There’s a few ways to go when grabbing a license from the Warhammer brand and spinning it into a video game. From direct adaptations of the turn-based strategy and tactics of the tabletop originals to more creative interpretations and action-packed adventures in thoroughly different genres, there’s a Warhammer game for pretty much everyone. Except for role players… However, Owlcat Games has aspirations to set that right with the first CRPG set in the grimdark 40K setting, Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader.
The concept of rogue traders goes all the way back to the very first edition of Warhammer 40,000, which released in 1987 with ‘Rogue Trader’ as the subtitle, but was dropped for later editions as the tabletop game shifted toward larger scale warfare and away from more RPG roots. The rogue traders as characters were really fleshed out in 2009 with the release of the Rogue Trader tabletop RPG, explaining more of how they tie in with the Imperium of Man, or more specifically, how they can work outside of its totalitarian rules.
Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader from Owlcat Games wholeheartedly embraces this setting from the very beginning – we’ve been hands on with a slice of the action as featured in the beta that launches today. The prologue starts off on a rogue trader’s voidship – a powerful Imperial frigate that will look familiar to fans of Battlefleet Gothic – showcasing the vast internal scale of these interstellar craft, their dark gothic architecture combined with technology that is archaic as it is futuristic. You’re brought there to potentially become the heir to this ship’s Lord Captain, but a mutiny takes hold aboard the ship and you have to rush to restore a semblance of order before they can disrupt the perilous journey through the void.
As you do so, you get to visit fully realised renditions of the cathedral-like rooms, spaces filled with barely understood technology, and one of the first depictions of the Warrant of Trade – a vast scroll that grants the ship’s Lord Captain with rogue trader privileges.
Being a CRPG, this is a wordy game. A very, very wordy game. As the characters converse, they feel absolutely rooted in this setting, your dialogue options more than capable of seeing you rebuked for not being pious or fervent enough in the service of the God Emperor, but also letting you lean into a particular role and background. If there’s every a piece of jargon that you don’t know or remember, you are able to click on the bolded words in the conversation to link through to an encyclopaedia.
Oh, that’s right, there’s a full character creator before you even get to this part, letting you pick the look for your character, your origins, whether that’s being Void Born or from a Hive World, then your background as a person, which affects dialogue options available to you, and then choosing a career that is this game’s two-tiered class system. You can be a fighter, leader, psychic adept or soldier at the start, but can then further specialise as an assassin, vanguard or hunter, though not all of these options can be combined. There’s a fair bit of this that’s locked away or not fully fleshed out for the beta, but the framework is clearly quite flexible.
As the adventure grows from the void ship to let you explore the Koronus Expanse, you can surround yourself with an unlikely crew of characters. Backing you up, you can have tech priests, your navigator, the Battle Sister Argenta and the Space Wolf Ulfar, but they’ll have to rub shoulders with unlicensed psykers, and even aliens – it’s a good thing the rogue trader charter gives you pretty much free license to do what needs doing to survive.
Leaping ahead to a climactic battle from this beta, taking you to the Dark Elves dark city of Commoragh and an exacting battle against numerous Incubus, hulking Grotesques and more. It’s a potentially tricky fight with a mixture of flighty and hard-hitting enemies, but it’s also fun to be able to dive into the turn-based RPG combat mechanics. You play on a square grid, each character having the core ability to move and to attack once with whatever weapon they have equipped, but then also having a pool of action points to spend on other abilities. These can be a charge that has you race across the map and still be able to get a second melee attack in, or a taunting war cry that forces an enemy to attack you, but then opens them up for attacks of opportunity from all nearby allies, and simple buffs and debuffs that are always going to be important in getting out of tricky situations. That’s before we consider ultimate abilities that allow you to absolutely whale upon enemies with repeated and more damaging attacks.
There’s some really fun touches here, like having bullet penetration that can blast through a line of enemies – beware of friendly fire! – and just the hulking tankiness of Ulfar in his Space Marine armour. Most 40K games have Space Marines only taking up a single square, while it’s Dreadnoughts that stomp around and take more space, but Rogue Trader has a different sense of scale that’s more accurate to the wider world’s lore – Space Marines are massive.
There’s plenty of Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader that I haven’t touched upon here, such as the interstellar travel and ship combat out in space, but from what I’ve seen, this has real potential to be a defining and practically unique trek through the 40K universe.
