Warhammer 40k Rogue Trader: the 'k' stands for 'kayfabe'
I've never played anything in the Warhammer 40k universe. Being alive in an English speaking country and spending my formative years online, I have heard a lot about it, but mostly through people posting stuff like "DEATH TO HERETICS! PRAISE THE EMPEROR! BURN THOSE XENOS!" This might be the most off-putting behavior an online community can have short of slurs and harassment campaigns, so I didn't really delve deeper. Like, I'm pretty sure it's kayfabe, but who knows--I was wrong about those 'deus vult' posters. Regardless, I got this game from a cRPG bundle, so I might as well see what the fuss is about.
Overall it's a 7/10. There's lots to love, but the game is practically made of little problems. So many frustrations and bugs are constantly popping up, and the game is balanced so poorly that it's not possible for me to give it a higher score. I've heard that there were a bunch of game-breaking bugs at launch (some that prevented you from beating the game at all), but those appear to be gone. What's left is a truly colossal number of little friction points. In every play session you will encounter abilities that don't do what they say, characters whose turns end early for no reason, fundamental actions (move, shoot) that are forbidden when they shouldn't be. Never before have I cried out "all I want is software that functions" at the TV as often as I have with this game.
Speaking of the TV, Rogue Trader has controller support, so I can play it from my couch (I my PC in the living room because I've lost control of my life) without resorting to coffee table bluetooth mice and keyboards. The controller functionality almost always works great. There are a few things you can't do (notably, read more than the basic descriptions of items in the inventory screen), but aside from that it's pretty seamless. This is a huge win. Being able to play a cRPG in comfort rather than at the work desk is truly joyous.
#tl;dr
The writing is fine, but the tone is very inconsistent, leading to instant jumps from campy fun to kicking the dog. The DLCs are great. Yrliet's quest is the best in the game and she is best girl. Owlcat should have let my Rogue Trader tell Marazhai that she hates him and wants to kill him and also sleep with him. The companions are well-characterized even if some of the companion quests suck (looking at you, Argenta, on both counts). The combat is incredibly complex and terribly balanced, making over half of the talents in the game next to useless. Strong builds deal five to ten times the damage they should. The optimal strategy, trivial to implement, means that the enemy will never get to take any actions for the back 50 hours of the game.
I do recommend this game overall if you like cRPGs, tactical combat, or the setting. For an optimal experience, I would recommend playing act 1 on Daring difficulty (Normal +1), Acts 2 and 3 on Hard difficulty (Normal +2) and Acts 4 and 5 on Unfair (Normal +3). Though set the ship combat to normal for all of them because they're balanced differently.
#The Writing - It's okay
The first thing you learn is, at least for the writers at owlcat, that it is kayfabe. The Imperium of Man is characterized basically instantly as a collection of class-obsessed lunatics whose contempt for human life is matched only by its hatred of everything that's foreign (can you tell Games Workshop first wrote the setting in Thatcher's UK?). It's made really clear from the beginning that they are not "The Good Guys", and that you should be deeply suspicious of them for the rest of the game. Owlcat does a great job of keeping this a steady throughline. Even if you've never played anything in this universe before, there's usually enough context to keep the vast setting comprehensible. And critically, the writers give you enough roleplay potential that you are allowed to say things like "human lives have value", which is something that there's no way in hell anyone in this universe would ever say. I've heard 90% of Mass Effect players took the Paragon (goodie two-shoes) options when playing, and I'm spiritually one of them. I don't like roleplaying as a fascist or a fascist but purple, so I'm very pleased that the game allows you to say things like "killing people for no reason is bad".
For the game's narrative, the writing is serviceable. The main story has plenty of twists and turns and opportunities to characterize your rogue trader, but doesn't blow the mind. It's a fine story and reasonably gripping. Perfectly competent and a pleasure to read.
Your main source of quality character writing comes from your companion quests, and these are all over the place. Some of them (Kibellah's and Yrliet's) are phenomenal, truly effecting vignettes of reconciling life with a hostile universe. These are the quests that make the game worth playing! Others are almost offensively bad. One companion's quest revolves around survivor's guilt. The promise of returning towhere it all went wrong for them is a dangled thread for the whole game. When you finally do return, the story ends so abruptly it's comedic. They retrieve some artifact off-screen and are cured of their mental anguish forever. Abysmal. Hilariously bad. And this is for the companion who technically has the biggest impact on the plot.
