There you are, rambling through the woods of Interactive Entertainment with an empty pack and a spring in your step. Here I am, lying in wait behind a tree. Wham! Bam! You reel back in consternation as I bounce into the path and clobber you with a sack containing no less than eight venerable RPGs, from Baldur's Gate to Warhammer 40,000: Rogue's Trader - well over a thousand hours worth of dungeons, dragons, dicerolls, dwarven shopkeepers and many other things I refuse to spend time alliterating, all of which will (currently) set you back just £32.07.
Were you planning to spend this weekend playing some cute two-hour artgame sideshow, without any levelling at all? Shut up, you DOLT. You will play what the nice journalist tells you to play! Best lay in extra caffeine tablets, because it's going to take you till Monday just to get through the character creators alone.
]]>A colossal new update for Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader launched last night, hitting the grimdark space-aristocrat RPG with so many changes that the patch notes are almost 17,000 words long. Fitting for a game that our Rogue Trader review called "engrossing, obscure and absolutely exhausting". It adds loads of new voiced lines, fixes everything from wonky abilities to broken quests, reworks balance, improves performance, and so much more. Enough is changed that developers Owlcat are giving everyone in your party a free respec to adjust to what the game has become.
]]>In the festively grim universe of Warhammer 40,000, space is sometimes racked by Warp storms – terrible cyclones of Chaos energy that have a catastrophic effect on imperial communications. One such storm hits the Koronus Expanse during the events of Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader, erasing starcharts and obliging your character - a newly minted Rogue Trader, aka High Gothic Commander Shepard - to re-discover the systems and planets that make up your predecessor Theodora’s dominions, while gathering an entourage of indecently customisable warriors, and hunting down a series of badniks that include a mysterious Chaos cult.
Warp storms sometimes have relativistic consequences. Voidship crews may be stranded for decades in transit: you will meet characters in this vast, brooding RPG who arrived at their destinations to find the battles they were sent to fight already passed into legend, the people they were sent to meet long since dead or departed. Something similar has happened to this review, which was supposed to be published in early December. Did I dramatically underestimate the amount of playtime involved, despite being told months in advance by developers Owlcat that Rogue Trader is well over 100 hours long? Nonsense. It’s all because of those pesky Chaos disruptions, you see. It’s Chaos that’s to blame.
]]>At last, every door on the RPS Advent Calendar has been ripped open, leaving nothing but foil wrapper remnants, and the odd pixel crumb of the digital delights once contained within them. But that doesn't festivities are over! Like a Boxing Day bubble and squeak, we've gathered together all of our favourite games of the year once again, this time in one handy location. If you've been following along with our Advent goings-on, you'll already know what our game of the year picks are for 2023, but just in case you missed them, here's the list in full. Enjoy!
]]>Doors for the door God! Calendars for the calendar throne!
]]>In the grim darkness of the far future… I will finish my review of Owlcat’s Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader. It turns out that trying to complete an estimated 100-hour RPG during the run-up to The Game Awards is too much for this humble Scriptor. There are still many more tabletop-style planetary maps to discover and plunder, many more character levels to scale, and many more cursed artefacts to tamper with before my protagonist, the closet Chaos worshipper Bruschetta de Plonque, can pronounce herself mistress of the Kronos Expanse - assuming the Inquisition doesn’t claim her first. But after 20 hours of the game, I can absolutely say that I’m looking forward to the next 80. While it doesn’t have the cinematic swagger and raw anecdote-generating capacity of obvious rival Baldur's Gate 3, Rogue Trader has mystique and depth to spare, both in terms of its grotty narrative and its exceedingly busy combat and levelling systems.
]]>In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only... compromise, calculation and license to misbehave. In Owlcat's forthcoming RPG Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader, you play the free-wheeling head of an interstellar merchant's dynasty. Operating on the fringes of uncharted space, you're the owner of a Warrant of Trade that essentially lets you run your own miniature empire within the Imperium, deciding the fates of planets, amassing vast wealth and recruiting a motley crew of xenos, heretics and assorted weirdos. It's the kind of behaviour that'd get you vaporised if you were some run-of-the-mill Space Marine Chaplain, but out here on the frontier, you're allowed to act with impunity, providing you fulfil your overall mandate of adding to the God Emperor's glory and kicking the odd Eldar's head in.
