I've been working on some long form writing, I needed a quick change of pace and, frankly, I just needed to get this disappointment off my chest:

3 stars / 10

Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader is a fascinating concept ruined by some of the most brain-dead execution I've seen in over 40 years of playing CRPGs (Computer Role-Playing Games). The graphics are beautiful. The universe, based on the longstanding Warhammer franchise, is rich and vibrant. The idea to explore this fantasy realm from the perspective of a Rogue Trader is certainly an interesting one.

And then Owlcat Studios took all of this potential greatness and sledgehammered it into what is mostly the most generic CRPG format possible, which doesn't work at all and constantly breaks any chance of immersion. And the parts that aren't generic? Oh, you're really going to hate those.

Let's start with you, the protagonist: the bizarrely unlikely heir to a crumbling mini-empire of mind-blowing wealth (they don't even bother to explain why you had no idea you were up for the literal throne) who is dragged in and installed as head more or less by default. Apparently ruling swaths of the galaxy is the sort of business where one doesn't bother to groom or even really keep track of the progeny that might have to take over on a moment's notice. Even with a literal army of retainers, this sort of job that would be one of the most important things imaginable in any empire barely rates a remarkably luckily-timed afterthought, because, well, doing otherwise would require an actual plot.

Even the name "Rogue Trader" makes no sense. You're barely a trader and you carry government-assigned powers of life and death over countless millions, which means you are in no way whatsoever a rogue. It's like the designers took two words they thought sounded neat, slammed them together, and called it a day. So I'm going to call it Rogue Trader™ with a ™ because other than branding the name is just stupid.

A Rogue Trader™ has countless subjects (tens of thousands? millions?), many of whom are so mindlessly loyal they would ritualistically disembowel themselves for your pleasure if you are having a bad day (it's that kind of story). The rest are on the razor's edge of rebellion because even though Rogue Traders™ have access to thousands of years of knowledge and wisdom, they and their literal army of retainers can't figure out how to rule their subjects in any manner other than a mindlessly brutal iron fist. None of it makes any sense for any reason other than "because the various plots and subplots require it."

The game world just keeps getting worse. As a newly-installed Rogue Trader™, with years of gruesome experience behind you, your combat abilities start at Level 1. Why? Because having a background that provides anything other than plot containment would make sense and nothing in this game makes any sense. Your first NPC party member, your seneschal, with decades of loyal service to your Rogue Trader™ line, is also Level 1. Why? Because shut up, that's why. If you have the DLC you eventually get a Bloodspinner party member (who is so overpowered she breaks of all the combat – a great purchase if you just want to ignore much of the painfully-bad combat system), and she joins you at Level 4 (or whatever your level is when you run into her). Now, she'll explain later that her entire life of near-death-level training was so incredibly intense that if you devoted three or four decades you might be able to barely grasp the fundamentals of it. Which is why, naturally, when she joins the Rogue Trader™, she's Level 4. Just freaking staaaaaaaaaaahp! At least your Navigator has a decent plot excuse for not being leveled, but nobody else in the game does.

There are many potential plot contrivances that could easily work around the nonsensical leveling system. The NPCs in question could be killed in the startup quest and you're joined by their descendants or the one young remnant of their factions. Or they could join you at appropriate levels and the missions are designed for them to escort you, a relative n00b (they'd have to fix the backstory), until you survive long enough to be a force in your own right. But, no, we're stuck with Owlcat's nonexistent writing skills and screw you, none of this will make any sense.

Now, in this universe, Rogue Traders™ are the economic lynchpin of the galaxy-spanning empire. So you'd think that this game would might have a cool economic system to work with. Or maybe at least a generic economic system because everything else about this game is so cookie-cutter generic and why not? Nah. Not Owlcat. This game has an economic system so ridiculous and contrived that if you threw several boxes of crayons and a few cases of methamphetamine tablets into the chimpanzee cage at a zoo, whatever they wind up drawing will be a million times more coherent than this trash. You see, a Rogue Trader™ doesn't deal with commoner things like currency. That would not be Rogue™ enough. They deal in Profit Factor (you can totally tell this game was written by over-educated socialists). Once you have enough PF, you just, you know, take whatever items you want from other factions, based on the PF level of the items. Of course, like all socialist-inspired systems, there is a ridiculous shortage of goods available and all of the goods suck. This is how a Rogue Trader™ goes about Rogue Trading™:

You, the Rogue Trader™: "Yo! I want some MediKits!" (so creative)

Faction: "Sure! We have, ummmmmm, three of them."

You, the Rogue Trader™: "What, you mean, like, you're in a horrible pinch and you have just three of them on you, like, right now?"

Faction: "NO! WE HAVE THREE OF THEM! FOR THIS ENTIRE SECTOR OF THE GALAXY. THERE ARE THREE OF THEM. GET OVER IT!"

You, the Rogue Trader™: "Wow, calm down. So, I'll, just, uh, take the three because my PF, I guess. Ummmmm... when are you going to restock?"

Faction: "NEVER!"

You, the Rogue Trader™: "Whaaaaaa?"

Faction: "NEVER!"

