Hello all you happy people! Josh Stoodley here with another blog post.
Everything is going to be coming out a little later this week, including my two preview chapters and the next update on my fanfiction.
Why? Because I forgot Warhammer 40K: Rogue Trader came out last Thursday and I’ve spent the last few days playing it instead of working.
So today you shall get my grate thorts on Owlcat’s latest game!
Remember, if you like my writing, you can support me on Patreon or buy me a hot chocolate.
In The Grim Dorkness of the Future, There Is Only Grim Dorkness
Warhammer 40K lore is trash. It just is. Everybody in the ‘verse is pure evil, and you only get to choose what flavour of horrible you are.
That’s not anything Owlcat can do about, not really, so we’re not going to spend any more time on it. I bought the game because I like Owlcat, not because I give two shits about Warhammer.
Bloat
I kind of figured the sheer amount of feats/skills/spells/whatever in Kingmaker and Wrath of the Righteous was an artifact of the Pathfinder system, itself an artifact of 3.x D&D. You know, back when you needed five sheets of paper attached to your character sheet just to track everything.
I was wrong.
There are a dizzying array of talents, abilities and powers in Rogue Trader, laid out in the most obtuse way possible. You will spend hours scrolling through long lists after every level up trying to figure out what talent or ability does what and how it interacts with other talents/abilities. This is not helped by the vague writing (if you are lucky, you will get the formula for how a talent works, but this isn’t a guarantee) or the fact that many of these abilities and talents are bugged. So even if you do figure out which talents/abilities are worth taking, they may not even work!
Sigh.
Defenders of Owlcat’s design process will say that this is a complex system and that makes it better than the D20 system of Pathfinder and BG3.
No.
Neither the D20 system or D100 system are complex. D100 is a roll-under system (we’ll get to what that means in a sec) so it’s somewhat counter-intuitive, but it’s not especially complex. Bigger numbers better. Anything that gives you bigger numbers or an extra is good. So on and so forth.
What it is is bloated, not unlike Wizards and their stupid amount of spells in 5e. 90% of your talents/abilities are worthless, even accounting for bugs, and maybe 10% actually help in any significant way shape or form. And the only way to find out which 10% are worth taking is through a lot of tedious experimentation.
That said, the talents that work are awesome, so the experimentation is worth it to some degree.
Roll Low?
The D100 system is dumb and counter-intuitive. It’s not complicated, just weird. The idea is that you have a difficulty check of between one and a hundred, you add your skill modifier to that check and then roll. In order to beat the check, you must roll under the difficulty check + skill modifier.
Argh! It’s a weird system. I refuse to accept any criticism of the D10 system (White Wolf’s system) or FFG’s Star Wars system after playing this game.
However, that’s not really Owlcat’s fault. That’s on Games Workshop, who understandably insists on the D100 for all their games. So we will move on to something that is very much Owlcat’s fault.
Whoever Designed These Maps Needs To Be Fired. And Possibly Banned From Working In Video Games Ever Again.
One of the critical flaws of the isometric perspective in video games is that that it sharply limits your field of vision compared to a proper third person perspective. That can make it really hard to figure out where you’re going, especially if the camera controls are wonky and your working with a lot of vertical elements.
Both Baldur’s Gate 3 and Rogue Trader suffer from this problem in the worst possible way.
Travel in Rogue Trader is an absolute slog. You will miss all kinds of stuff like loot or important quest objectives because they are obscured by the camera angles and placement of background objects and the camera controls are questionable at best. It takes forever to get anywhere and there’s no quick travel system. So you will see the same stupid map over and over again as you try to get anywhere. Worst still are the maps where the correct route is deliberately obscured: you will run around in circles trying to get anywhere with no clue where you are.
And that’s not even discussing the utterly stupid way space travel is handled in this game.
There’s no map of the star systems, so you have to go to each individual system and ‘chart’ new star systems, making it easy to get lost. Most of the routes are dangerous too, so you get the random encounters that Owlcat are way too fond of. Combat in this game isn’t bad, but it can become a chore quickly. Especially as Owlcat has questionable ideas about balancing encounters (see below). Then, most importantly, is the fact that there’s no way to plot a course over multiple systems. What I mean is that if you want to go to a planet that’s five systems away, you have to go to each individual system. It’s a real pain in the ass.
And that brings us too:
Dear Larian And Owlcat: There Are Better Ways To Balancing Encounters Than Dropping As Many Enemies As Possible On The Player
No, yeah, that’s pretty much the tweet. Most of the encounters in this game are ten enemies or so; many can get as high as thirty.
Rogue Trader is the worst by far of the two games for this, as BG3 has a lot fewer random encounters. But both are terrible. Dropping thirty enemies on a player is not fun! Especially as Owlcat likes to have reinforce their encounters, so you may have to wipe three or four waves of thirty plus enemies. AOE helps, but AOE also hurts your guys so its not as reliable as it should be with this many enemies on screen. On the plus side, the enemy isn’t immune to their own AOE either. I’ve won many a fight simply because the enemy AI decided to cut loose with the AOE attacks and wiped out their own side.
Damn, but that is funny.
Larian, There Are Some Things You Need To Learn
It’s not all bad. There are a lot of things that Owlcat has straight up perfected in its gaming.
First is the Character Creation, which is a huge step up from Kingmaker and WOTR. It’s not as good as BG3’s, but it’s still pretty good.
Second, more importantly, are formations. Why BG3 doesn’t have formations is beyond me. But I’m sure we’ve all run into that problem where our squishy wizard is suddenly leading from the front or our anti-charismatic ranger is suddenly forced to talk to people. RT has some of those problems, but a lot less so than BG3. Which brings me to my next point.
Skill checks! Owlcat games handle (active) skill checks so much better than BG3 does, just by virtue of letting you draw on any of your party member’s skills regardless of who you’re controlling at that particular time. For example, if I talk to somebody but have low social skills, but one of my party members have high social skills, the party member with the high skills will take care of the check for me.
This is especially helpful with jumping. I’m sure we’ve all had our party members get stuck while trying to traverse BG3’s overly vertical environments. Well no more! In RT, all you have to do is pass one skill check (which your party member with the highest Athletics skill will handle for you) and all your team will cross the gap! It’s fantastic, I love it. Way, way better than BG3’s method.
Related, RT continues Owlcat’s tradition of selecting your best character to disarm traps and unlock chests. So if you click on a trap, the person with the highest disarm skill (or lore: xenos, which is the other skill I’ve seen used for traps) will go and disarm it. You sometimes have to do some manoeuvring, and a lot of the traps are awkwardly place, but it’s a lot better than BG3’s system where you have to click on the party member you want, then right-click on the chest or trap (unless you spot the trap, then you can left-click it) and select the disarm or lockpick option.
Another thing RT does well, and much better than WOTR, is corruption. As you go down the Heretical path, your ship slowly becomes more and more corrupted. You don’t get any cool Chaos mutations yourself, but it’s cool to see your ship transform.
I’ll see you guys next week.
