The Grim Darkness of Humanity's Future, Part 2
Recap: I've been playing Owlcat's Warhammer 40K: Rogue Trader video game, it's my first time interacting with 40K in earnest, and it's been at minimum an interesting experience. Spoilers to follow.
I finished the game. It was okay; 3 out of 5. Post over.
Just kidding.
By the time I was getting to about the last 35-40% of the game, I felt like not being familiar with the setting was becoming an actual roadblock to enjoyment. Any time some new thing showed up, I didn't know quite what to make of it and the game could only really offer basic explanations if it wanted to keep moving in a timely fashion. I felt like I was doing a lot of polite smiling and nodding.
Things were definitely escalating. I sure fought weirder aliens. I got a "SPACE MARINE?!?!?" on my party. I recruited a Drukhari and immediately turned him over to the Inquisition. More exclamation marks showed up in the dialogue. I knew shit was getting real because suddenly everyone wanted me to finish their companion quests and started telling me "I'm with you until the end, Rogue Trader." You better be, after 80 fucking hours. I'm so tired.
I assume being captured, thrown into the Webway, and consigned to Commorragh's gladiatorial pits is actually a huge deal within 40K lore, but I can only interpret it based on my own experiences. I could only think, "this is just like when I went to Alushinyrra in Wrath of the Righteous," or more pertinently, "this is just like when I went to the Underdark in Baldur's Gate 2." The symbols of the 40K universe mean nothing to me until after I experience them, and no amount of Lore (Xenos) checks and their resultant one-paragraph explanations is quite going to fix that. That's not really the game's fault, though.
What might be the game's fault is the difficulty scaling (I guess I could have cranked up the difficulty, but I generally just try to play things on Normal). Around the point I got back from Commorragh, everything completely ceased to be a threat. New enemies got bespoke cutscenes or several paragraphs building them up as huge new threats, and they'd drop like everything else. I killed the final boss within the first round of combat. C'tan shards ain't shit, apparently.
Aside: I have to talk about my comical (and apparently, quite common) build here that I just sort of stumbled into unintentionally, where you pump up Ballistics Skill and kill everything instantly.
- Sister Argenta has an Improved Heavy Bolter, which has a Rate of Fire of 9 (using a burst fire shoots 9 bolts down range) and increases its rate of fire by 1 for every kill.
- Argenta's subclass is Arch-Militant, which builds stacks of Versatility with each attack.
- One stack of Versatility increases Ballistics Skill by +3, and once you have at least 4 total, damage is increased by (10+BS)%.
- "Concentrated Fire" increases your next burst fire's damage by (50+10xBS).
- "Rapid Fire" doubles your next burst's rate of fire.
- "Wildfire" lets you get a free attack if you've built enough Versatility.
- The "Fired Up" perk means every time she does any damage, her crit damage increases by +1% (so 9 hits will increase it by 9%).
- The "Extermination" perk causes her base damage to increase by +1 for every attack she makes.
- The "Demolition Engineer" perk increases damage with AoE attacks by 5% for every 10 points of Demolition skill.
- The "Demolition Instructions" accessory increases Demolition by +25, and causes all hits to do additional damage equal to 10% of total Demolition skill.
- The "Compensator Gloves" ignore recoil and increase Rate of Fire by (half of total Ballistics Skill)%.
- The "Portative Manipulator" accessory allows her to reload her weapon without spending Action Points.
- Among other stuff. The other party members weren't slouches, either.
So every battle opened with Cassia (who is stacked up with her own slate of buffs and abilities, naturally) laying down extra buffs/debuffs on Argenta/enemies, and then using a skill that gives Argenta an immediate free turn with 2-3 Action Points. Shit just snowballs from there. Only two or three battles in the back two acts took more than a single round, and they were because enemies were too spread out for Argenta to hit them all in one turn.