Rogue Traders are arguably the only characters in Games Workshop's brutal and decrepit table-top setting that lend themselves to the role of CRPG protagonist, because they are the only characters in Warhammer 40K's Imperium who enjoy anything like the plot agency of a Commander Shepard. And with that, I think, comes an interesting transformation of the character alignment systems the game shares with other CRPGs such as Baldur's Gate 3.
]]>Owlcat Games have whisked the wrappers off Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader's co-op functionality, explaining how you and up to five other players can team up to navigate the Games Workshop RPG's 100-plus hours of grid-based combat, violent religious differences and unrepentant planetary colonisation.
]]>In the grim darkness of the far future, the galaxy is your oyster. Or at least it will be, once you've played 100 hours of Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader, an RPG from Pathfinder developer Owlcat in which you can buy planets, configure your genocidal Dark Eldar friend to strike ten times a turn, and gaze on ruefully as a demon explodes out of your Psyker's head.
An immediate and shameful disclaimer: I can't match Nic Reuben's deep knowledge of the 40K tabletop universe, which saw him ruminating upon the mysteries of the Koronus Expanse back in 2022, while holding Owlcat's feet to the fire over the absence of space dwarves. The nearest I got to playing 40K as a lad was its Battlefleet Gothic spin-off (which none of my friends were interested in, so when I say "playing", I mean that I sat in a room staring glumly at some unpainted Lunar-class Cruisers while other kids went out and climbed trees). The framing I'm working with instead, based on an hour of hands-off Rogue Trader gameplay, is that it's sort of Warhammer Mass Effect, but with XCOM-style turn- and grid-based combat, and while there are opportunities to be a compassionate hero, you fundamentally only have the option of playing Renegade. Let's dig in!
]]>Earlier this week I attended a hands-off preview for Owlcat's forthcoming CRPG Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader, which is shaping up nicely, inasmuch as there's anything "nice" about a Warhammer 40,000 game. Rogue Trader is a party-based affair in which you play a sort of Warhammer East India Company, tasked with flipping outlying worlds to the Imperium. In order to carry out this goal, you're granted a lot more individual license than most human residents of the 40K universe. You can, for instance, recruit ungodly xenos to your grimdark troupe, operate a private armada, and even colonise planets and turn them into your own personal piggybank. Just watch you don't push the whole "heresy" thing too far.
I'll have more for you on the subject soonish, but here's an interesting advance snippet from my interview with Owlcat's creative director Alexander Mishulin, in which we discussed what really distinguishes a CRPG from other kinds of role-playing game. According to Mishulin, it's all about designing for choices with consequences that genuinely run the entire length of the game, without (somehow) getting lost in the narrative undergrowth.
]]>Tonight's Warhammer Skulls event showed off a new trailer for Warhammer 40K: Rogue Trader this evening, which not only revealed several new locations, enemy types and party companions, but it that a closed beta for the Warhammer CRPG will be arriving on June 1st. The beta will be available to anyone who's already pre-ordered the game, and it will run until the game's release. We still don't know when that final release date will be just yet, but if you're keen to see how 40K translates to a good old-fashioned classic RPG, at least you should have a fair old while to see what's up.
]]>At a glance, Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader looks like so many other turn-based games set in the 40K universe. Except, this isn't turn-based strategy, but a proper CRPG from the makers of the recent, well-liked Pathfinder games. Its first gameplay trailer awaits below.
]]>First released in 1987 - back when Games Workshop were, arguably, much more fun than they are today - Rogue Trader was the first edition of what would eventually become tabletop miniature megachonker Warhammer 40,000. Rogue Traders, the stars of the setting, are themselves a touch more colourful than your average corpse-emperor enjoyer; freelance explorers given a ship, a packed lunch, and a cohort of space-toughs, and sent off to explore the far-flung reaches of the galaxy. And it’s this unique place in the 40k universe that makes them such an exciting prospect for the setting's first fully-fledged classic CRPG.
]]>The week-long Warhammer Skulls event has kicked off with an avalanche of announcements. Leading the pack are three new games: CRPG Warhammer 40,000 Rogue Trader, digital card game Warhammer 40,000: Warpforge, and retro FPS Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun. Warhammer 40,000: Shootas, Blood & Teef, the 2D action platformer, also got a release date. It’ll be out on the 20th of October.
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