Nuance to this is all of the stacking effects and maximizing the action economy this system I would say is reactive more than it is proactive that is to say you don't need to pre-buff before fights or anything you do all of that in combat but there are a lot of effects and things you want to buff a character with before attacking which can still be a little bit tedious though it is easier than Pathfinder because you can do it in combat Now by far the easiest way to approach this system is taking advantage of the extra turns one of the archetypes the officer is capable of giving characters extra turns their heroic act just gives them a full extra turn and they can often completely rid themselves of attack per turn limits if you will that is to say they can attack basically as much as they have action points and combining the officer's abilities with other Buffs can see a character getting probably like four or five turns in a row at Max maimum boosts to their damage and things like that to deal just outrageous damage and unsurprisingly that's where a lot of I would say the more interesting combat stuff comes into play is interacting with all those systems to maximize your turns on the action economy but all of these stacking effects and constant giving of extra turns let's say can lead to occasional bugs I have seen people dealing with infinite turn Loops problems with talents and abilities not stacking properly Etc so there is quite a bit going on there but still much more manageable than something like Pathfinder overall as a core system I really enjoy this approach to turn-based combat being able to just destroy a bunch of little enemies build up momentum and then sort of just unleash on the main boss or larger enemies in general if you will combined with some cover systems the burst fire mechanics of all sorts of weapons that allow you to do things like mow down huge swaths of enemies with automatic weapons for instance can make for a lot of really interesting gameplay and because of that I do enjoy the combat system of Rogue Trader really my only complaint remains what it was in my initial review in that due to the very large number of enemies on screen combat can be a bit slow and while you can speed that up which on keyboard is default the space button there are still so many enemies on screen that even speeding it up might cause you some problems of just like not seeing what enemies are doing Etc not to mention that the default speed up key is actually also the key to end your turn on PC which means you'll probably want to change that if you want to go that route basically my point being that it's not a perfect solution to the problem that the game is a little bit slow in turn-based mode though they have done some things to alleviate that broad Strokes though I think it's great I think the combat system fits the setting almost perfectly and you can do a lot of really cool stuff with it much like many other more specific subjects I do have a dedicated video about this if you want more information where I go a lot more granular and talk about specific effects in detail such as recoil on weapons how armor Etc Stacks all that g again really cool system overall a couple notes I want to amend to the end of the combat section here really are mercs respecing and healing if you want to make a custom party or resp your character that is available via an NPC on your ship Bridge your fact Tatum as a matter of fact and at the cost of profit Factor you can in fact Respec though the first few are free though this will not completely reset your character for instance your companions are taken down to their sort of Base abilities and then you can go in different directions from there this is is to retain some of their lore specific information and you yourself can't for instance change like your home world or your origin as those things are baked into the game and how dialogue and things like that work but should you want to redo any of your choices it is possible to a degree now when it comes to healing in combat healing is not a big Focus overall as you will heal to full health after combat is over though there are a handful of abilities that will affect your health or your wounds as it's called in combat and make you a little more survivable but generally speaking you're not going to be doing a lot of healing mid combat what you do have to deal with however is wounds and traumas when your character takes a certain amount of damage based on the difficulty in a single round they will potentially incur a wound or if they get hit by like a trap or something and if you get enough wounds they turn into traumas traumas are very big negative factors on your characteristics or your stats in some way they make that character less effective overall and the the only way to remove traumas is to go back to your ship now in most cases you can do this freely but there are a few times where it's not available if you just have a wound that can be removed by a medkit and this is how they keep you from just doing terribly in combat and pushing on and on and on so it will limit you a little bit but it is overall a very lenient system speaking of combat however we do need to talk about ship combat in addition to ground combat occasionally you will be up against other enemy ships in your Flagship and this system works a little bit differently for starters your Void ship has to take all of its movement in a turn that movement is divided into three phases which is mostly important for the activation of certain abilities at certain times how far your ship can move what weapons it has available to it Etc is down to the equipment you have on your ship as we discussed in the progression systems but the ship also has several