WH40K: Rogue Trader - Full Review After 200+ Hours

The grimdark is part of it, take it or leave it. You can't romance a sister of battle or a navigator...

Yrliet is the best RPG romance I've experienced in years. Too bad HER ENDING IS STILL BUGGED!

for a newbie is this game worth it. i’m also thinking about jagged aliance 3.

Do you say you play like a heretic stile? BURN THE HERETIC! KILL THE MUTANT! PURGE THE UNCLEAN!

For me one of the mayor dislikes was one of your likes, the combat, its a heavy broken system right now, you can beat the game on unfair with argenta and 2 officers, one cassia and other yourself or jae in first round, you dont need any other companion, and there is a point when you get the first exemplar talen when you just finish every encounter in 1 round with just argenta and one officer, making infinite loop of turns.
There are 2 core problems, the extra turn habilities and the stacking bonus system as a whole. they need to scrap it and redoit, cause in the end do not make sense that a character can do +1k dmg with each bullet of a 24 bullet burst, the final boss of the game have half that HP, and you cant do more damage cause there is no more enemies to fire at, if there where more, youll do more and more.

the game lacks reactivity, some times you manage to influence some companion to do something and next that is totally ignored.

I enjoyed watching the game. I was disappointed in the game breaking bugs or quests that just ended with a whimper. It does feel very 40K. Ive been in the 40K universe gaming since 1991, and this RT was straight out of the Rick Priestly book. I kept waiting for Abdul Goldburg to show up.(For those of you that remember him from that book) A couple of things that I hate...you get great party members that you just never get to use because you have soooo many good party members to choose from. Maybe there needs to be a way to remove the option of using the same, old ones EVERY time. Injuries, or they leave for an offscreen task like Von Calox did at one point. Another thing is I have played Owlcat games, so the synergy between characters and their abilities is soooo vague to me that Im afraid I will have no clue how to create an effective team on my own. Finally a final battle with EVERY member showing up would rock.

Correction: the voidship, a sword class escort ship, carries approx. 26,000 crew.

The menus are absolutely gorgeous!

I just want to react for your sentence where you said that there is not a single chaos god showing up in the game. You would never see a chaos god in warhammer 40k. If it happens, then it's a goodbye galaxy scenario. It is because for a warp creature to enter realspace, it requires enough warp enery to sustain it's body in realspace. That's why when in game you use too much pshychic power, you destroy the veil between the immaterium and realspace, and chaos creatures start to appear. A chaos god would require so much warp energy that it is simply not possible for them to show up in realspace. Even after the fall of cadia and the fall of the last necron pylon (ancient necron structures that could nullify warp energy) that held the eye of terror (a tear on the veil between realspace and the warp that came to existence after the birth of a chaos god) back from expanding, there is still not enough warp energy for a chaos god to exist in realspace.Chaos gods create demonic legions and aquire followers from chaos cults and traitor space marine legions, but they themselves cannot fight. The closes being to a chaos god that could enter realspace was Vashtorr, an unholy blacksmith demon, that was stronger than a demon prince, but weaker than a chaos god and he was searching for a way to transcend to chaos godhood.

Act 4 is really buggy on the side of the retinue personal quests. Had to toybox some variables to make it work.

They need to divide everything involving reputation by 10. By the beginning of Act 4 I should be able to pretty much max out my rep so I can actually USE the items available. Also, they need to integrate Void Ship combat into the story more and make it more dynamic (building up a fleet, different ships, etc.)

Ulfar should have just had unique abilities. He was underwhelming big time when you first get him. Also, ACT 3 was lame.

overall, I really liked about 80% of this game. the other 20% was varying degrees of frustrating. mostly not horrible, but could have been better.
the combat is mostly far too easy. even increasing the difficulty, most fights after act 1 are a stompfest, very little strategy needed. that's fun sometimes, but gets old fast when everything is like that.
and while I really liked voidship combat, there wasn't as much as I wanted, nor does it integrate well with the rest of the game. the onboarding for it is also terrible. it's not the most intuitive system, and your ship at the start of the game is nearly useless. this makes it really satisfying when you get the hang of it, but I imagine it turns a lot of people off long before then.
I also wish Ulfar wasn't so underdeveloped. having a space marine is really cool. having a space marine that doesn't play qualitatively differently from other party members (and is generally much weaker than a somewhat-optimized Argenta) is less so. And I still can't figure out why Owlcat insists on continuing to give us companions that we can't fully respec. sure, they usually work alright enough, but it never feels good. who wants this?
And while this is true of all of Owlcat's games (and most of the genre overall), but I'm tired of how most of these games handle skill checks. the vast majority of the time, nothing interesting comes of failing a check. A human GM would 1) tune important checks to their players' party, and 2) offer interesting (not always good, but interesting) outcomes even on failure. in most crpgs, the option are either pass and get something interesting or fail and don't, so failing just feels like you're missing part of the game.
The last big issue I has was load times, especially for between the bridge/system/expanse maps. I'm on a great PC, and it still eats up a lot of time. particularly the system and expanse maps have no reason to take much if any time at all. there just isn't much happening on them. it makes exploration (what should be a highlight of the game) a real slog, and I started skipping some opportunities when I just couldn't be asked to sit through a dozen or more loads to do anything cool.
while I've been pretty negative here... I did still really enjoy most of the game. most of the systems are fun, and the writing is engaging and occasionally quite funny, and it's easily the most immersive video game interaction I've had with anything 40k. but still, there are some significant ways that it fell short.

