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[Persus13]

Owlcat Games announced that they were working on a 40k Rogue Trader cRPG about 6 months ago, but they just released an alpha for it this week, and that gives us a bit more information of what this RPG looks like.

If you're not familiar with Owlcat Games, they're the developers behind the Pathfinder video games, Kingmaker and Wrath of the Righteous. I enjoyed Kingmaker but never could get around to finishing it, but Wrath of the Righteous thoroughly hooked me and I had an absolute blast playing it. Its not a perfect game by any means, but its definitely one of my favorite RPGs, and the setting of that game makes me incredibly interested in seeing these folks tackle a 40k game.

Rogue Trader seems to be like their Pathfinder games in that its an isometric cRPG where you play a customizable protagonist Rogue Trader with a party of NPC companions, including a Sister of Battle, an Eldar, and a Tech-Priest. And like the Pathfinder games it seems to be an adaptation of a tabletop rpg, in this case though its the Rogue Trader RPG. The game is set in the Koronus Expanse, a lot of the companions match up with the different tabletop classes (Seneschal, Navigator, etc.), and the stats and skills seem to be the same as in the tabletop. Character levelling seems a bit different, but its possible they've just organized it a bit more than the tabletop did.

Unlike the Pathfinder games, it seems that they're going exclusively with turn-based combat, and there seems to be a half-cover/full cover system similar to XCOM and other recent turn based games. My personal expectations for a Rogue Trader game would be a mix of trading, exploring, and fighting both on the ground and in space, and it looks like they're trying to go for all of that. There's space combat in the alpha (albeit in a very unfinished state), the world map makes it look like there's a lot to explore, and managing trade and stats like Profit Factor sounds like a core component of the game.

If you absolutely want to play the game this second, preordering gives you alpha access, but personally I'm going to be waiting until release date since that seems like a good way to burn out on the game.

Steam Page

Gameplay Trailer

Official Website

RPG Reviewer discussing what's in the alpha

[nenjin]

I'm going to keep an eye on it, but I can't say I immediately loved it. Then again, Pathfinder et. al, I've never played. Years of 40k games where their reach extends their grasp leaves me wary. It's one of the issues with 40k properties, the universe is so vast and full of stuff that devs try to stuff it all in at once and get buried in the details.

[Dostoevsky]

The pathfinder games have gotten a lot of love, but personally I kind of hate them. There's a lot of good in there, but (in my opinion) the plot & characters are bland at best (especially in WOTR) and the enemy encounter designs were absolutely terrible. All those mechanics and combat were in the service of munchkining and buff-stacking to pierce through massively overstat-ed enemies.

As a person who gave some kickstarter money to Owlcat, at this point I'm feeling very much 'fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me' - not eager for time number three.

[Chiefwaffles]

Both Pathfinder Kingmaker and Wrath of the Righteous were fucking amazing games. Can't wait to play this one too.

It will, of course, be buggy on release and have at least two different "definitive edition" updates that add some QoL stuff and fix critical bugs later. But I've not actually encountered any significant bugs on release for either of Owlcat's Pathfinder games so I'm feeling similarly lucky here.

[Persus13]

The pathfinder games have gotten a lot of love, but personally I kind of hate them. There's a lot of good in there, but (in my opinion) the plot & characters are bland at best (especially in WOTR) and the enemy encounter designs were absolutely terrible. All those mechanics and combat were in the service of munchkining and buff-stacking to pierce through massively overstat-ed enemies.

As a person who gave some kickstarter money to Owlcat, at this point I'm feeling very much 'fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me' - not eager for time number three.

I kickstarted Kingmaker as well and am pretty glad I waited until I had a better computer to try it. I definitely think a lot of your criticisms are fair, as they're why Pathfinder 1e is a system I have 0 interest in playing as a tabletop game. But when the game takes on a lot of the work of the tabletop game for me, I enjoyed playing it, and personally I really enjoyed WotR's narrative of reclaiming a land from demons. That's partly why I'm interested in seeing what they do using a different system as a starting point. It helps that I recently got a bunch of the Rogue Trader PDFs from a humble bundle, so I'd been thinking of trying the tabletop when I found out this was coming out.

[ndkid]

Overall, it seems like Owlcat's Pathfinder RPGs are some of the most divisive games I've seen in years... the rate of "loved it" and "utter trash" both seem high, even taking into account the typical hyperbolic nature of internet discourse. I'll be curious to see whether moving away from the Pathfinder style combat leads them to making combat encounters that are more to my taste.

[Robsoie]

Only played Pathfinder Kingmaker and it was frankly amazing in many ways.
The only thing i really didn't liked about it was that they choose the unity engine to build their game on, meaning longer loading times than any similar looking games ... and those loading times were really painfull. Apparently this big annoyance was slightly improved the sequel but still.

[Cthulhu]

Somebody once described Pathfinder's gameplay as "exchanging appellate briefs on fictional war criminals."  I can't imagine playing it on tabletop, but offloading all the crunch to a computer makes it pretty fun. 

Mainly I'm semi-excited because despite not really liking Pathfinder gameplay I thought the story and characters in WOTR were pretty fun.  A lot of generic stuff, but then you also get like Camellia, who's

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

a full on BTK-style sexual sadist serial killer and there's no way to redeem her, her romance path is dragging you down with her.

which is crazy and fun and not something you usually see in these games.  So if they make the characters interesting and hopefully easier to actually use (some of the characters in WOTR are pretty garbage if you're playing on higher difficulties, but that's partly a pathfinder problem so maybe RT will be better)

[Iduno]

The pathfinder games have gotten a lot of love, but personally I kind of hate them. There's a lot of good in there, but (in my opinion) the plot & characters are bland at best (especially in WOTR) and the enemy encounter designs were absolutely terrible. All those mechanics and combat were in the service of munchkining and buff-stacking to pierce through massively overstat-ed enemies.

As a person who gave some kickstarter money to Owlcat, at this point I'm feeling very much 'fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me' - not eager for time number three.

Yeah, I had a lot more interest in this game until I saw Owlcat was making it, for the reasons you mention.

I still remember the island of creatures who were effectively immune to everything except magic missile, and also you were not allowed to rest to regain/change spells, and fuck you if you didn't guess correctly what they expected. Absolute trash design.

[Chiefwaffles]

That island was great, excuse you. God-tier game design