Navigating Paintings - a review of the Rogue Trader CRPG

I bought this for Christmas and was playing it a bitevery evening during my temp job, then I lost that job unexpectedly and at thesame time UK got paralysed by dirty snow. I was depressed and  frustrated because I thought the game screwedme out of an achievement, so I made a decision, a really BAD decision; Idecided to restart, use a mod to activate ALL romanceable characters across genderand remove jealousy, and re-start the whole game with a new character - a gloriouslyfancy noble with a high fellowship and moneymaking skills and rock bottomtoughness and willpower and commit myself to playing the whole game again asthe fanciest boy imaginable. 

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

 Raszard

I have deleted Rogue Trader. Never let me play a CRPGagain. 

 

Vast

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

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

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

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

 

 

Navigating Paintings

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

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

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

They are pretty. Really actually beautiful, and characterfulenvironments, and are all limited in size, very much not procedural orsimulated 'real scale' environments but more like 'stages', 'scenes' orchessboards with the narrative being made up of journeys between these stages.And that is both good and bad, because there is no insane wilderness wanderingthrough procedurally generated hexes, like you might have had with earlierCRPG's - but the game has to communicate its sense of scale and vastness throughthese 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 andthe gameplay. The 'scenes' are a rhapsody of wild detail, from fecund junglesset with sapphire streams where snakes wriggle between the feet of yourcharacters, to spiky space elf megacities (Drukhari are very 90’s), to theendless pipage and grating and plates of a cogboy world, and this deepoverflowing of detail and specificity makes them very good at imbuing the gamewith the spirit of 40k in all its heaving byzantine gigantism. 

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

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

 

 

 Reading And Clicking 

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

An interesting case of 'known unknowns'; dialogue willsometimes highlight when an option will require a skill test to pass, and willsometimes visibly grey out dialogue options based on how you have played thegames 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 possiblepaths, but I think there are also truly hidden options, lost and found thoughhigh or low intelligence or fellowship scores, though done or undone events andrelationships with various characters and organisations. there are times whenthe game wants you to know you are making a choice with certain consequencesand times when it will hide the existence of that choice and thoseconsequences. 

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

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

There is almost too much dialogue for me to simply reviewit. The main impression it left me with was its own giganticness, the sheermass of it, and the incredible organisational systems that must be required toarrange all of it, and to update it. On my second playthrough I added the voidshadows expansion and that adds characters and integrates their conversationsinto the game throughout the whole thing. I almost want to watch a documentaryon how Owlcat manages this stuff. 

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

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

I know that if it was easier to 'accidentally' losecompanions, like if the battle sister sees you becoming heretical and eitherleaves or even tries to kill you, this would probably draw complaints, but theaddition of more unknown unknowns really adds to the feel and flavour ofexperiencing a living world, and knowing, or not knowing, precisely who mightbe recruitable, deepens immersion.

 

Murder Chess 

Though all chess is murder chess I suppose. 

The square-grid turn-based combat is one of the most funthings 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 charactershaven'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, theelaborate procedure of 'dressing your dolls' with the best possible armour andclothes, and the mildly pleasurable autism of balancing boots that give plusone movement if an adjacent character is upset vs shoes with knives that letyou kick someone in the nuts and so on

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

Positioning and planning your little chess pieces, preparingsightlines and trying to control areas with grenades and magic powers, tryingto make sure your psyker or nutty tech priest only explodes the enemy and notyou, planning when you will pull out your special sword for a super swing, ororganising your character build so you can dual-attack, trying to position yourofficer character so they can hand out buffs and extra movements, settingthings and people on fire, is great fun. 

I played this on normal difficulty and by the last partof the game most fights were too easy to be interesting in themselves. A fewstuck out as having abnormal or wild difficulty. I could have turned thedifficulty up, to make things more interesting, but by the last act the sheet lengthof 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 toprogress (also I probably should have turned off the non-attack animations, thegame does give you the options for this), and the general deep sweaty graininessof the combat and character progression system also became a weight of its own 

If you are a different kind of person I think playing onvery hard and continuing to carefully analyse and progress your characters mightstill 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 tacticwill be to try to lock off areas of the board and control the flow of enemiesinto choke points where you can maintain your characters in close proximity toaid each other. Even at the early points, I was the master of a city sizedstarship and hope of the dynasty, but I kept running out of grenades and especiallyuseful ones. Like, I can have a gun that fires alien dreams or whatever, andapparently we never run out of ammo for that, I get infinite reloads, but Icannot get a fire grenade to save my life - I'm meeting with the Governor of awhole world who is offering me a trade deal and I'm looking for the option toask for a handful of grenades. The same is true of melta-charges; specificdemolition items that can open boxes and sometimes in open up new paths andareas of the board - if you are trying to 100% the game I think you canactually get soft-locked because there are not an infinite number of melta chargesin the Koronus expanse - you can only buy or find so many so be careful. 

