Navigating Paintings - a review of the Rogue Trader CRPG

I bought this for Christmas and was playing it a bit every evening during my temp job, then I lost that job unexpectedly and at the same time UK got paralysed by dirty snow. I was depressed and  frustrated because I thought the game screwed me out of an achievement, so I made a decision, a really BAD decision; I decided to restart, use a mod to activate ALL romanceable characters across gender and remove jealousy, and re-start the whole game with a new character - a gloriously fancy noble with a high fellowship and moneymaking skills and rock bottom toughness and willpower and commit myself to playing the whole game again as the fanciest boy imaginable. 

And that is what I did, for much longer than I expected, about two weeks I think, though time got a bit formless during the experience, and now I stand before you, finally free from the Koronus Expanse, having completed the whole game, or as close to whole as one persona can reasonably get on one playthrough.

 

Raszard

I have deleted Rogue Trader. Never let me play a CRPG again. 

 

Vast

RT is a vast, ridiculously fat, byzantine structure. Its sheer weight, scope, and the interconnectedness of all its multifaceted systems is both the flaw and the draw. The systems sing when they interrelate in interesting ways that provokes more than the sum of their parts. 

Draws; The gigantism is appropriate for the Warhammer universe and the ever-collapsing Imperium of Man. It actually makes you feel like a Rogue Trader, desperate ruler of a small empire, drowning in problems  and facing everything with the fractured morality of the 41st Millenium. 

Flaws; There are multiple intersecting types of crunch and grind, (which I probably made worse by downloading DLC and leaving ALL romance options open), from grainy grindy battles towards the second half, to the literal accountancy job of progression. There is an Imperium-appropriate companion quest in the game where you literally have to stand in line for days in an Administratum complex and its more fun than the actual bureaucracy of levelling your characters. 

The systems of Rogue Trader are; Navigating Paintings, Reading and Clicking, Murder Chess and the lesser systems of Navigation, Space Battles, Empire Management and Storybooks.

 

 

Navigating Paintings

An isometric system like the old Infinity Engine classics but with the scenes and arenas modelled in 3D and with a swirly camera so you can spin around, and limited 3-dimensionality. 

By limited I mean there are sometimes two 'layers' or levels to a game, with advantageous sightlines, ways to get up or down to and from places and ways to bottleneck and control areas in combat, but the areas you run your little figure around when you are just being a Rogue Trader and talking to people are the same as those you use for combat, to the games advantage when gunfights erupt in places you thought were safe, which they do constantly in the first part of the game, or turn into negotiations, which is more rare but does happen sometimes. 

Most potentially-tactical areas have one or two aspects or elements you can use in combat, like a secret or less obvious flanking path you can find by exploring, or a perch to put a sniper on, and in the later game, some limited interactable elements, like stairways you can materialise and remove if you are in the right place, and objects and items you can mess with to alter the circumstances of a fight. 

They are pretty. Really actually beautiful, and characterful environments, and are all limited in size, very much not procedural or simulated 'real scale' environments but more like 'stages', 'scenes' or chessboards with the narrative being made up of journeys between these stages. And that is both good and bad, because there is no insane wilderness wandering through procedurally generated hexes, like you might have had with earlier CRPG's - but the game has to communicate its sense of scale and vastness through these many journeys between limited stage plays - making it more 'like' a play, in which a story of great events takes place, but  the scene moves from 'court' to 'battlefield' to 'wilderness' with only the inference of an in-between. 

There is a mild conflict, or at least, a managed polarity, between the complexity, detail and baroque nature of the painting-scenes and the gameplay. The 'scenes' are a rhapsody of wild detail, from fecund jungles set with sapphire streams where snakes wriggle between the feet of your characters, to spiky space elf megacities (Drukhari are very 90’s), to the endless pipage and grating and plates of a cogboy world, and this deep overflowing of detail and specificity makes them very good at imbuing the game with the spirit of 40k in all its heaving byzantine gigantism. 

