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Started this game, and advanced a little. Hope to love it. Previous Owlcat games are making me furious cause they seemed one step from being games I'll replay 20 times like most of what BioWare did and Obsidian still does. But some evil force within the company deliberately made these games frustrating for me personally. Most of my issues stemmed from the combat system (it's mindless and repetitive, but putting it on easy invalidates most of the interesting choices in the game because they're integrated with mechanics; plus you still have to fight thousands of mooks, but now it's even more mindless) so Rogue Trader going its own way and turn-based only looked like a good sign to me. And so far it is good. Combat seems to focus on diverse character roles a la XCOM which I lately see in RPGs (e.g. Expedition series) and it feels good. As in Shadowrun games looked like XCOM too, but they still didn't have that variety of roles, a wizard did mostly the same stuff as a sniper. Not like here where a marksman has a unique skill run and gun and an officer has a unique skill of being useless. Hope it won't be like PFKM situation where I wondered why don't people praise it as the best RPG ever while playing the first act, and quickly realizing what it is afterwards.
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Jan 23, 2024 10:51
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In case it wasn't obvious I was joking. I expect officer buffs to become important later, but in the introductory fights my officer MC misses a shot, tells "pls do a good job" to one of the companions, and has spare AP with nothing to spend on. And as you say, it's someone else who does a flashy thing with the officer's buff.evilmiera posted:It's not just you, the mindless repetition and bloat is half the reason I dislike the other games. Playing these games on easy at least means I can get to the story content faster. Sadly it's not like BioWare's RPGs where the story is usually divorced from the story. In, say, Mass Effect or Dragon Age you don't lose much if someone plays all the fights with you. In Dragon Age Origins they don't ask you if you want to sell your soul to get help for the final fight, they ask you if you want werewolves or elves to help you in the final fight and presumably it doesn't change much gameplay-wise. The most interesting choices in PF games are all connected to the mechanics as they affect your stats or kingdom/crusade. If you know you'll easily beat anyone most of these choices don't feel important or interesting at all, you don't need deals with the devil cause devil won't make things any easier for you, and you don't care about your mythic powers cause you can destroy anyone without effort anyway. ilitarist fucked around with this message at 11:32 on Jan 23, 2024 |
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Jan 23, 2024 11:26
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Eifert Posting posted:My dream version of this game is basically an amalgamation of Sid Meyer's Pirates, an ecosim, and a management game where you control staff and manage ground teams. Funny how you write about it right below the post about Star Traders Frontiers which is more or less this There are also Space Rangers which are this and much more.
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Jan 24, 2024 20:35
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I'm only in the beginning of 2nd part (space combat and second classes were recently introduced) but I totally agree, gameplay-wise it's better than Pathfinder games in every regard. I already think about second play through on the higher difficulty because here Normal difficulty is very forgiving for Owlcat. I've heard later there's a lot of medium and trash fights but we'll see. Story-wise it's probably not as appealing as your generic high fantasy for your average Joe. It's confusing if you somehow don't know what WH40K is, and if you know something about it like me you don't see a case for an appealing RPG story. All the choices are between bad and ugly, and the stories you can expect are repetitive. You've seen one heresy - you saw them all. It's a satire so it's not as depressing as the story suggest but still - even when people appreciate an evil playthrough option they often still want a heroic good guy playthrough with good pals in your party.
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Feb 3, 2024 11:03
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Even this path is not exactly kind. And your party members are all murderous psychopaths. Abelard comes close to being a sane man but he's an imperial officer and his reaction to any dissent is mass executions. Also the morals are tainted by the fact that the alternative to totalitarian theocracy is suicidal satanism. I have not played the full story and I don't know what iconoclasm does but if it turns out that you can fight chaos with kindness. Maybe you can "fix" everyone in your party and show them a third way but I doubt it cause it will probably won't feel like Warhammer.