To start some fights, here's my rating of the quality of the companion quests (not my rating of which companion is best): Yrliet > Kibellah > Pasqal > Ulfar > Idira > Heinrix > Solomourne > Cassia > Jae > Argenta. There's a last companion who is written like you're supposed to have an intense hatesex relation with, but if you try to roleplay that, you don't get to recruit him and he dies. RIP to that guy. Apparently even if you do recruit him you can't romance him. Cringe.
Moreover, there's a tonal whiplash problem through the whole game. For all the hem and haw online about "WH40K is the OG grimdark", this is not a particularly grim or dark game. It's full top to bottom with humor, and all the grim stuff happens off-screen. Pillars Deadfire and Avowed are far more grim for more of the runtime. You're not really encouraged to take the world seriously, as your roleplaying options are typically "1. [Dogmatic] burn 2 million people at the stake. 2. [Heretical] turn 2 million people into slugs. 3. [Iconoclast] give 2 million people some bread. 4. only burn 10 thousand people at the stake". These are not serious choices. So it isn't grim or even dark--it's comedy. And to be clear--that's fine. It is a legitimately funny game--the jokes land almost every time. But occasionally the game bounces back to these kick the dog moments that feel out of left field. This is especially egregious in the epilogue. Yes, it is very verisimilitudinous (given the setting) for the ending to have >!your companions to all kill each other.!< That alone doesn't make it good writing--you have to earn that. You have to support that epilogue in the game we actually played. Make the game's runtime actually grim. Set up these conflicts in the text! Like, if >!Heinrix or Argenta killed Yrliet, that would make me cry!<, but it would make sense given the game I played. What happens instead is much worse.
I don't think that being set in the WH40K universe makes the game better. Games Workshop isn't going to let Owlcat write anything that changes the status quo of the setting or reveal huge secrets (maybe I'm wrong! if you're a lore scholar and rogue trader does crazy stuff here, let me know and I'll apologize for my ignorance). So you spend the whole game knowing that no matter what big and important things any of the characters talk about, in the end, the status quo will be restored. Pillars 1 gets to do amazing, hurtful, shocking things with the secrets it reveals (play Pillars of Eternity! It's great!), but you know going in that Rogue Trader isn't going to be doing anything even close because it's not their setting. Moreover, you have to deal with 40 years of aggregate debt accrued from Games Workshop's bad decisions. In the 90s, they thought it would be hilarious if an alien race called humans monkeys (""""mon-keigh""""). This is a joke that's funny exactly once the first time you hear it and immediately becomes tedious thereafter. You spend the whole game listening to important characters in important conversations call you monkey and it takes me out of it every time. I want to think about your characters, not be reminded of brits from the 90s! A nontrivial portion of the tonal whiplash I mentioned comes from this aggregate cruft of 40 years. For example, the space wolf clan of space marines are all incredibly campy. They speak in these exagerrated Swedenisms, talk about drinking mjod, going to kjalhallah after death, and how inside of them there are two wolves men, one dark and one light, in constant combat. This is well-done and actually very funny and clashes instantly whenever the tone gets even close to serious. It's like having a happy clown honk his nose at you while talking about his dead clown brothers. If you're gonna do camp, commit to camp, camp is great!! The half-measures just don't work for me. However, the game would certainly have been a complete financial failure if it wasn't set in WH40K, so it can't be helped.
#The DLCs - They're great!
Of the cRPGs I've played, usually the DLC missions get siloed off into separate areas with their added companions usually only having dialogue in those areas. This saves a bunch of work. Owlcat chose instead to incorporate its two DLCs into the main story. Your two DLC companions, Kibellah and Solomourne are full characters through the main plot, piping up often and being reacted to by the other characters. The missions themselves are also fantastic. The stories here really flesh our the world, and the mission on the medieval world in Solomourne's DLC is the best quest in the game. If you're picking up this game, it's definitely worth buying them. Though, they advertise themselves as being 15 hours each, and that's definitely not true.
#The Combat Mechanics - They're bad!!
Rogue Trader is capital-C Crunchy. Owlcat wants you to think about your characters' builds and how they affect combat and skill tests in dialogue. Unfortunately, they fail to hold up their side of the bargain; the game crumbles basically instantly against the slight pressure of trying your best. To shamelessly steal a line from a 10 year-old game review: the problem here is that you're too free and have no choices.
Let's get into that claim. First off, there's a colossal array of potential builds. Every class has like 30 different talents (i.e., feats/passives) and 8 different abilities, and each character can choose between three or four different classes halfway through the build. By the end of the game, each character has something like 100 talents to choose from, increasing to 160 if you take into account changing classes. In theory, there's a lot of freedom there.