they should allow player to breed genestealers in his ship's bilge and use them for shock troop

Trying to avoid most media on this but so far from the little I have seen it seems like a classic Owlcat game. Best to wait a year or two and get it on discount with all the patches etc. Shame really.

People who say "Romance has no place in WH40K" obviously haven't read enough Black Library novels. Because here is a brief list of actual romances that I remember from all the novels I've read and frankly the Rogue Trader video game is in my humble opinion the closest thing I've ever seen in video game format to a standard Black Library book, if somewhat scaled down due to well limitations imposed by only 3 years of games development and making sure this game can run on a toaster (seriously this game can run on a computer 7+ years old), anyways... the list:

- Inquisitor Gregor Eisenhorn develops a relationship with a Medicae, not sure if she is a Sister of Battle or a member of the Imperial Guard or a Mechanicus Adapt, can't remember, but as far as I'm aware that relationship stuck despite not being mentioned much since except in reflection.
- On a Night Lords Ship slave named Septimus has a relationship with another slave named Octavia (the ship's Navigator) and they both flee.
- In another book a Ship's Confessor Cyrene has a relationship with an Officer.
- A well known relationship between Commissar Ciaphas Cain and the Inquisitor Amberley Vail; The fact they never made it official baffles me as they had been an item for over 100+ years together and their social rank is appropriately on the level.
- In the book Deamon World, a weird twisted relationship between a hermit/slave and a deamonette.
- Fulgrim details a budding romance between a sculper and an artist with a bit of a love triangle from a musician in a Horus Heresy novel.

There are many others I can't remember. But as far as lore/canon is concerned, the relationships in Rogue Trader check out; They wouldn't be there if Games Workshop didn't approve. To my knowledge only the western community support team for Owlcat were against the two Eldar relationships, both that of the Aeldari and Drukhari respective.

Voidship combat is also LITERALLY Battlefleet Gothic:lite. It as if Owlcat copy+pasted the code from Tindalos's now 7+ year old game. It plays and feels exactly like OG Armada. You'll know what I am talking about if you've played it (right down to the ship skills and abilities, right out of Battlefleet Gothic rulebook). This is obviously something Games Workshop stressed the devs to do, as this is very much in line with GW's MO; Games Workshop has a rather patronising attitude towards their customer base and have it stuck in their heads that fans would be confused if spaceship combat was different than what they are used to from existing games so for consistency it should stay the same. It is the same level of closed minded disrespect of the intellect of their customers that Nintendo has; Everything has to be the same, or our dumb fans would get confused... no, only your dumb boomer employees get confused. The fans prefer it to stay the same because fans are like that, they don't like change to things, often to the detriment of those things.

Also, seeing someone pimp out an Imperial Frigate (which are technically light cruisers) to the point it ends up as being as powerful as ships of that size and class during the 31st Millennium is ridiculous too. Taking on ships three times it's size and class ratio alongside entire fleets of escorts all on it's own is hilarious to me. It is akin to "Do you think your crappy sports lookalike car can take on my custom ride in a street race? lol". With that said, space combat is no joke, even though you're using a super strong custom frigate with rare tech bells and whistles with the plot armour of space pirate captain Harlock, at the end of the day it is still just a frigate and if you mess up you'll get wrecked up very quickly. Soon as your shield is down, get hit by multiple missiles, someone blows up right next to you or someone rams you who is bigger than you, you're toast. If you encounter Cruisers or Battleships (the game shows you the type of ships you'll face in the little image icon on the system screen), don't fight, RUN. If it gives you the option to attempt to run, take it. Your ship won't be powerful enough to take on Battleships until Act 5. And in Act 2 you can only take on Cruisers on Normal settings if you've pimped your ship out, otherwise, run from those too.