But the tools and methods used for navigating these baroque digital paintings are highly limited, specific and well-honed from making many previous CRPGs. There are traps, which can be found and disarmed by your not-D&D-thieves in the same way as the strangely-rectangular goblin traps in Baldurs Gate, (they are actually a little more complex), fiddly hidden things that glow or are outlined so you can click on them, and secondary routes to places, (but very rarely tertiary or more, there will be an obvious way forward and, if you explore and click about the margins, maybe a less-obvious way, but not the infinity of choices presented by, for instance, a real forgeworld or space ship interior). 

Of course actually making functional use of all this visual and spatial detail would make the game virtually unplayable - investigating every crevice in something like a hive world map would be mindbreaking, though it does leave open the potentiality for a much narrower more 'arty' game with a few very detailed maps and a large amount of context-dependant executable detail in them, I suppose something like being a belowdecks investigator looking into smaller scale dramas.

 

  

Reading And Clicking 

The next most common activity in Rogue Trader is reading dialogue text and clicking one of a range of options. It’s through this that you feel much of the 'reality' of the world. The dialogue is solid, the character writing somewhat better. 

An interesting case of 'known unknowns'; dialogue will sometimes highlight when an option will require a skill test to pass, and will sometimes visibly grey out dialogue options based on how you have played the games morality path - so you could have said this, if you were more Iconoclastic  or more Puritan etc, but aren’t, so you can't. The game is letting you know and making it clear there were other possible paths, but I think there are also truly hidden options, lost and found though high or low intelligence or fellowship scores, though done or undone events and relationships with various characters and organisations. there are times when the game wants you to know you are making a choice with certain consequences and times when it will hide the existence of that choice and those consequences. 

The question of knowing and not knowing when you are making a choice and what it might mean goes down to one of the core conflicts I felt when playing the game. 

if you've played infinity engine games or their ilk before the slightly natural/unnatural sometimes looping gamic structure of the dialogue its more questions-and-answer than more natural dialogue and flows more like an interview. 

There is almost too much dialogue for me to simply review it. The main impression it left me with was its own giganticness, the sheer mass of it, and the incredible organisational systems that must be required to arrange all of it, and to update it. On my second playthrough I added the void shadows expansion and that adds characters and integrates their conversations into the game throughout the whole thing. I almost want to watch a documentary on how Owlcat manages this stuff. 

To return to the known and unknown element; there are characters we meet as NPCs who can clearly become companions, as this is set up in their introduction, we can lose companions, though it’s usually very explicit when this will happen and usually has to be a deliberate choice, (many reviews of the game criticise the fact that your clearly one-way aligned characters stick around way too long if you are obviously going in a different moral direction and don't respond to that enough),

and there are a handful of secret companions who start out as NPCs and can possibly be recruited if you  have the right alignment and pick the right dialogue options. 

I know that if it was easier to 'accidentally' lose companions, like if the battle sister sees you becoming heretical and either leaves or even tries to kill you, this would probably draw complaints, but the addition of more unknown unknowns really adds to the feel and flavour of experiencing a living world, and knowing, or not knowing, precisely who might be recruitable, deepens immersion.

 

Murder Chess 

Though all chess is murder chess I suppose. 

The square-grid turn-based combat is one of the most fun things about the game. The combination of moves, actions, attacks, cover, mutual support, area control etc, makes the fights feel very lively and fun, especially in the early game when you only have shit guns and your characters haven't levelled to absurdity. 

The combat brings together a lot of the 'material' aspects of the game; all the weapons you found, recovered or traded for, the elaborate procedure of 'dressing your dolls' with the best possible armour and clothes, and the mildly pleasurable autism of balancing boots that give plus one movement if an adjacent character is upset vs shoes with knives that let you kick someone in the nuts and so on

The weapons also 'feel' chunky and appropriate. Sister Argenta’s familiar bolter sound was so loud I had to go into the settings to turn down effects. 

Positioning and planning your little chess pieces, preparing sightlines and trying to control areas with grenades and magic powers, trying to make sure your psyker or nutty tech priest only explodes the enemy and not you, planning when you will pull out your special sword for a super swing, or organising your character build so you can dual-attack, trying to position your officer character so they can hand out buffs and extra movements, setting things and people on fire, is great fun. 

