If playing Owlcat’s CRPGs at launch is a mug’s game then fill me up with coffee I guess, because I keep doing it in spite of their issues. It’s not just that they’re buggy, though that’s definitely part of the problem. My first experience of Rogue Trader was marred by the fact I lost 18 hours of progress thanks to a bug at the end of chapter one.
But beyond the glitchiness there’s also the wonky balance, inevitably addressed across several months’ worth of post-launch patches, and the DLC, some of which is carefully threaded into the game rather than bolted onto the end where you could play it just by loading an old save. To experience the two expansions released for Rogue Trader so far, making up its first season pass, you need to start a whole new playthrough.
Or just wait until the game’s been out for at least a year, maybe two, before you even bother with it. Like a sensible person. If that’s you, congratulations! Play Rogue Trader now and you’ll have a much better time than I did when it came out at the end of 2023.
Each of the two DLCs adds a new origin and archetype you can choose (one available at level one, the other an advanced archetype that unlocks at a higher level), a new companion for your voidship’s crew, and a string of sidequests involving that companion. Both are romanceable, and both have dialogue that comments on other quests if you bring them along, making them feel about as central as the existing companions.
Your Imperial Gothic GF
In fact, the first of them feels more significant than several of the companions available at launch. The Void Shadows DLC adds Kibellah, an assassin from a death cult that lives in the bowels of your city-sized spaceship, and her questline lets you explore more of that ship and meet more of the officers who help run it. There’s an entire train line you’d never get to see without the quest that involves a hunt through the ship to find a hidden temple.
As you get to know your ship better you get to know Kibellah and her gonzo philosophy of blood and tarot, which is fully accepted by the state religion because if you kill in the name of the Emperor you’re the kind of useful fanatic who can be pointed at enemies of the Imperium. She’s an unstoppable murder machine who gets powered up by standing in blood, with a leap attack that can be chained multiple times and then the whole chain repeated to slice and dice a bunch of enemies every turn. Her archetype, the death cultist, isn’t as broken as the officer archetype was at launch, but still makes her a terrifying beast.
Yes, of course I romanced her.
Owlcat’s love of unchallenging filler combat is toned down in Void Shadows, with more fights that have interesting objectives like timers to defeat or generators to shut down and bosses who shield themselves so you can’t snipe them on turn one. A dogfight with a space station bristling with turrets made for one of the better space battles too.
Post-launch patches that made combat abilities more impactful help. There’s none of the “improves your chance to crit by 0.5% if it’s raining and also a Tuesday” stuff it had at launch. Although you still level up often enough that it gets annoying, with climactic encounters handing out so much XP you level up once and have enough XP left over that doing something laughably trivial immediately after will level you up again. I once followed a post-boss leveling with another because of the extra XP I got from taking a bath.
Arbitrator Rex
The Imperialis Lex DLC adds an arbitrator, which is what 40K calls its Judge Dredd analogues, named Solomorne. He’s got a pet cyber-dog sidekick to suggest there’s a soft side beneath the gruffness, but beyond that there’s not a lot of layers to him.
Lex Imperialis feels thinner than Void Shadows in a lot of ways, even adding less music to the soundtrack, though what it does add is decent. The overseer archetype lets you choose a familiar, like Solomorne’s cyber-mastiff, with the other options being an eagle, a swarm of servo-skulls, or a psychic raven. I gave my navigator Cassia those skulls, which she can use her officer abilities on to spread them over multiple characters within range, making officers feel almost as busted as they were at launch. (Almost.)
Solomorne’s storyline gets into gear with a raid on a pirate spaceship called the Heartless, which you then get to keep as a side-piece to your frigate. Both Solomorne and the Heartless were initially rewards you had to wait a while to unlock, but patches have made them available earlier if you needed another reminder not to play anything Owlcat makes close to release.
Shooting your way through a pirate ship isn’t a bad time, but it does seem a waste of a detective not having his quest begin with a mystery. Something with more crime-scene investigation and less shotgunning generic bad guys might have sold me on Solomorne, but he does come off as another character with reams of introductory text and not a lot beneath that, which is another recurring Owlcat issue.
Still, if you’ve been holding out on Rogue Trader now is a good time to finally bite the bullet. When you do, grab the Void Shadows DLC for sure, but Lex Imperialis only if you really want a pet dog or skull-swarm of your very own.
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