posts that you need to assign your companions to to maximize their benefits but also to be able to use the individual abilities ass associated with that post as your ship when you participate in space combat will be leveling up much like all of your other characters which allows you to unlock extra abilities effects Etc that can then be utilized now towards the end of the game your ship becomes a bit of a Powerhouse if you've been upgrading it fully and earning reputation with the Imperial Navy which gives you the best equipment possible but this combined with ultimates for your ship can make you a bit of a wrecking crew it's also possible through your Colony management to get an escort ship that follows you around and helps you engage in a lot of this combat at the same time but what makes this especially unique is that while your abilities and things will have cooldowns you can use your ship's weapons pretty much once per turn that is to say you can use every weapon your ship has once per turn which lets you fire all the time you can fire then move move then fire move fire then move some more Etc so how you attack enemies is largely down to how you have customized your ship so to speak in terms of its weapons and ability but a fully upgraded ship is capable of doing an intense amount of attacking when it comes to other ships and you really need to make use of all of that if you want to be good at ship combat that said you can turn the difficulty of ship combat specifically down if you still don't want to deal with it very much overall I liked the ship combat system it kind of grew on me it was very barebones in the alpha and beta versions of this game but over time I think they polished it up and made it pretty fun though I recognize it's not the kind of thing that's going to be for everybody I wound up enjoying it a lot more than I thought I was going to based on my initial dealings with it all the way back in the earlier versions of the game that though does finally bring us to the steam deck portion of this review before we start wrapping it up and the steam deck for Warhammer 40K Rogue Trader is a real mixed bag it does not have an official rating but I would say it's probably going to get a playable rating it does have controller support which goes a long way for the steam deck and truth be told when it comes to actually moving your character around the maps I've got to say the controller portion of that that feels great now the game does also have Cloud saves but this is where things start to get a little weird because I had a lot of trouble getting the cloud saves to work properly that is to say getting them all to show up often times it would only pull my latest save from my PC as opposed to all of my saves another thing here is that for whatever reason anytime I would try to load a save from my PC on the steam deck it would simply fail to do so and not let me play it now I could start a new game and play that on the steam deck but already the of that sort of interchangeability between your PC and steam deck is going to cut into how much you're going to be able to play a very large game on just the steam deck alone and then there's how the game actually runs it's pretty hit or miss some cutscenes were really really choppy and then others were fine actually running around individual areas seems to be okay and this is what the settings turned all the way down and then I was still running into some choppiness there is however a text scaler in the game's menus the accessibility options so you can actually blow up some of the smaller text which I was a little concerned about going into it so altogether as of right now can you play this on the steam deck yes but I would argue it's the worst version of that experience at the moment which is mostly due to I would say clearly not being designed with the steam deck in mind now if I'm being honest do I want to play this on the steam deck not really can you yes but that brings us to our positives and negatives now my positives for this game between my launch review and now largely remain the same I think the story is really cool I like how it all came together in the end and brought all these loose plot threads together in ways I wasn't expecting I think the options you'll make during that story are particularly cool and seeing the difference between iconic class heretical and dogmatic options and how both Companions and the World At Large response to those individual things has a lot of potential and that combined with the very deep setting of Warhammer 40K leaves you with a crpg that has a lot to love and I think that's why in spite of the bugs this game is still sitting in a mostly positive user review score over on Steam however we do of course have our negatives by far in a way the biggest problem this game has right now is bugs I do think this will eventually be fixed alcat has shown themselves to be pretty committed to the long-term support of their titles outside of kingmaker which they no longer have the rights to but nonetheless the game does have some serious bugs that you may or may not encounter I myself didn't see a lot of them just on my first playthrough for instance another issue is that combat can be a bit slow in plotting just because of the sheer amount of enemies you're dealing with and all of these stacking of various effects you need to put on a character before you really make a move with them and while that can all be done in combat does slow things down a little bit so while there are speed up options combat compared to something like real time with pause in Al cat's previous work is going to be a bit slower and while that's not really a deal breaker it can just make especially smaller fights feel really tedious where you