I played this on normal difficulty and by the last part of the game most fights were too easy to be interesting in themselves. A few stuck out as having abnormal or wild difficulty. I could have turned the difficulty up, to make things more interesting, but by the last act the sheet length of the game and the number of battles I had to fight became a weight on its own - many had turned from something I 'got' to do into something I 'had' to do to progress (also I probably should have turned off the non-attack animations, the game does give you the options for this), and the general deep sweaty graininess of the combat and character progression system also became a weight of its own 

If you are a different kind of person I think playing on very hard and continuing to carefully analyse and progress your characters might still be fun 

A few interesting points; 

The true currency of the Krononus Expanse is.... GRENADES! Especially sustained area-effect grenades like smoke, toxin or fire. These are incredibly useful for dealing with big fights where your best tactic will be to try to lock off areas of the board and control the flow of enemies into choke points where you can maintain your characters in close proximity to aid each other. Even at the early points, I was the master of a city sized starship and hope of the dynasty, but I kept running out of grenades and especially useful ones. Like, I can have a gun that fires alien dreams or whatever, and apparently we never run out of ammo for that, I get infinite reloads, but I cannot get a fire grenade to save my life - I'm meeting with the Governor of a whole world who is offering me a trade deal and I'm looking for the option to ask for a handful of grenades. The same is true of melta-charges; specific demolition items that can open boxes and sometimes in open up new paths and areas of the board - if you are trying to 100% the game I think you can actually get soft-locked because there are not an infinite number of melta charges in the Koronus expanse - you can only buy or find so many so be careful. 

Sightlines work surprisingly well and intuitively. Sidling up to a corner to peek round is something that actually works. Turn based character will hide behind something and pop out to shoot. Neat red lines indicate all their possible sightlines, snipers and careful skilled single shot ranged weapons users can often fire into combat but your normal close range guy and mid-range people will have real trouble doing so. Having a sniper is fun and satisying, they are someone who can deal with enemy snipers, which is very useful, reliably dish out high damage on key enemies, but there is again a slightly grindy quality to carefully selecting a target, then one after another sequentially applying all your different buffs, each time the camera swiiiiiings across the battlefield and you have to drag it back, then clicking 'fire' and hopefully watching some goon hiding behind soft cover a mile away totally evaporate. Again it’s the crunchyness and the infinity of mild effects, the careful application of the same buffs in fight after fight, that might be something you 'get' to so, but might turn into something you 'have' to do. 

 

The Space Marine character, once you get them, is surprisingly mid. Or at least, they are a very chunky tanky guy who hits mildly hard and shoots reliably, which sounds like a disappointment but is actually how space marines tend to play on the tabletop, (unless they are optimised for something else); very very survivable heavy infantry that shoot reliably at close range and fight ok, but less good at any of those things than your by-now more specialised characters. 

I feel like the combat system, and Owlcat generally, really need to make a Necromunda game. In terms of personalities, drama, large scale intersecting systems representing a complex world;

they have worked that out, and the early fights are better specifically because you have crappy tech and weapons, limited buffs that relate more clearly to the imagined world, and limited character options so you have to think more about using them, which fits well with Necromunda. Owlcat even managed to get their engine to create a 'dark' level where you can barely see anything and your little lumen servo-skull follows your cursor, which surely they could adapt into Necromunda. Their visually dense and carefully made maps are already good, the one limitation is dimensionality. Most Rogue Trader area have two levels and that’s about it, and characters cannot pass 'underneath' other characters if they are on a gantry or something, so really its one level but at different heights, which would be a challenge for underhive play, but their ladders and movement up and down work really well, and the often fancy oblique sightlines and stuff like throwing a grenade from above actually function well 

 

Crunchy Levelling 

The levelling is really where the systems gigantism and hyper-detail brings together its arguably-less-good aspects. I feel like computer games are a good place for the very crunchy but still human-operable systems like the Final Flight system Rogue Trader is built on, since the machine can handle the endless series of buffs and details but the core number system is still comprehensible enough that humans can fiddle with it. 