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Feb 3, 2024 12:39
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Xun posted:I got minor spoilers about the iconoclast ending and it actually seemed pretty cool? Seems weird to be worrying about it before you even get to the end I am not worried about it, I explain why it's a hard sell for story-focused RPG with choices. I myself wouldn't be interested in WH40K RPG if it wasn't made by Owlcat who made 2 games that were couple of steps away from being my favourite RPGs.
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Feb 3, 2024 13:38
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I got to a point where I can finally explore the sector and the bugginess became more noticeable now that the fights take up more time. Gamepad controls (playing on Steam Deck) are fine but there are some uncool bugs there, like sometimes I open enemy details screen and get stuck there. Guess I'll wait for 1.1.
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Feb 17, 2024 14:02
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DaysBefore posted:I mean it is a legitimate bottleneck for devs to commit to full voice acting. See Morrowind -> Oblivion. Personally I prefer the mix that Owlcat does where important characters in important scenes get cool voices but some sidequest with General Nobody can vomit paragraph after paragraph of unvoiced but well written text at you This. I like the approach of Owlcat, BG1/2, Neverwinter Nights 1-2, Pillars of Eternity 1 (2 went for the full voice acting, but actually not, but it still felt like it limited NPC interactions. Which, on the other hand, may be to the best if you remember PoE1 walls of text), Tyranny. I don't want to listen to NPCs doing basic exposition with voices and I feel guilty for skipping it, and being walking encyclopedia suits some NPCs. I also don't like how in most modern voiced NPCs the world is filled with NPCs you can't talk with. The numerous tricks RPGs use to circumvent the limitations of voice acting irritate me. In some older RPGs you could ask a random person on the street where the tavern is or what's happening (e.g. see Arcanum or Morrowind) and get varied response depending on circumstances like race or social status of the inconsequential characters. Nowadays RPGs send a welcoming NPC your way when you enter town dumping all this on you. You can't put specific directions in VA unless the game map is fully finished, or you can't put a random requirements there so people say "I've marked it on your map" or "here I've written what I need on thjs note". Anyway Owlcat does it right at the moment.
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Feb 20, 2024 09:21
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The patch helped with a bunch of UI annoyances. The Gamepad controls had some problems. Like when you turn on popups describing an item and want to equip it the popup blocks most of your character sheet, you have to cancel equipping, turn off the popup and equip again. Not anymore. A lot of minor nuisances like that kept me from playing the game more than balance concerns and bugs. I still had bugs though, hope it will be better now.
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Feb 20, 2024 10:59
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I didn't like Pathfinder games but I think the idea behind roguelike expansions is great. Every story-focused RPG must have a mode like this. Even replayable RPGs suffer from the fact you know all the quest rewards and party members. A randomized mode, however basic, would be great for many classic party-based RPGs as a side dish.
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Feb 20, 2024 14:52
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I am not sure yet about this game if the variety of builds and enemies can support a roguelike mode. I didn't like Pathfinder combat but it had a lot of space for experiments. I wish there was a DLC like that for some other RPGs. Pillars of Eternity 2 has great deep mechanics, but it's a very roleplaying-focused game and it's easy to play through the game several times feeling like you've scratched the surface.
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Feb 20, 2024 15:14
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Typical Pubbie posted:How's the co-op? It's just for combat. Second player is not present till party members are there to control. They don't have their own characters but control some of the party members. They'll be able to get their own character only after prologue when mercenaries are available. So don't imagine it being anything like BG3.
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Feb 20, 2024 19:33
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CommissarMega posted:This might be a 'different strokes for different folks' situation; I found BG3's level up system too basic, the upgrades too samey. RT having a whole bunch of class-unique upgrades keyed to different attributes was much better suited to my tastes. That said, it's good to see you had a good time with the game! Same. BG3 is on another level but I didn't like a lot of concepts from there. Levelling up specifically felt lacking both choice and impact. Same for Pathfinder really, in all of these games it felt to me like my choices are tricky questions determining how close to a perfect build for my class am I. Not to mention the giant trap of multiclassing. RT does have too many levels though. I though it will slow down after the tutorial but I'm in a middle of act 2 and I still get levels every couple of fights and I don't have time to get used to new stuff my characters got. I could probably live with fewer passive and active abilities for each character. Also the UI in general is bad and levelup UI begs for replacement in a form of tree - not Diablo style but rather Windows Explorer folder view maybe.