What a great review - very thorough and detailed.

Funny dislike in 40k I ever heard.. fail.. from group that say "kill the alien the heretic the mutant" and ya want group full.. not mass effect dude

i haven't played rogue trader, but one of my friends has the core rule book and it actually has his name printed in it as he purchased the first edition when it first came out. I ended up playing deathwatch as a spacewolf sniper, so much fun. and dark heresy as an inquisition investigation team, i played a militarum officer yeeted by the inquistor after a dig i was on found a xenos artifact and i was ordered to terminate the rest of the team under inquistion orders. we also had a cop, a psycker and a techpriest in the party. So I am really REALLY looking forward to playing this game.

At the start, I only went iconoclast because as a rich noble officer I didnt see myself jumping through flames. Problem is I heard because the points are limits I feel compelled to stick with Iconoclast in dialogue choices even if it goes against my character roleplay as I won't be able to reach rank 5. Perhaps next time they should add more of these points to allow more potential freedom? Also like you mentioned with this scale also effecting companions more than choices or dialogue perhaps a approval score for them aswell.

Tank class not necessary? I guess you played on the easiest difficulty?

as a 40k fan, this game is the dream. No other game has delved into the lore like this one does, and the writing is quite good. It has some issues but this is a true work of passion and its shows

I went Forge World Crime Lord Iconoclast Officer on my first run

Anyone who actually thinks Romance doesn't exist in Warhammer 40,000 setting doesn't know the lore well. Honestly I was surprised by the level of loyalty Argenta showed my Iconoclast in her ending which I think counts against your complaint about the relationships not changing . I adore Cassia and she's one of my favorite romances in gaming.

And I hate it when the protagonist of an RPG is the commander or pilot of an armed craft but ship combat is only in cutscenes so I loved the voidship combat in this even though my ship's default weapon loadout caught me off guard. As a veteran of the settings tabletop tactical games and RPGs I was expecting a Sword class Frigate to start armed with nothing but cannon batteries since that's standard for the class in setting. And to get a ship with the number of weapon hardpoints your Voidship has in the tabletop RPG you would need a Cruiser which are around three times the size of the Frigates you can use in this game. Still as a lover of Frigates in general I was pleasantly surprised one was our primary ship in this game.

I guess you had bad luck with Ulfar or something because I found a decent array of Space Marine only weapons in my run. And his chapter 5 companion quest you're supposed to use Cassia's ability to cut a new path through the warp to reach it. Which is very bad if you've run out of navigator insight before getting there. There definitely needed to be a way to get more insight in chapter five because of how much you need it there IMO

Should i pick up this game if i do not like turn base RPGs?

im so glad this game is really good

Side note wouldnt it be awesome if you could recruit like a Tau fire warrior who escaped the influence of the Ethereals and is like in hiding with the rogue trader as a sniper. I totally agree that while its very un lore friendly, i think RPGs like this are the best opportunity to explore things in a setting that would otherwise be very very almost impossibly rare.

Nice review. I've just begun doing the main quests in Act 2, yet I'm somehow still 70+ hours in. I guess I just like roaming space and exploring star systems. Hahahaha.

My main problem with the game is that combat just takes SO LONG all the time. It's not a turn-based problem, it's just due to how all of the encounters are designed. There are just so many little scrub enemies that are no problem knocking off but who each have their own turn and just bog the pace down. On the opposite end, there are (so far at least - I AM still in the beginning-to-middle of the game) very few really challenging fights that really test out your skills and how well you've built your characters. It feels like I'm just mowing down cannon fodder, and while that can really work in a faster-paced game (the Space Marine FPS comes to mind!), it isn't terribly fun here. To me, at least.

Or...well...I do enjoy the combat. I just wished it was tighter and more difficult.

One thing I disagree with you on is that it's a shame there aren't more xeno companions. I can see why you'd feel that if you haven't played Warhammer 40K before, but man, they do NOT get along. It's not like a game like Mass Effect where you have a bunch of alien races that generally get along, then a bunch of fairly antagonistic races, and then some REALLY BAD ones. Nah, in W40K, they're all pretty genocidal towards each other. I'm not a huge W40K fan who is neck-deep into the lore of the universe, but I'm fairly certain that most of the races out there have at least razed a planet or two of Humanity's. While Chaos is kind of the big bad out there that absolutely everyone can agree to hate, no one is friendly with each other. I'm actually surprised that there are xeno companions at all, at least without you having to go full heretic to bring them onboard. Overall, I feel like you get a bit too much leeway with your wild ideas as the player character. I brought a mechanical "pet" onboard the ship and everyone around me rightly freaked the eff out because it was an unholy abomination that could put the entire ship at risk, but after yelling at me for a little bit (all voice acted, haha!), they all eventually cooled off and went along with it.