Everything flattened out in the face of Sister Argenta's Improved Heavy Bolter. Lokhust Heavy Destroyers? Daemon Engines? Lords of Change? No difference: dead in one turn. I wouldn't have given a shit about fighting Necrons if my friends had not asked me repeatedly over the past couple months if the Necrons had showed up yet. It got a little hard to give a shit about any of it, and it's a bit weird to know you don't really care while the game wants you to care and your friends who do know 40K care. I'm feeling more guilty than anything else.
This made me evaluate some of my feelings about other CRPGs. As noted last time, some of my friends are playing Baldur's Gate 3 for the first time. I did a lot of grousing about that game at launch, and one of my big complaints was that it was basically a rollicking tour of Famous DnD Stuff rather than any kind of more pointed or specific storyline.
When I look at my own relationship with DnD, like actual Dungeons and Dragons, it's rooted in video games. My intro was Planescape: Torment, which is content infodumping you for ages about planar lore and including a bunch of weird and wacky shit. How much of that was actually weird and wacky, and how much of it was just par for Planescape as a setting? Perhaps it's both?? Regardless, I evaluate everything in DnD through the lens of these various games; I wouldn't constantly suck off Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of the Betrayer otherwise.
More to the point, since I invoked Baldur's Gate 2: those first two BG games make so many different assumptions about the target audience. Imagine if you will a Venn diagram where one circle is "people who play and engage with Dungeons and Dragons", another circle is "people who play video games on their PC", and the last circle is "people who are willing to purchase a branded Dungeons and Dragons video game for some reason". I feel like the cross-sections were much bigger (proportionally) in 1998 than they are now in 2024.
The writing in BG1 & 2 sort of fundamentally assumes you're already familiar with DnD. They usually aren't stopping to explain basics to you because chances are you're the kind of person who's already going "ohhhh fuck" when you end up in the Underdark. You already know you probably shouldn't fuck with Demogorgon. You already know that you gotta hit trolls with fire or acid.
Baldur's Gate 3, by contrast, is sort of the Theme Park Ride of the Forgotten Realms and that's just what it is. It's Greatest Hits because way more of the audience is simply not as familiar with DnD. The Underdark is just another backdrop, take our word for it that it's definitely scary, but you're soooo cool and brave for delving into it anyway, Protagonist-sama.
What I'm trying to say is that's the vibe I get from Rogue Trader, but I also don't quite have enough knowledge about 40K to feel strongly about it one way or another. My friends do, and that's why relating information to them has been so entertaining to me. I can mention that the final boss is a C'tan Shard and spark a ten minute lore dump that the game itself sure isn't gonna give me.
It's fun to be on the other side. Last week I was the one explaining the Pronouncement of Two Skies and the schism between the Githzerai and the Githyanki. Today I'm hearing about the War in Heaven and how the Emperor's efforts to map the Webway ultimately led to the Horus Heresy. None of these things are directly pertinent to the story happening right now per se, but having that knowledge base ahead of time gives you a foundation to work with. It's just more fun when you can see more of the web, I think.
So, I dunno, is this game a good introduction to the setting? Is Baldur's Gate 3 a good intro to the Forgotten Realms? Is Planescape: Torment a good introduction to DnD cosmology? Who can say? We all start somewhere. Why not here?
For better or worse, any future interaction I have with the grim darkness of Warhammer 40K will be colored by my time with Rogue Trader. It built that foundation for me as I blundered through the Koronus Expanse, barely understanding what I was doing. Every Inquisitor will be compared to Heinrix and every Tech-Priest to Pasqal. I will always know it as a wacky, farcical, maximalist sci-fi setting not to be taken too seriously. A setting suitable to fit dozens of video games, including one mid-to-decent CRPG.
I suppose that's all I really expected from Rogue Trader, in the end: another Owlcat CRPG that I respect while also not finding it terribly interesting. Here's to their future endeavors that I'll probably also sink another routine 80+ hours into because I have a sickness.
See you again, folks. The Emperor protects.
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