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Feb 24, 2024 17:13
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Also do I understand correctly that levelups do not affect anything beyond what you specifically get on that wheel? As in no HP/stats increase. And from I've seen character level is never used in any calculations, the closest you see is "number of archetypes" which changes very rarely. I like this approach. Even games focused on tactical choices still feel like they must provide some numbers-go-up elements to their systems. It often ends up feeling like the only point behind this stat creep is level gating which is often obsolete in structured games like most modern RPGs.
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Feb 24, 2024 19:44
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ulmont posted:Why are my characters and the enemy built on 2 completely different health scales? Because this is JRPG.
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Feb 26, 2024 07:53
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But none of these games goes for a simulationist feel (except maybe Battle Brothers, to a degree). All of them have characters, both yours and enemies, eating headshots for breakfast. I'd understand if we were talking about Jagged Alliance or something like that, but this is a world of magic and implants and chainsaw swords so it doesn't feel wrong for characters to work on different scales. From what I've seen you still encounter cannon fodder enemies and they justify a lot of abilities and tactics that wouldn't work if the game had just buffed enemy stats. Of course I was joking about it being JRPG but WH40K is close enough to technoscience settings favored by JRPGs for similar conventions to work. Also the game structured in a very restrictive way similar to JRPGs. Unlike, say, Bethesda games or classic Fallout/Arcanum games, or their modern games in this vein like Divinity Original Sin 1/2, BG3, Wasteland 2/3, or Encased you can't attack just anyone. That is probably what you mean?.. In the games I've listed everyone exists in the world in the quantified state, yet in most RPGs (made by BioWare, CDPR or Owlcat) every fight is staged and there's no need to have a universal system describing everyone you meet, enemies are separate entities working by their own rules. Also I'm glad to finally see in the wild someone who likes RadCodex RPGs. I don't get them but they are curious.
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Feb 26, 2024 15:49
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I'm not that far into the game but I fully expected that at some point iconoclast path throws you into the hands of chaos. The setting doesn't make a lot of sense to me if fascism isn't necessary to fight pure evil. Edit: I get that this is satire and the imperial fascism is inhumane and inefficient. But it wouldn't make much sense to me if you could just behave like a good guy and kill Chaos gods with the power of friendship. I guess it would make sense if the Iconoclast path is especially difficult both gameplay-wise and narratively. ilitarist fucked around with this message at 11:13 on Feb 27, 2024 |
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Feb 27, 2024 11:05
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This point gets lost often in very straight portrayals of the setting. RT is fresh in that it's not like that and focuses on normal people instead of supersoldiers. But from what I've seen playing up to act 2 your Iconoclast decisions do not get a real push from companions and authorities. It's like the empire allows people to be good. Sometimes before you make the decision you're told that genocide is necessary for the greater good, but then when you make the decision there's no pushback, no one tells you that the society will collapse the minute you stop daily public executions. This feels wrong, people around you don't strongly care about the necessity of evil to fight greater evil, and they're still portrayed as deeply devout brainwashed people.
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Feb 27, 2024 12:04
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Szarrukin posted:I don't think anyone in first two acts has authority over Rogue Trader, true Inquisitor appears later. I suppose it's still an early part of the story. It just rubs me wrong for now.
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Feb 27, 2024 12:55
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Szarrukin posted:I think that few people outright states that they put out with your poo poo only because you have Warrant of Trade, a biggest "get out of jail free" card in entire Imperium. Yeah, I get that the game had to do something like that to give you any freedom at all. So far nobody told me anything like this. Recently I had an episode with Idira where you could let Argenta shoot her dead. I expected it to be a hard choice where you'd have to choose between two party members. But Argenta wasn't even disappointed when I stopped her. Same with the end-of-prologue decision, I saw some consequences but there were no consequences you'd expect from being the only non-fascist in a land of fascists. It reminds me of Tyranny which handled somewhat similar premise with more finesse.
