It felt like there were an unlimited amount of Warhammer tabletop games. I get the same feeling when looking at the video games set in the series. Without a clear entry point or recommendation, I didn’t know where to start.
So when I decided to check out Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader, I wasn’t really sure what to expect; Was I gonna be confused by the story? Will the game assume I know certain staples of the series going in? What kind of game is Warhammer 40,000? I sat down with Nikita Putilin of Owlcat Games at Pax West 2023 to ask him some of these questions.
“One of our aims is to bring both Warhammer and the CRPG experience to players who aren't familiar with either of them,” Putilin said.
In an effort to do this, Owlcat Games implemented an in-game wiki that you can use at any point to learn more about any Warhammer lore referenced. This reminded me of the active time lore feature in the recently released Final Fantasy XVI, which I frequently found myself using to understand what was going on in the story.
To help players unfamiliar with CRPGs, Rogue Trader will have an in-depth tutorial to get them up-to-speed on battle systems, dialogue choices, and difficulty.
Rogue Trader is being made by Owlcat Games, a small team of gaming industry veterans who have a passion for RPGs. They’re known for the critically acclaimed party-based fantasy CRPG Pathfinder: Kingmaker and Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous. Similar to Warhammer 40,000, Pathfinder is also originally a tabletop game. So Owlcat has experience cutting its teeth by creating award-winning adaptations of games from another medium.
So we can see why Owlcat games would be a good fit for a Warhammer 40,000 adaptation. But why the switch from Pathfinder to Warhammer?
“While we were developing [Pathfinder:] Wrath of the Righteous, the core team was playing the table-top version of Rogue Trader for four years and when we had our first talks on what to do next they made the internal pitch on a CRPG in the Rogue Trade universe,” Putilin said.
With the idea coming from the core team, Owlcat Games approached Games Workshop with their vision and went from there, Putilin said. To get familiar with the game, everyone at Owlcat Games began to play the original 1987 tabletop version of Rogue Trader.
While Rogue Trader shares the same name as its tabletop predecessor, Putilin said the video game isn’t a direct adaptation. To bring the game to a CRPG format, they had to rebuild the RPG systems behind the game.
“People who’ve played the pen-and-paper Rogue Trader will find familiar things,” Putilin said, “but still, it’s a new game and a new experience for everyone.”
Fans of Owlcat Games’ previous Pathfinder games will find familiarity in Rogue Trader. The studio kept the same core pillars as they had in Pathfinder such as choices with consequences, vivid companions, romances, rich plots and different endings.
Rogue Trader doesn’t have a release date as of yet but is expected to come soon to PC.
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Kelton Burns is a freelance games reporter and recently graduated with his degree in Journalism. You can find him talking about the latest gaming news on his podcast Press Why or reach him on Twitter at @KeltonBurns His favorite game is Alan Wake.
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