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I mean, it’s an Owlcat cRPG, and you know how I feel about those. For a development studio with three games (and apparently 450 employees), they have an incredibly well-established brand. Unfortunately, that also means I’m going to have to start really criticizing some aspects of their gameplay and implementation of the Warhammer system specifically.
I’ve spent 30 hours playing Rogue Trader – also known as a “short session” in Owlcat terms – and I’m near what I think is the end of chapter two. So far, the world-building, plot, sector map, and initial character creation options have engrossed me thoroughly and I look forward to finishing the game over the next week or so (the only positive outcome of catching a cold from July 4th).
This is almost to be expected: Owlcat’s ability to make sprawling, dense, fascinating worlds and characters has been proven beyond doubt over their short catalogue. In an age when many single player games shoot for the easily consumable 10-15 hour campaigns and most of the “long” games are shooting for the 40-60 hour mark, it’s quite nice to have a solid player behind the 100-200 hour epic experiences.
There’s a certain knack they have at making me want to play for just five more minutes – just clean up that last star system, just explore that last corner of the map, just turn in this one last mission – that turns itself into hours upon hours spent engaging with the story and pushing to see the next area, character interaction, or quest they’ve designed.
And yet.
The mechanical experience leaves something to be desired. Partly this seems to be the fault of the Warhammer system, but quite a bit of it is endemic to the whole Owlcat catalogue. Owlcat’s isometric cRPG engine has been evolving as close to the ideal one you have in your mind as might be imagined. What started a bit rough around the edges yet supporting significant depth with Pathfinder: Kingmaker was refined in Wrath of the Righteous to bring us the rotating camera, and with Rogue Trader we finally have the final missing aspect of any good Infinity-like: the combat grid.
Indeed, it’s hard to believe we’ve gone two full games without the ability to snap to a grid; I have to say, it’s a welcome addition. And yet, Owlcat giveth and Owlcat taketh away: though we now have a combat grid, the game no longer allows for real-time combat. Admittedly, the combat system of Rogue Trader practically requires using turn-based combat: I can’t imagine trying to line up rifle shots half-way across the map without resorting to it (and the time-bending definitely wouldn’t work, but we’ll get to that later).
Taking away the real-time option, though, does mean that there’s no longer a way to “skip past” the easy fights – the ones where you aren’t biting your nails and are just mowing down some thugs in an alley on your way to the den of chaos. I complained about this in my Kingmaker review, and the same issue carried into Wrath of the Righteous: eventually, once you have so many options and little things to do in a combat, even the trash mob fights require you to invest just a tad too much time to really find it enjoyable.
Is this just bad encounter design on the part of Owlcat? I’m not sure. In my Kingmaker review, I definitely blamed the Pathfinder 1e system, having experienced the (this term is now indelibly tied to the fantastic actual play channel in my mind) Glass Cannon nature of high-level combat first-hand in a pen-and-paper setting. It’s certainly possible that the same issue is at hand in the Rogue Trader system (which seems to be a customized take on the specific Fantasy Flight implementation), but it’s also possible that the encounter balance in Owlcat games is off somehow.
Here, at least, the problems are different. At least on Normal difficulty, combat is far from what I’d consider complicated – for the most part. Some abilities, like my Navigator’s innate ability to infinitely cast a quarter circle of pain or single target bombshell, are both straightforward and highly effective. But at the same time, exploiting an Opening for my assassin or removing 3 exploits to reduce a target’s dodge, parry, and armor by -(10 + exploits removed x 5)% until the start of their next turn is considered a core ability by the games systems, and it just doesn’t feel terribly useful. The party was practically carried by my automatic rifle party member simply burst-firing for much of the first act, whose effectiveness at wiping out large portions of the enemy force only waned when I hadn’t found a good burst weapon for a while. This isn’t a complaint about complexity so much as it is about a sufficient reward for complexity.
Despite all that, I still don’t know if I can blame this on Owlcat. I’m currently in a Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay campaign (the Enemy Within for 4e from Cubicle 7), and a lot of the complaints I just leveled at Rogue Trader could also be made against that system as well: my character has a bunch of abilities, but the only thing you really need is a high melee skill and a dual wielding/ambidextrous feat (so you get that second attack), which you can easily leverage into an overwhelming advantage. It’s entirely possible this might just be a case of the flaws of the system being translated over – just as with Pathfinder 1e and Kingmaker/Wrath of the Righteous.
I’ve spent a lot of time on that last point, so let’s move to my final complaint: the action economy is a shambles. It’s based on a “move and then shoot” paradigm, but it just doesn’t work ludonarratively. Certain characters (two of my party, in my case) have the at-will ability to grant another character an action or two – and later on, the ability to grant a full extra turn once per combat. The character granted the action might also choose to activate one or more of their own abilities, which allows them to take a full turn of their own or just a couple extra actions.
This hierarchy means its possible for a character to be able to move, say, five squares one turn and shoot a (semi-automatic) weapon once on one turn, but then the next turn they might be able to move 25 squares and shoot the same weapon upwards of 20 times (at 7+ targets/areas) at full accuracy. For a melee character, it’s much the same: limited to a single attack on one turn, but allowed 5+ on another. If this is at all similar to the tabletop experience (which I am under the impression it is not), just imagine sitting at a table with someone who gets to shoot their long-range carbine 20 times in a round and brings down a bunch of enemies – then you get to move and swing a sword once (a chainsword, but still).
That’s probably enough for complaints (plus I’m running low on screenshots). Despite my problems with the combat, Rogue Trader still squeaks into Tier One on its expansive story, stellar world-building, and Star Control II/Ur-Quan Masters exploration fun (though sadly, we don’t get a little tiny rover that gets constantly blown up by electrical storms here). But I think this is the last freebie Owlcat gets: whatever they come out with next will need to have a better combat foundation that can stand up to the 100+ hours of story they cram into their games.