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Feb 27, 2024 15:35
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Warmachine posted:One of the things in the Trader's favor is that part of the Imperial brainwashing is to respect your betters. This is a very well explained point of view and it will probably enhance my experience. Thank you.
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Feb 27, 2024 17:44
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There are many authors in the universe. A lot of them write stories that are just background for a battle. They can't go deep into the satire and they don't want to sound clownish, so they often speak as in-universe characters who truly believe in thier official BS. The artist is not obliged to add a disclaimer about the author not actually agreeing with the genocidal characters on display. I've heard warhammer characters being compared to pirates and I think it's a good comparison. Everybody likes pirates with thier eyepatches, parrots, hooks, ships, pieces of eight. Children love pirates. In media pirates usually have some stories justifying them (see Sabatini's Captain Blood). Yet nobody is worried about pirate apologism, everyone understands that piracy is dumb and bad for everyone. It's clear their coolness is divorced from reality, you wouldn't worry about a child who shouts they're a pirate and swings a toy sword. Spacemarine (and other cool Warhammer guys) coolness exists without justifying their evil nature just the same way. You need some justification present to make specific characters relateable even if everyone involved in the situation is still a horrible person. You can also look at the deeper level. Pretending that evil can't justify its ways and is always unapologetically obviously evil is more dishonest than portraying an evil character with a flimsy justification for their actions.
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Feb 29, 2024 16:16
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pentyne posted:W40k is never taken seriously except by the people who need to take it seriously to validate their own fascist opinions. You're not allowed to use an anime avatar to post such valid opinions.
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Feb 29, 2024 17:17
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They've added VA to the introduction and updated it so you might find it worthy of restart.
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Mar 1, 2024 11:10
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pentyne posted:Trying to clean up the Before I Play page, this should all be fairly spoiler free and useful info the game isn't telling you. Stuff in bold I'm not 100% on All cool words, though I think it goes too deep into specifics for Before I Play page. Btw Grenadier only works once per combat. I'd also add that sooner or later you'll encounter enemies with more than 100% armour and you have to be prepared to do something about it. All the psyker powers raise the chance of side effect for the following psyker powers, but the chance is never zero even if the corresponding bar is empty. Even the first psyker power has a chance of backfiring. Anyway, I'm playing it and this is what I want RPGs to be. Even with all the bugs I enjoy it without a lot of "except for" to add. Pathfinder games were a torment cause it felt like somebody took pleasure in deliberately modding 9/10 RPG to make it borderline unplayable. I keep hearing about endgame not being great. But for now it's great. I've realized that a recent random encounter fight in warp got me excited because I wanted to try a new toy for my party and the description of the encounter sounded fun (it was Nurgle guys throwing poison around). I've raised the difficulty to make all the combos more meaningful because all of the systems work. I'm not used to enjoying mechanics in an RPG at this level, it's more akin to well-thought out tactical roguelikes rather than RPGs which usually succumb to kitchensink imbalance. This makes me excited for their next game. To be honest the very idea of WH RPG doesn't look exciting to me. You need a lot of effort and talent to make a game about narrative choices in a world of satire while keeping a straight face. Owlcat isn't terrible about it but it works worse for me than their previous games. I understand Pathfinder world is less defined and gave them more artistic freedom. Perhaps their next game with their own IP or something else more suitable would be my 10/10 game. I just hope they won't go back to making faithful adaptations of Pathfinder games cause these are not my jam at all. ilitarist fucked around with this message at 11:41 on Mar 4, 2024 |
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Mar 4, 2024 11:33
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Gamepad controls are good in general. There were some bugs with them early on, but now they're mostly fix. You still have some very strange decisions. Like every move with a stick is registered by the game for voiceovers, so unless you turn off voices you constantly here your MC saying "yeah I'm going". On a galactic map selecting a system with cursor is bugged, and default method is using stick to select a system in the direction of the stick, only it has no distance limit so when you open up a map it's very hard to hop into a neighbouring system that is 30 degrees from the North, your cursor jumps on the other side of the galaxy. But other than that and some conversations allowing me to say something out of place (like "ok I will help you" immoderately after "here I've helped you give me my reward". It didn't break any scripts from what I can tell) it looks relatively stable. When I've played BG3 after a couple of patches it was in a worse state.