You, the Rogue Trader™: "But MediKits are important. People get injured all the time. Not just the disposable trash mobs, but, like, important people. Shouldn't we have an economy that produces a reasonable number of MediKits and makes them available, at least for the ultra-rich who rule millions like me?"

Faction: "THERE ARE THREE MEDIKITS!!! THERE CAN ONLY BE THREE MEDIKITS!!! THERE WILL ONLY BE THREE MEDIKITS!!! PERIOD!!!1!!1!!!!eleven!!!!"

You, the Rogue Trader™: "But... but... how? why?"

Faction: "BECAUSE SHUT UP, THAT'S WHY!"

You, the Rogue Trader™: "Yikes. I guess I'll take the rest of the stuff my PF allows me and just scrap it, because the stuff I can get is stuff I've already leveled way past and there's virtually no payoff for building enough PF and reputation to Rogue Trade™ for anything other than ship parts and the three MediKits."

Faction: "See? Now you're getting it. Or not getting it. Heh. Get it?"

You, the Rogue Trader™: "fml"

Don’t worry. MediKits abound in places like lockers and treasure chests, errr, I mean crates. And if you play your cards right you can have one of your half dozen or so developable planets make five of them a week. Or a month. Or a year. I can’t tell. Time really isn’t a fleshed-out concept in this game. Stuff just happens. This makes the timing-based quests, of which there are a few, really freaking awkward. I couldn’t bring myself to care enough to figure it out.

Which takes us to the one part of the game that’s ridiculously over-developed: leveling and combat. Rogue Trader™ takes place in the Warhammer universe, which is based on a pen-and-paper RPG. The many successful CRPG implementations of huge, complex, pen-and-paper games have been well-received by the general public because they either pare down the rule system enough to make it understandable to the layperson, or they hide it well enough so that it’s there if you understand it but not in your way if you don’t. The Baldur’s Gate series and Elder Scrolls series handle this aspect brilliantly. Rogue Trader™ just jams it all in your face and laughs.

In the Warhammer universe there seem to be multiple development paths for each character class, each of which has dozens of potential specialized skills and traits in addition to the dozens of generic skills and traits. If you’re a pen-and-paper geek and have wasted 20 years of your life rolling Warhammer dice this probably all makes tons of sense to you. If you’re not? You might as well just pick stuff at random because not only is it all insanely detailed and complex, the world of Rogue Trader™ isn’t built up enough to take advantage of virtually any of it. There’s simply no payoff for learning the system. I wound up turning my “grand strategist” into a vanguard / tank, because none of the battles are epic enough to make use of any of his specialized skills. Not only is the complexity there, but the help system doesn’t really help much. For example, apparently the perception attribute somehow plays a role in ranged weapon attacks but how that works isn’t explained anywhere even though specific mathematical formulae are endlessly littered throughout the online documentation. Someone who’s not a Warhammer expert might as well just button-mash through character development, which takes all of the fun out of RPG systems. Pointlessly renaming some attributes like hit points into “wounds” (the dictionary definition of which is the opposite of what hit points represent) just adds to the pointless confusion. And it’s difficult to justify much effort for a game whose story and plot are made of pure retardium, which is the one commodity that is in limitless supply in Rogue Trader™.

Even the few things there are to recommend in the game have drawbacks. The isometric graphics are beautiful, but the camera frequently swings behind walls blocking your view of the action. The writing in the creepy / diabolical world of Rogue Traders™ is sometimes fun, but it often just drags on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on. This might be more excusable in a world you can immerse yourself in, but the game is almost specifically designed to prevent the player from becoming immersed. You can’t combine “just shut off your brain and roll with it” and a detailed story that requires you to care enough to read a lot between action scenes. I’m a reader, and I eventually just lost patience and clicked through most of it without reading.

And the aforementioned retardium never, ever ends. Your world as a Rogue Traders™ is one of hereditary dynasty, but if you wonder where what must have been the virtually endless Profit Factor of your immediate predecessor went… never explained. You start off with zero because the developers want you to level grind, and that’s that. The warp links between stars and information on the worlds that orbit them are lost and I guess, despite this being possibly the most important economic, military, and even survival information in the known universe, meh, nobody bothered to make a backup. Ever. Anywhere. On any planet. In any solar system. It’s all just gone and you have to rediscover everything again, because reasons. This is even meta-retarded. The game takes place on the edge of the known universe, and could have very easily allowed you to explore a huge or even endless, procedurally-generated frontier. This would have taken virtually no development effort and could have made the painfully stupid economic system at least playable. But, no, they simply allow you to rediscover what was already known on what is, in galactic terms, a tiny pinprick of a map.

You get the idea: Owlcat took what could have been an absolutely epic experience, and crapped out a less-than-pedestrian product. Fortunately, I bought it on sale at a huge discount but even then I feel ripped off. I managed to get about three-quarters of the way through, mostly by imagining that the NPCs being endlessly killed in various gruesome ways were the game developers, but even that managed to wear thin and I gave up. How does it end? I couldn’t possibly care less. And that is the worst thing you can say about any story-based game.