In RT you level up across three 'wheels' and you level up a LOT. You start with basically a core class which often relates to your characters lived background; Soldier, Psyker, Officer etc, then once your characters max that out you go to a second wheel that is a bit more abstract; ‘Arch-Militant’, ‘Executioner' ? Then once you max that out, you go to a third wheel which is nearly the same for everyone, the 'Exemplar' wheel. There are fifty something 'levels' in the game and five 'chapters' so you will be levelling regularly. 

ITS VERY GRAINY 

Some core choices are simple, like 'you get this magic power', 'you get dual-wield (its shit without the right stats and buff)' and 'you get another action point' or 'you can wear heavy armour now', but a lot, a lot a lot, are more like 'you get times two this derived value in when X equals double efficiency stack'. (THE FUCKING STACKS). Basically if you have a high IQ, or just really really like excel sheets and deriving figures, you can build probably some insane broken characters to do specific things, but if you are like me, in the middle of the graph or just fucking basic, the 'normal' sensible choices run out quickly and it’s very easy to soft-lock or bollock up a character, like did you know an 'Executioner' specialises in deepening and exploiting long-term damage like people being poisoned or on fire? So if you want to select that when it comes up, you really need to have a character that is good at those things, or a bounty hunter gets big bonuses for personally taking out characters they have marked, so they need to be mobile or have strong range. 

None of this is super-difficult, and is quite fun to begin with, but it’s the main drift of the game where its scale, detail and length all add together to make it more of an annoying weight rather than a fun weight. 

Did I mention that all of your companions all level at the same time? You can only ever take six on a mission - the rest just hang around on the ship, (presumably training hard), so, every time you level up and get back to the ship you have to go through the HUGE lists of feats and incremental buffs and special tricky powers, which are usually a bit different from character to character, compare those with your companions core competencies, stats, improved stats from items, favourite weapons, the way you tend to use them in fights, and, if you are a drama queen like me, the type of person you think they are, and you synthesise these all together and click 'this' or 'that' option from a huge range and hope you haven't accidentally soft-locked yourself from not being able to wear power armour or something in twenty levels time (which I actually did with my main character, and had to re-train them, which you can do, but again, you have to choose EVERY level again, which is a ten minute job). And you have to do this for ALL AVAILABLE CHARACTERS with every level-up. THE FUCKING CRUNCH! 

This is the part of the game most like work. I still had fun with it, especially in the early to mid game. It went along with the whole 'dressing your dolls' aspect but it became less fun as the game went towards its end and for characters I didn't 'like' or rarely used, I just ended up clicking whatever to get them out of the way. I did go from 'yes, another level' in acts one and two to 'oh my god fuck not another  level' in acts four and five. 

[A side note; the instability and violence of imperial society, and the constant intrigues and real physical dangers at the top of the pyramid, (in the first parts of the game you get attacked pretty regularly in high and low status areas, even to the extent that it becomes a bit silly), all does fit with the background, and does make sense of imperial characters taking sword and pistol literally everywhere they go. If I was any of these people I would be taking my looted drukhari blast pistol into the bath and to bed because of course someone is going to try to assassinate you in the bath, it’s the best place for it, and of course demons will materialise in your bedroom during a warp transition, and of course the local rebels will try to shoot you down over the governors palace, where else would they do it? yes I am taking my fucking chainsword to the dinner reception, and so is everyone else, are you fucking stupid?]

 

 

The Lesser Systems 

Navigation 

This is neat. It’s a really simple system but encapsulates an interesting paradox of navigation and exploration in games. A terrible incident destroys your dynasties knowledge of the stable warp routes of the expanse, and warp routes in this area shift regularly anyway, so what you have is a map with a bunch of stars with mysterious names, some of which you know are important to you,

and are a handful of potential warp routes already highlighted. Every time you reach a new system you can hit a spooky button to chart new routes which sends out a magical sonar blip which might highlight some new routes between places, maybe some whole new systems you didn’t know about before, it also gives you Navigation points, which represent your navigators skills and knowledge gained from going to new places, and you can use these points to either make warp routes less horrifically-dangerous,  or to forge brand new routes to discovered or already known systems. 

