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Game subthread.
Review of Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader in the child comment here. (if putting it like this, let the mods remind me of not doing this)
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.
"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.
...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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