Sightlines work surprisingly well and intuitively. Sidlingup to a corner to peek round is something that actually works. Turn basedcharacter will hide behind something and pop out to shoot. Neat red linesindicate all their possible sightlines, snipers and careful skilled single shotranged weapons users can often fire into combat but your normal close range guyand mid-range people will have real trouble doing so. Having a sniper is funand satisying, they are someone who can deal with enemy snipers, which is veryuseful, reliably dish out high damage on key enemies, but there is again aslightly grindy quality to carefully selecting a target, then one after anothersequentially applying all your different buffs, each time the cameraswiiiiiings across the battlefield and you have to drag it back, then clicking'fire' and hopefully watching some goon hiding behind soft cover a mile awaytotally 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 besomething you 'get' to so, but might turn into something you 'have' to do. 

 

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

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

they have worked that out, and the early fights arebetter specifically because you have crappy tech and weapons, limited buffsthat relate more clearly to the imagined world, and limited character optionsso you have to think more about using them, which fits well with Necromunda. Owlcateven managed to get their engine to create a 'dark' level where you can barelysee anything and your little lumen servo-skull follows your cursor, whichsurely they could adapt into Necromunda. Their visually dense and carefullymade maps are already good, the one limitation is dimensionality. Most RogueTrader 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 reallyits one level but at different heights, which would be a challenge forunderhive play, but their ladders and movement up and down work really well, andthe often fancy oblique sightlines and stuff like throwing a grenade from aboveactually function well 

 

Crunchy Levelling 

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

In RT you level up across three 'wheels' and you level upa LOT. You start with basically a core class which often relates to yourcharacters lived background; Soldier, Psyker, Officer etc, then once your charactersmax 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 isnearly 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 magicpower', '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, alot a lot, are more like 'you get times two this derived value in when X equalsdouble efficiency stack'. (THE FUCKING STACKS). Basically if you have a highIQ, or just really really like excel sheets and deriving figures, you can buildprobably some insane broken characters to do specific things, but if you arelike 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 upa character, like did you know an 'Executioner' specialises in deepening andexploiting long-term damage like people being poisoned or on fire? So if youwant to select that when it comes up, you really need to have a character thatis good at those things, or a bounty hunter gets big bonuses for personallytaking out characters they have marked, so they need to be mobile or havestrong range. 

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

Did I mention that all of your companions all level atthe same time? You can only ever take six on a mission - the rest just hangaround on the ship, (presumably training hard), so, every time you level up andget back to the ship you have to go through the HUGE lists of feats and incrementalbuffs and special tricky powers, which are usually a bit different fromcharacter to character, compare those with your companions core competencies,stats, improved stats from items, favourite weapons, the way you tend to usethem in fights, and, if you are a drama queen like me, the type of person youthink 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-lockedyourself from not being able to wear power armour or something in twenty levelstime (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 aten minute job). And you have to do this for ALL AVAILABLE CHARACTERS withevery level-up. THE FUCKING CRUNCH! 

This is the part of the game most like work. I still hadfun 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 towardsits end and for characters I didn't 'like' or rarely used, I just ended upclicking whatever to get them out of the way. I did go from 'yes, anotherlevel' 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 imperialsociety, and the constant intrigues and real physical dangers at the top of thepyramid, (in the first parts of the game you get attacked pretty regularly inhigh and low status areas, even to the extent that it becomes a bit silly), alldoes fit with the background, and does make sense of imperial characters takingsword and pistol literally everywhere they go. If I was any of these people Iwould be taking my looted drukhari blast pistol into the bath and to bedbecause of course someone is going to try to assassinate you in thebath, it’s the best place for it, and of course demons will materialisein your bedroom during a warp transition, and of course the local rebelswill try to shoot you down over the governors palace, where else would they doit? yes I am taking my fucking chainsword to the dinner reception, and so iseveryone else, are you fucking stupid?]

 

 

The Lesser Systems Navigation 

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

and are a handful of potential warp routes alreadyhighlighted. Every time you reach a new system you can hit a spooky button tochart new routes which sends out a magical sonar blip which might highlightsome new routes between places, maybe some whole new systems you didn’t knowabout before, it also gives you Navigation points, which represent yournavigators skills and knowledge gained from going to new places, and you canuse these points to either make warp routes less horrifically-dangerous,  or to forge brand new routes to discovered oralready 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 bepossible to accidently soft lock yourself out of things and in my firstplaythrough I didn't understand what I was doing, accidentally burnt my pointsby making an inconsequential route green and then got attacked by demonseverywhere else. But its a fun system generally. 