This balance of discovery to opportunity to making-safe, all bound by your rate of exploration itself

works... pretty well. Like a few things in RT, it can be possible to accidently soft lock yourself out of things and in my first playthrough I didn't understand what I was doing, accidentally burnt my points by making an inconsequential route green and then got attacked by demons everywhere else. But its a fun system generally. 

The paradox about game navigation I feel it highlights is the discovery of the known. Because actual totally undiscovered places in real life, I mean places undiscovered by anyone, are actually very dull and not useful. At takes sustained human interest and activity to turn a totally unknown place into one where exciting and useful things might be found and exploited, and where dramas might happen

so, like in a lot of games and stories, what you are exploring in the Koronus expanse is the forgotten rather than the unknown, and the game deepens this in many ways - there are lost imperial ships, forgotten frozen colonies, strange bunkers, abandoned mines, lost cities, mysterious research sites around impossible objects etc. This adds to the deep sense that the border of the imperium is not something it is expanding into, but a deep tidal zone, that imperial power expands into and retreats from on the scale of millennia, reaching forth when strong or driven, fading away at other times, only to  be rediscovered by new ages, that what you are exploring, others have explored, many times, and will again, and this add to the sense of tragedy and deep time that creates part of the sorrowful nature of the setting and which feeds into the morality or sense-of-self of its characters. They are truly the children of the ruins. 

 

 

Space Battles 

There is a cool ship combat system based on the Battlefleet Gothic rules, where space ships manoeuvre in curves and arcs, trying to get each other in their prow or broadside ranges, and in the case of imperial ships, trying to set up the rare ramming opportunity. Few things are more fun than the occasional chance to Plow madly into the prow or stern of some giant chaos battleship or mysterious alien artefact, one thing I miss from my original character was her crazed voice lines from ship combat, she went off like a lony supervillian with every battle; 

"CHAAARGE THE LANCES! FIIIIRE!" 

Winning these ship combats gets you access to certain planets and spaces. Planets either have nothing, but you get xp for discovering them, some have exploitable resources to feed your growing empire, some have dialogue-only away missions where you send guys out to investigate mysterious ruins etc, and some have actual full adventure zones. 

Ship Battles interlock with two factions in the game you encounter in various forms; the Navy and the Flellowship of the Void (Pirates), each of which can trade you various handy things if you build enough of a reputation with them. 

 

Empire Management 

Once you have a few planets under your belt you can start making horrific management decisions about what projects to build there and how to govern them. Depending on how good a ruler you are, how much resources you can gather etc. There are limits on what you can build, some projects getting you certain rare resources, special items, (my late-game familial power armour came from one of these options on my main planet), and locking off other later options. 

There are also mystery events or crises that require your personal intervention, which means you have to hare off across the map again to return to a colony to tell them to stop being idiots about something. Having a meaningful empire means doing a lot of governing, so I hope you spent those navigator points carefully to green the routes between your main planets. 

A fair amount of the mid-game of RT is being in the middle of something important and getting a message saying your need to race across the expanse to deal with something else. 

 

Storybooks 

The last system is an interesting one. Certain events or situations will trigger a multiple-choice storybook section. This is like a chronicle or a tale told from a certain perspective, of a time someone encountered the Lord  Captain, where your protagonist is a character in their story. 

So at various points, you might be about to invade a world to free it from chaos and the story of the invasion is told from the perspective of one of the grunts on the ground with your decisions and skill tests deciding how the invasion goes, or at another point your get the first person story of a Drukhari Scourge given the contract of assassinating the mon-keigh leader, with your character being the subject of their hunt and your choices deciding how the hunt goes, or as the tribal retelling of the story of when the great leader came from the stars and what they did. 