W40K is just a...weird setting. Things are very black and white, and honestly mostly just black and grimdark. I feel like Owlcat had to de-extreme it a bit in order to build a proper game around it.

All of this being said, I can recommend Warhammer 40K: Mechanicus if you liked Rogue Trader. Mechanicus is less of a CRPG and more of an XCOM-type tactical turn-based game, but it's hard to not see a lot of similarities even so. I really liked that game even if it had one of the weirdest difficulty curves in a while, with the beginning being hard as nails and the end being fairly easy.

But it was still a fun game. It follows the tech priests while they're battling another xeno race that I don't think is in Rogue Trader. Obviously I'm not done with Rogue Trader yet but I see no inclination that this particular race would pop up. And that's kind of what I like about Warhammer 40K. Between Space Marine, Rogue Trader and Mechanicus, you have three games where you not only battle three different alien races/groups of aliens, but you're actually playing as three different parts of the Empire. There's a LOT of lore there.

Sorry for rambling a little. Point is, great review! :)

I’m just playing now and 3 months after your review it’s still really buggy with parts of act 2 almost unplayable, and other graphical bugs that partially obscure the screen. But I’m 100+ hours in so obviously they’re doing something right! I think they’ve nailed the setting pretty well, and the stories are genuinely interesting. My biggest gripe is that levelling up your characters is a chore - there’s a bewildering array of options, and it’s not always clear how one upgrade will interact with earlier choices - it doesn’t help that some introduce new systems and tokens to keep track of. If they could find a clearer, more visual way to present the information I think it would be a huge quality of life improvement.

Watched a lot of your videos on this game and thinking of finally picking it up with the release of the 1.1.58 patch.
I'm sure I will be coming back here for all your excellent info after buying th game...

The "secret" ending is having Nomos help you out but that is very easy and obvious to get especially on an Iconoclast playthrough (where it's also mandatory for having a "good" ending).

There is a secret ending involving nomos, no?

Have you gave any thought into creating your own party members?

My friend drew quite a few female portraits for this game. I'm going to send him this video, he's a bit vain - he'd like to hear your kind words in this regard.

saying romance doesn’t belong in 40k a setting where humanities greatest power is how fast they reproduce is crazy to me.

Haha, I didn't know Ulfar was just mediocre. I played blind on hard difficulty and thought that Ulfar was busted. My Argenta was perma-benched for dying so fast and doing no dmg. I was lazy to build henrix, so he was just support to cast words of the emperor spells.

No way you experience everything in 1 playthrough bruv

One playthrough so far. Iconoclast ranged dps psyker. The build was underwhelming, but the game was awesome. Waiting for some DLCs and then I'm gonna go again either dogmatic or heretic.

I always thought that the companions don't become closer to the player is because they are already fleshed out characters with a set worldview (in the game world that is). They are either "business" partners, subjects, servants etc. One does not simply change a character of a Battle Sister, a Space Marine, an eldar or a Dark Eldar for that matter. It does really reflect the 40k genre. I've read many books from the universe and I have yet to see a budding, happy romance in any of them. Even the famous Cain when he has his trysts and romances it's never really about love or feelings, some of his "adventures" are one night stands, some just for pleasure and even Cain himself has no illusions about him and Amberley, in fact he knows all to well that if he fails or flat out disobeys her she will kill him.

And don't get me wrong, that's coming from someone who would love to see some Sister of Battle action.

This is BG3 level of quality game. If they had budget for voice acting and animation like Larian - they would easily take GOTY

I personally like the companions of Rogue Trader more than BG3, Pasqal in particular is my favourite (AD mech fan all the way)

Doing anything but eating, working and breathing when you are told is a 100% accurate description of 40k. 🏆

The void ship does not have "millions of people" it has about 62 000 crew.
But the planets you own (yes, right you own PLANETS) can have milliards of people.

Bro I like your videos but calm down on the spoilers in a REVIEW video. One of many examples "there are no major villains" can be said without spoiling that specific detail.

While I listened to your review, I thought how funny it is, most things you point out as drawbacks and dislikes are things I consider to be actually rarely encountered good design choices and restraint on the devs' part. :)

they should include real time action (same as pillar eternity) in addition to tactical action. Buffing and debuffing feel repetitive

Bro you’re obsessed with romances in video games
It’s kinda weird

"Commander Highslanderer" got me Kek'in