The paradox about game navigation I feel it highlights isthe discovery of the known. Because actual totally undiscovered places in reallife, I mean places undiscovered by anyone, are actually very dull and notuseful. At takes sustained human interest and activity to turn a totallyunknown place into one where exciting and useful things might be found andexploited, and where dramas might happen

so, like in a lot of games and stories, what you areexploring in the Koronus expanse is the forgotten rather than the unknown, andthe game deepens this in many ways - there are lost imperial ships, forgottenfrozen colonies, strange bunkers, abandoned mines, lost cities, mysteriousresearch sites around impossible objects etc. This adds to the deep sense thatthe border of the imperium is not something it is expanding into, but a deeptidal 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 youare exploring, others have explored, many times, and will again, and this addto the sense of tragedy and deep time that creates part of the sorrowful natureof the setting and which feeds into the morality or sense-of-self of itscharacters. They are truly the children of the ruins. 

 

 

Space Battles 

There is a cool ship combat system based on the BattlefleetGothic rules, where space ships manoeuvre in curves and arcs, trying to geteach other in their prow or broadside ranges, and in the case of imperialships, trying to set up the rare ramming opportunity. Few things are more funthan the occasional chance to Plow madly into the prow or stern of some giantchaos battleship or mysterious alien artefact, one thing I miss from myoriginal character was her crazed voice lines from ship combat, she went offlike a lony supervillian with every battle; 

"CHAAARGE THE LANCES! FIIIIRE!" 

Winning these ship combats gets you access to certainplanets and spaces. Planets either have nothing, but you get xp for discoveringthem, some have exploitable resources to feed your growing empire, some havedialogue-only away missions where you send guys out to investigate mysteriousruins etc, and some have actual full adventure zones. 

Ship Battles interlock with two factions in the game youencounter 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 areputation with them. 

 

Empire Management 

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

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

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

 

Storybooks 

The last system is an interesting one. Certain events orsituations will trigger a multiple-choice storybook section. This is like achronicle or a tale told from a certain perspective, of a time someoneencountered the Lord  Captain, where yourprotagonist is a character in their story. 

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

These are interesting for a variety of reasons; theyoffer a relatively quick and cheap method of dealing with huge events andcomplex situations without having yet another dialogue tree, they build thesense of gravity of the reality by showing your character from a variety ofdifferent perspectives - to a tribesman or soldier you are a semi-mythicalfigure, they challenge your skills and abilities with the familiar known andunknown unknowns, in most dialogue and painting-navigation sections, yourcharacter can 'use' the skills of your retinue to deal with challenges, whichleads to you carefully developing and selecting characters to be good atcertain things, if you think there might be traps you need the Aeldari rangerhigh 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 thebook sections is it’s your abilities alone that decide things. 

In my first playthrough my character was smart, strong mindedand good at shooting, so they were an icy intelligent type that made them a competentsniper on the battlefield, gave them perhaps hidden dialogue options from ahigh intelligence and let them face down scary threats with high Willpower. Butshit 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 boywith super high fellowship and commerce, but I actively tried to keep hiswillpower and toughness low for as long as possible, so he was rubbish in afight unless he had people to command. 

These storybook sections really highlighted thedifference between them, with the icy sniper Isabella dealing relatively wellwith physical stuff when isolated, but being bad at persuading people oraltering events, while Valerian Von Valencius, my posh fancy boy, was inabsolute pantsshitting terrorgdanger with solitary adventure sections, butactually 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 myfirst character, when I nearly go to the end of the second act, and again withmy second character, where I played the whole thing all the way through. 

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

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

uncertain, not knowing what choice or option might leadwhere, weighting my dialogue choices and strategic choices more like a personthan a player. 

On my second run I knew more about the game, already knewwhat would happen in much of the first two acts, and my character wasdeliberately unbalanced, designed more to be a particular person with a strongset of abilities and weaknesses. I also downloaded the Void Shadows DLC, whichadded a whole bunch to the game. 

In some ways Valerian Von Valencius felt more like arogue trader, while my first character, Isabella, refused to take a bath,Valerian did so immediately, presumably as a noble it was simply his nature, andhe ended up bathing with every member of his entourage over time, but in otherways, 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 whatwas to be. I was less immersed, because I knew more. 

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

Throughout the game RT deliberately plays with veils, givingyou some choices with clear causes, consequences and mechanics, others blind, somegiven without reason, others removed. You never really know when the game willrespond 'as a game' or when it will simulate a world, with strange long termconsequences resulting from apparently minor choices or effects. This slightlyshadowy 'magic trick' quality seems another curious paradox of play, onecentral to the RPG experience;

the strange gift of ignorance. 

I did cheat at times. 

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

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

The deeper question of what it actually means to playblind, and what and where the value of a game lies, of the fundamentaldifference between meeting an apparently complex situation for the first time inignorance, and therefore treating it as fundamentally more-real, and meeting itfor a second or more times, and the deep conflict within myself of wanting toexperience vs wanting to 'get things right', I am no closer to resolving. Thoughperhaps by accepting it I can manage it better.

 

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