These are interesting for a variety of reasons; they offer a relatively quick and cheap method of dealing with huge events and complex situations without having yet another dialogue tree, they build the sense of gravity of the reality by showing your character from a variety of different perspectives - to a tribesman or soldier you are a semi-mythical figure, they challenge your skills and abilities with the familiar known and unknown unknowns, in most dialogue and painting-navigation sections, your character can 'use' the skills of your retinue to deal with challenges, which leads to you carefully developing and selecting characters to be good at certain things, if you think there might be traps you need the Aeldari ranger high perception to find them, and someone good at demolitions to disarm them, if there is warp fuckery you might need to bring the inquisitor, but in the book sections is it’s your abilities alone that decide things. 

In my first playthrough my character was smart, strong minded and good at shooting, so they were an icy intelligent type that made them a competent sniper on the battlefield, gave them perhaps hidden dialogue options from a high intelligence and let them face down scary threats with high Willpower. But shit fellowship, persuasion and commerce, so actually not that good at a lot of 'governing a star empire' events. My second character was a noble fancy boy with super high fellowship and commerce, but I actively tried to keep his willpower and toughness low for as long as possible, so he was rubbish in a fight unless he had people to command. 

These storybook sections really highlighted the difference between them, with the icy sniper Isabella dealing relatively well with physical stuff when isolated, but being bad at persuading people or altering events, while Valerian Von Valencius, my posh fancy boy, was in absolute pantsshitting terrorgdanger with solitary adventure sections, but actually very good at managing people, doing diplomacy and managing his empire.

 

  

Love And Failure - Did I Fail The Game? 

I played this game one-and-a-bit times. Once with my first character, when I nearly go to the end of the second act, and again with my second character, where I played the whole thing all the way through. 

My first time I really didn't know what I was doing and made a bunch of mistakes, soft locking myself out of certain things and generally being non-optimal, but my sheer lack of knowledge about what I was doing lead to me being much more immersed in every individual choice as that character

even though the game was going less well overall. I was overwhelmed by events and systems and everything, but this frantic sense meant that I felt like my protagonist; constantly on the move

uncertain, not knowing what choice or option might lead where, weighting my dialogue choices and strategic choices more like a person than a player. 

On my second run I knew more about the game, already knew what would happen in much of the first two acts, and my character was deliberately unbalanced, designed more to be a particular person with a strong set of abilities and weaknesses. I also downloaded the Void Shadows DLC, which added a whole bunch to the game. 

In some ways Valerian Von Valencius felt more like a rogue trader, while my first character, Isabella, refused to take a bath, Valerian did so immediately, presumably as a noble it was simply his nature, and he ended up bathing with every member of his entourage over time, but in other ways, though he was, in some ways, more optimised to be a 'person', he, (meaning I), had lost our ignorance, our unknowing of what meant what and what was to be. I was less immersed, because I knew more. 

It’s very hard to play a game and not try to optimise yourself, but that very instinct is in conflict with a deeper desire or impulse; the need to really experience events, from the first time, un-warned in advance and unknowing of their consequences. 

Throughout the game RT deliberately plays with veils, giving you some choices with clear causes, consequences and mechanics, others blind, some given without reason, others removed. You never really know when the game will respond 'as a game' or when it will simulate a world, with strange long term consequences resulting from apparently minor choices or effects. This slightly shadowy 'magic trick' quality seems another curious paradox of play, one central to the RPG experience;

the strange gift of ignorance. 

I did cheat at times. 

There are cheats I defend and would do again. Using the toybox mod to activate ALL romance options across gender and removing the jealousy feature; why this is simply how a true Rogue Trader would play. 

Likewise, there were a handful of annoying multiple-choice shit riddle questions where you have to either relentlessly examine tiny fragments of environmental information and then postulate from those the correct sequence of answers with no indication of which in the sequence might be right or wrong, or just brute-force them. I looked those up and I feel fine about it. They were shit challenges. 

The deeper question of what it actually means to play blind, and what and where the value of a game lies, of the fundamental difference between meeting an apparently complex situation for the first time in ignorance, and therefore treating it as fundamentally more-real, and meeting it for a second or more times, and the deep conflict within myself of wanting to experience vs wanting to 'get things right', I am no closer to resolving. Though perhaps by accepting it I can manage it better.

 

I got a Goth Girlfriend, and a hot Mutant Bae, but they both left me in the end…..