Warhammer 40K: Rogue Trader
So I finished the game finally and overall I had a blast, but it has many issues.
Note, there may be some spoilers.
I'll start with the good.
I really liked the story set-up. I have very little experience with W40K lore and knew nothing about Rogue Traders (RT) at all except for the name and a few things people mentioned here on the forums. The set-up is very clear and allows for an immediate understanding of where you stand. Owlcat have also been doing their little tooltip popups for the past games and those have remained there for further information. There's even a codex which contains further details on concepts both within 40K lore and the game itself.
The story itself doesn't start you out as anything special and I thought it would take a bit longer to become the RT, but it's almost immediate essentially, which is both good and bad as it allowed me to step into those shoes and learn as I go. I found the story to be quite enjoyable overall, but it had certainly had its highs and lows, with most highs being frontloaded. For example, the game starts you off deciding which planets to go to first to investigate what is happening. Each decision has consequences on the other planets. They were really obvious and subtle at the same time. That was really well made. They carried this into Chapter 2 as well well, but then it felt like they lost track of funding as those choices started petering out... Overall, I would still call it a fun story, which carried me through most of the game and I did always want to find out more. It's a shame the second half is not as good.
The quests were fun, both main and side quests had a lot going for them, interesting characters and contained a set-up, a body and usually several endings. Many of the quests had dependencies, based on what choices you had made earlier into the game, which means you could easily replay this game at least 3 times with very different outcomes, and probably several more times with some more minor changes to the game too.
I think the majority of the characters were quite interesting too - bar a few. I found some characters a bit over the top, but within my playthough I always had my main characters I was happy to bring along and a few I didn't mind bringing along on their sidequests. The only two exceptions were Argenta and Marazhai, both because they were simply too extreme for my playthrough. I believe that if I did ever play again with more dogmatic or heretical characters, they would fit into those playstyles better. So although not amazing, I do understand they would have a place in game.
The combat was pretty good, overall, but I found the majority of fights too easy (except for a few minor examples). I played on Daring. I also actually enjoyed the ship combat and although it doesn't come to the level of really good, I had no issues with it at all.
Now the bad.
Most of the bad is related to mechanics. First of all, and I mentioned this in the What Are You Playing thread, is the amount of leveling needed. We are talking about 55 levels with a minimum of 6 characters (but actually more), so you spend 330 levels' worth of looking at menus in this game. This is madness. The majority of levels are minor changes and the ones that do make an impact take ages to decide on because the recommended skills are mostly useless. For example, if you have a psyker, it doesn't even recommend leveling up the psy rating, which is like not a warrior not leveling up their STR in DnD. This needs a full overhaul in my opinion and should be limited to 25-30 levels that have larger impacts.
I also believe itemisation to be something that could have been amazing, but with the inventory being so unmanageable it makes it difficult to navigate. Many items provide unique benefits to characters, but sometimes only if they have a particular skill. However, it doesn't show me if my character has that skill. I don't remember all the skill names by heart, so I would have to review each and every item and each and every character. Instead those items were never used. There are also many filters missing in my opinion, such as - can my character even use it ? No, just shade it red and let me scroll through 100 items for no reason.
Another issue with this game is the amount of loading screens. Some maps are pretty large and it makes me wonder why others are so small with so many unnecessary transitions. It's probably too late to fix now, but I really can't understand how they did not think about this. Go my bridge to room, load screen, back to bridge, load screen, to map, load screen, visit planet, load screen, walk for 3 mins, load screen, walk back, load screen. This was a major annoyance and my loading didn't even take long. I can't imagine how it feels for people with slower PCs.
The final issue for me is that the bugs are still obviously there. This game is really well cooked for the first two chapters. I could barely see anything major, but from chapter 3 onwards, there are many bugs. Quest-breaking bugs, visual bugs, dialog bugs,... They should have beta-tested chapters 3 and 4 at least too to allow for some of the main ones to be picked up on. I feel like they haven't learned (enough) from their first two games.