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Mar 8, 2024 09:18
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The wave of official renames came around 2014. I guess everybody knows it's because of copyright. Eldar is the word used by Tolkien so if you sell your own Dark Eldar toy soldiers there's nothing Games workshop can do about it.
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Mar 8, 2024 11:40
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YMMV regarding space travel and colony management. I enjoy colony decisions even if they don't matter much. Minor events while travelling are also well written, the devs clearly liked Sunless Sea/Skies. Space battles can feel like a chore though. And if you don't secure your travelling paths you'll encounter tactical combat (something goes wrong inside your ships and you have to fight something chaotic) which is usually more than just a generic fight but still not very interesting. The game would probably be tighter and better without all of this, but for some people it's more than just tediousness. Then again, I'm still only half way through the game, maybe I'll get fed up with all that too.
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Mar 8, 2024 14:12
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I have a growing suspicion that Bounty Hunter bonuses do not work at the moment. I can't see anything on character screen about effects from bounty hunting. Also every enemy icon is marked with "VII". I think it's supposed to be rank for the bounty hunter and I think they should be more varied?..
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Mar 8, 2024 15:37
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I'm somewhere near the end of act 2 and I have discovered you actually need to hoard some Navigator Insight to continue main story. Or maybe I'm missing something? In any case, Owlcat fooled me again making me think that this time they don't want me to suffer. Well played, Owlcat.
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Mar 10, 2024 12:13
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Jack Trades posted:Yeah, that specific point is weird because if you make all the routes that make sense into safe routes, you'll run out of Insight at that exact point leaving you with no way to farm it. A quick googling shows that a lot of people have bumped into this. There should also be a random event that gives the insight, but it's supposedly rare. Even if it isn't rare what is the player supposed to do in this situation, just travel around the sector looking for dangerous routes that can do something? It's easy to cheat I understand, but it instantly breaks my faith in the developer. When, say, Bethesda breaks something it's usually a complex technical issue. Here it's a very obvious mechanical issue that developers don't seem to acknowledge as I'm playing the game after a lot of updates and this was not addressed.
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Mar 10, 2024 12:33
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Jack Trades posted:Oh please. I mention Bethesda specifically because they're buggy and often break scripts. When they do this it looks like an honest mistake, you can see that they were too ambitious or didn't have enough time to iron out issues. And here it looks like a deliberate trap. I can see Owlcat saying "You thought the game would not require a hoard of (almost) finite resources 40 hours into the game because you've only played games made by cowards". Also I've confirmed that bounty hunter is broken for me. Every single enemy is labeled with rank VII and I get no stat bonuses at all from the bounties. This doesn't make angry because it does feel like an honest mistake. ilitarist fucked around with this message at 15:05 on Mar 10, 2024 |
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Mar 10, 2024 14:19
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Old Doggy Bastard posted:Yeah, it's never needed? There's one star system that appears up top which is very faded and hard to see, but functionally red. That's the only reason I can think of that would make people feel like they need to "hoard" it, which is not at all the case. This may be so, but I've revisited all the star systems I have access to and I am certain I've poked everywhere I could. It might be something else, like quest conditions not triggering. I've just restored control over all the colonies, the last was manufactorium planet, and the only thing that looks like a main quest to me is about tracking the Drukari dude and I don't see a way there. I'd conclude that I'm blind rather than think the game is designed this way, but a quick search showed a lot of people had the same problem.