have to do all this windup just to knock out some enemies that you know you're going to destroy and then there's the companions for me most of the comp opions were a Miss I'm sure plenty of people love them but a lot of them just felt either contradictory uninteresting or just outright hostile that made dealing with them more of a headache than fun there was one or two that I enjoyed but for me the cast of characters here just wasn't something that ever really grew on me and I wish a lot of them had more growth or characterization in many ways because as it stands it really does feel to me that Games Workshop came in and told them what they could and couldn't do in this regard which while understandable for the protection of their IP I suppose makes it feel like a different quality of writing compared to their previous work and last but not least for the negative something I probably should have talked a little more about over the course of the review but I did mention previously is that the pacing for the game can be a little bit weird in places because you have free roam to go to all of these solar systems kind of right out of the gate it's easy to stumble on to things you shouldn't be fighting because many of them are actually situated in the earlier solar systems right near where you start exploring at which can lead you to a fair few problems cuz realistically what you should do is go do some other stuff and then come back but I think it can cause a bit of a difficulty Spike as you transition from the end of Act One into the start of act two and start exploring more and while you can certainly work around it and if that's you you're running into that obviously go do and explore some other stuff that's easier and come back to it later personally I actually kept a little notepad of interesting Encounters in various Space Systems that I had to come back to when I was a little bit more leveled up now I think personally that is a problem that is likely caused by their approach to the prologue regardless of the difficulty you have the game set on the prologue is actually more or less the same difficulty once you get to uh daring and higher and then after the prologue the game actually starts ramping up to your selected difficulty and this is to allow people to actually get through unfair without tearing their hair out in the prologue but I think it does cause some problems with things like difficulty spikes especially on unfair where the skill checks are all jacked up which can lead to some unfortunate moments in terms of pacing and how you go about exploring the places that are presented to you overall though that brings me to my conclusion now when it comes to recommending Warhammer 40K Rogue Trader by far and way the biggest consideration is do you think the amount of bugs present are going to bother you that was true in my last review and it's true in this one although now I would say those bugs are even more prominent once I've had the chance to explore more styles of play through that said you can get through this game it is playable but you're almost certainly going to run into some issues at least as of now so whether or not you're willing to put up with that should honestly be your biggest deciding factor at the moment moving past just that though I would say that in many ways I think Warhammer 40K Rogue Trader is a great crpg it does a lot of really cool things it brings you to this setting and puts you in a very unique position within the Imperium that allows for a lot of really cool roleplay options and situations that are unique but I think that is unfortunately let down by a few characters that I think just don't quite lived up to what I had hoped they could be as they don't really grow or change in any way and while you can certainly chalk some of that up to the IP to me it does feel like a fair bit of lost potential so while I think Rogue Trader is great and you should check it out which of course means I give it a buy I also don't think it's Alat best work even if you ignore the bugs which is mostly down to the characters and the writing not to mention that it's quite a bit less ambitious with your three conviction paths as opposed to like 10 Mythic paths in Wrath which makes it overall feel a little less brand in scale so in conclusion Rogue Trader is a great game you can have a lot of fun with it and I certainly did to be clear but I don't think it quite reaches the heights of ALC cat's previous games but at a price point of $50 us and whatever that amounts to regionally I do still think it's a worthwhile experience that manages to offer something unique that is to say a crpg set in Warhammer 40K so if you like crpgs or you like Warhammer you should absolutely check this out just be aware of the problems that I've covered over the course of this review with all of that said though I think that's about where it's time to wrap this particular video up so I certainly hope you enjoyed it if you did like comment subscribe all that YouTube jazz but regardless of any of that truly just thank you so much for watching I really do appreciate it may you wander in wisdom and have an amazing [Music] day

Channel: Mortismal Gaming

Views: 168,516

Keywords: Mortym, Mortismal Gaming, rogue trader, rogue trader trailer, rogue trader 40k, rogue trader character creation, rogue trader gameplay, rogue trader review, wh40k rogue trader, wh40k rogue trader gameplay, wh40k rogue trader beta details, wh40k rogue trader companions, wh40k rogue trader romance, wh40k rogue trader game, wh40k rogue trader rpg, wh40k rogue trader owlcat, wh40k rogue trader review, warhammer40k rogue trader review

Id: d3b5gkmoyjg

Length: 48min 27sec (2907 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 23 2023