However, Rogue Trader has two big problems that tear down the illusion of build variety. Owlcat fails to engage meaningfully with the general principle that guaranteed damage now is better than maybe doing damage later. So many of the talents are either "Do 5 more damage with heavy weapons" or "Do 5 more damage when an enemy that hit you two turns ago moves past you at least two tiles and you're adjacent to an ally". Because your goal is to kill your enemies, killing them faster is better, so all the talents that give you damage later are strictly worse than talents that give damage now. The optimal strategy is to kill as many enemies as fast as possible.
The second big problem is that the way damage is calculated, there is a gargantuan gap in damage between a good build and a bad build. Change a few talents, equip a different weapon, and Argenta will go from dealing 8,000 damage in one turn to 800. This means that there's no way to really balance the encounters because some players will be doing thousands of damage, and others will struggle to break 200. What Owlcat appears to have done is crank up enemy damage quite high, so if you allow them even a single turn they can wipe your entire team. The act 3 boss shows this clearly: when you bring them down to half health, they heal back up and instantly take a turn, easily killing 1-4 of your pals if you don't put a beefcake in the way. This tries to solve this problem by pressuring weaker built players into respeccing for real power, but exacerbates the first big problem. All the talents that deal damage later become useless garbage.
The result of these two problems is that the only strategy becomes alpha striking--speccing your team into going first, buffing a damage queen, and killing every single enemy in the fight before they get even a single turn. Entering the arena of the final boss, it had been dozens of hours since an enemy was allowed to take their turn. I am not a spreadsheet guru. All I was thinking was "damage now is worth more than damage later" and "Argenta's heroic act lets her take 10 free single shots", and the game crumbled to pieces. For what it's worth, the final boss was good and did survive the alpha strike. If only any other encounter in the back half of the game had been like that. Even worse, is that the difficulty settings don't really help. If you can first-turn a fight on Normal difficulty, you'll be able to do so on Unfair difficulty. The scaling of enemy strength with difficulty setting doesn't compare to the difference in power between a good and a mediocre player build, so adjusting the difficulty mode rarely makes a difference in the back half of the game.
The optimal strategy being alpha striking reveals a third problem with the combat. I haven't let the enemy take an action for 50 hours, and it still took 136 hours for me to beat the game. There's so much combat in the game that if they fixed these balance issues and every fight was merely reasonably tilted in the player's favor (rather than overwhelmingly tilted) the game would last twice as long.
Therefore, you're too free (huge numbers of talents to sift through) and have no choices (most of the talents are garbage, and if you don't alpha strike every fight, the game will last an additional 70 hours). There are so many bad talents, in fact, that Owlcat has invented a new problem never-before-seen in gaming: leveling up feels bad. Every level up in the back half of the game has you sifting through heaps of trash talents (the list is different for every character, so you're looking through 6 lists every level--sometimes 12 lists if you have a double-talent level up) hunting for one that's even passably decent. And remember, between all your characters' different classes, this could be over a hundred total talents you have to read. I didn't know it was possible to make an rpg where leveling up is a chore and something I actively dread. Respeccing your characters is even worse. Rather than letting you swap out some talents for others in the Respec UI, you have to go through and click through each level one by one. It is hideously bad. If you thought respeccing in Pillars Deadfire was a pain, you haven't seen anything.
#The Solution
Owlcat is making a second WH40K cRPG. To fix the problems outlined above, they would need to severely reduce the strength of the player. A good build and a bad build should be a difference of 800 damage vs 200, not 8,000 vs 200. By reducing the damage of the top-end of builds, more play styles become viable, the player can't just completely prevent the enemy from taking turns, and the player gets to see all the cool variety you put in the game. They'd also need to cut down on the number of fights so that the game doesn't balloon to 200-300 hours. I think that fewer, longer, fights with the top-end of player power chopped off could push the sequel up to a nine without even improving the quality of the writing.
Also, if Owlcat wants to make a game as complex as this one, they really really need to rethink their tooltips. So many times throughout the game, you'll find abilities where it's unclear how they interact with one another. For example, Kibellah's Blade Dance ability says it performs 4 Melee Attacks with her sword, and her sword says that it does X every successful melee attacks. Will X happen 4 times, or 1 time? You'd think it's 4, but it's actually 1. The game is full of stuff like this. What Owlcat needs to do is to take a page out of Magic: the Gathering's book. In Magic, every noun and every verb have precise, consistent meanings. It is completely unambiguous what the difference is between "casting a spell" and "playing a land"; between "declaring an attack" and "attacking". If they're going to put a bajillion talents in the game, having an ironclad, consistent vocabulary to describe those talents is absolutely essential. As it stands, you will spend a few cumulative hours over the course of the game looking up interactions or trying to figure out why something happened or something didn't work.