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Mar 10, 2024 20:08
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This may very well be true. I remember a story Josh Sawyer, designer of Pillars of Eternity (and other games but this one is relevant here), told in one interview. He designed some areas in Icewind Dale 1 and some playtester told him this area is impossible. Josh sat down with the playtester and started playing. When he sturted buffing before an encounter the playtester asked what are you doing, and this was probably a transformative moment for Josh cause he remembered it many many years later. He also told a similar story about seeing how a normal person tries to create a character in Neverwinter Nights 2. I'm paraphrasing of course but you get the idea. It's similar to how the RTS genre was killed by focusing on people who play RTS games religiously. Owlcat developers seem passionate about what they do and this allows their games to punch above their weight in a typical eurojunk fashion. But a lot of the time it feels to me they deliberately make choice of doing something annoying because of some grand idea. I hate their games in moments like these but they definitely don't feel like games designed by committees cutting all the rough edges and destroying any artistic distinctions. Instead they feel like huge kitchensink mods with some polish. Someone at the team said "we should have tactical space battles" and no one questioned it. Then someone said "in addition to colony events that can be resolved from anywhere we should have colony events that require you to be there, even if these events are basically the same". And so on, their games have a lot of stuff in them even if it doesn't make any sense when you think about it more than a minute. Also the insight thing would be much better if its description or tutorial popup mentioned that you should maybe keep some in stash. I understand there are story events when you might want to be somewhere ASAP. I'm not sure how the game counts time for these, but these are moments when opening a new direct route and suffering a bad warp event might feel like an interesting and cool decision.
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Mar 14, 2024 12:07
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I know that feeling. In my case it's intensified by the fact I made Ireleth Bounty Hunter and Bounty Hunter abilities don't work for me for some reason, at all. And Ireleth is still extremely powerful and murders everybody with her sniper shots. It's double frustration: a mechanic is clearly not working but you also don't need it really on a higher diffculty setting. I'm hoping 1.2 will help with that so that the basic mechanics are functional.
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Mar 26, 2024 09:19
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Relevant Tangent posted:Just talk to the guy on your ship who lets you respec See, you are right and this is probably what I should have done. This game welcomes this approach, just like using the cheat mod to evade other design problems. But something in me is very screaming when I give up in front of a game like that. Seriously though my Pascal is an Assassin and I could probably do with whole team made of officers and assassins. My MC is Officer/Strategist and I struggle to find a good use of his abilities. They are kind of cool on paper but I rarely get the chance to do something noticeable with them. I guess Arch-Militant is very cool too.
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Apr 1, 2024 08:28
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Yeah, it works, it's effective, but it's not as cool what some other guys can do. Like I have 2 operatives in the party so that they can quickly put a lot of vulnerabilities on some enemy and then we use it to give the whole party defensive buffs for the rest of the combat. In any other game I'd be fine with officers and strategists, but here everyone else gets to do extremely cool stuff so the bar is high.
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Apr 1, 2024 18:48
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pentyne posted:They are more or less buffs/debuffs you can move 1 at a time, the various strategems can let you do some crazy stuff but if you are at the point you need to eke out every advantage of the system you're probably playing on the hardest custom difficulty possible. Yeah, it's clear the person you were answering to has a problem with the game balance in general. Owlcat games have always been criminally close to joining the list of RPGs I replay repeatedly, and in this game I am intrigued by higher difficulties requiring me to actually use all of the tools. Usually I am a kind of a lazy minmaxer who would try to play the game in the most effective way even if it's boring but here I enjoy the abilities of many classes and use them cause I like stacking modifiers.
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Apr 1, 2024 19:43
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Talkie Toaster posted:I have a mechanics question - when an ability lasts 'until the start of your next turn', or 'for one round', how does that interact with extra mini-turns? I'm pretty sure the moment you start controlling a character you get all the "on turn start" effects, which means all the "till the start of next turn" effects end. This is at the very least true for buffs, which can be quite annoying, cause some characters get "mini-turns" conditionally without your direct command.
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Apr 3, 2024 13:04
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It's a popular trope. Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams certainly had similar stories in their fantastical worlds. More recently Witcher 3 had a quest like this, but it concentrated more on absurd document requirements and less on the queue.
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Apr 7, 2024 13:41
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