A lot of RPGs assume you’re just some nobody with a sword trying to make their way in a strange and hostile universe. And there are few universes as large and hostile as Warhammer 40K. That’s why I was so delighted that Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader puts you into the shiny, step-on-me boots of a titular Rogue Trader, the heir to the von Valancius dynasty and a very powerful member of the high nobility in the Imperium. Getting to roleplay someone of such status and wealth across more than 130 hours of gritty, tactical combat and superb quest writing is a fresh power fantasy for this setting and this genre. I just wish it wasn’t plagued by more annoying bugs than there are daemons in the Warp.
Rogue Trader is an absolutely colossal, somewhat lumbering CRPG. And like my grandiose, gothic voidship the Fortunatrix, it’s not exactly polished to a mirror sheen. On the bright side, like Baldur’s Gate 3 before it, almost none among the huge catalog of side quests and optional activities feel like filler. Developer Owlcat’s previous games, Pathfinder: Kingmaker and Wrath of the Righteous, had a lot of trash fights that honestly seemed like they were there to waste my time, but every encounter in Rogue Trader’s epic-length campaign presents tactical challenges that are made interesting through new ways of thinking about its enemies and use of space and cover. And Rogue Trader has a lot of surprises in store for 40K fans in terms of the kinds of foes we get to fight.
Breaking away from the Pathfinder rule system Owlcat reproduced with almost self-defeating fidelity in its past two games, Rogue Trader pays homage to some of the classic Fantasy Flight Warhammer 40K tabletop RPGs, but this is really a new system built from the ground up. And that intentionality has allowed it to simply work better in most cases. I will warn you that it is still a very crunchy system, though. If you’re coming here straight from Baldur’s Gate 3, Larian’s interpretation of D&D will seem like a soft, gooey nougat that melts in your mouth by comparison.
Ability descriptions in Rogue Trader can feel like reading an academic paper on differential equations, and the wordy, overly-detailed way the tooltips are presented doesn’t do it any favors. I eventually got a handle on it and came to enjoy the depth it offers, but it’s intimidating until you learn its visual language. And it never stops being kind of a research project to understand what a new talent actually does on first inspection.
The upshot of having so many options is that the power of my squad fully outstripped the default difficulty by around halfway through the campaign. My heavy weapons specialist Argenta, like a broken ramp deck in Magic: The Gathering, can do what functionally amounts to infinity damage on Normal by the third or fourth round of combat, trivializing even some of the toughest bosses I faced. Luckily, difficulty in Rogue Trader is fully modular and can be changed at any time. You can keep out-of-combat skill checks at Normal but really crank up combat difficulty in targeted and granular ways, which allowed me to dial in a satisfying experience – though it does take some patience and experimentation. And there are some startling difficulty spikes here and there where I had to nudge things back down temporarily.
One of my favorite elements of this combat system is how powerful support characters can be. I made my Rogue Trader, the esteemed Katarin von Valancius, an officer who not only hands out buffs, but can also give allies free actions. This ended up making me the lynchpin of the entire party even though I rarely ever fired a shot or swung a chainsword myself. That’s why I have Yrliet, an ancient elven ranger with a sniper rifle, Argenta, a warrior space nun, and Ulfar, a freaking werewolf in power armor, after all. I’m never going to be as cool as any of them, so helping them do violence even better is a great niche to find myself in. Setting up a combo where Ulfar cuts several people in half or Yrliet one-taps the enemy commander from across the map is endlessly satisfying.
The highly positional space combat is well done too, and plays out much like a naval engagement with lots of maneuvering and lining up broadsides. And a fairly involved colony management system reinforces the idea that I am a powerful ruler within this sector, even though some colony of the stats, like Security, didn’t seem to matter much.
The writing is what really steers the ship here, though. From the central quest to reclaim your protectorate and deal with a powerful Chaos cult, to terrifying encounters on desolate shipwrecks hidden away in the dark corners of the Koronus Expanse, to conversations with your diverse and multifaceted crew, the dialogue and scenario design is of a similar quality to Baldur’s Gate 3 and other greats of the genre. Plus, if I had to pick three favorite factions in the 40K universe, they would be the Sisters of Battle, the Craftworld Eldar, and the Space Wolves. The fact that all three of those are represented by Rogue Trader’s recruitable companions probably wasn’t done specifically to pander to me, but it sure feels like it was.
The galaxy of Rogue Trader also looks great, from the cramped corridors of an imperial bunker to the wild expanse of an untamed jungle world. It manages to capture the harshness and moodiness of 40K without being constantly gloomy or depressing. There’s a lot of deft use of color in every environment and on every model or portrait. Exploration is a treat, even if danger is usually just around the corner. The character designs rule, too, even if they definitely seem a bit dated for 2023 in terms of fine detail.
Rogue Trader’s music is generally strong, and fits the tone of the 40K universe perfectly with its ominous chanting and pseudo-medieval gloominess. The problem is, Owlcat still hasn’t really figured out how to use music dynamically to amp up a scene. A lot of huge, impactful moments deflate like a balloon because they’re lacking the wicked or triumphant audio stings that would help them land so much harder. Beyond that, the sound design is top-tier, from the satisfying rapport of a bolter to the high-quality voice acting – what little there is of it.
Unfortunately, Rogue Trade is packed with bugs – enough to stuff a Space Hulk with. I saw way too many missing tooltips, abilities that don’t work correctly, T-posing servitors, and even a couple cases where my progress was blocked on a crucial quest and I had to wait for a workaround or a patch to continue. There have been several since I started playing the review copy, and to be fair the devs did caution me that continuing on a save from an older version could cause issues. So some of the stuff I experienced could be due to that. It’s hard to say. Especially since the 1.0.1 patch released on December 14, I have gone back and found that most of the egregious stuff seems to be fixed and what’s left mostly falls under funny and/or just annoying. But it might be worth giving this one a little more time in the plasma oven before jumping in.