A question: has Owlcat Games considered not releasing a game in a buggy and unbalanced state? Just over a year ago, the studio issued one of the biggest patches I’d ever seen for its incredibly ambitious and equally wonky CRPG Warhammer 40k: Rogue Trader. Now, another voluminous changelog is upon us, this time directed at Rogue Trader’s recently released expansion: Lex Imperialis.
While the changes in update 1.4.1 aren’t quite so drastic that Owlcat feels obliged to give you a free shot at respeccing your character—as was the case in February last year—they still go way beyond minor fixes and tweaks. Primarily, the update makes the expansion’s new party character—the Arbites officer Solomorne Anthar—appear much earlier in the game than before.
You can now start his recruitment mission at the outset of Act II, while players already beyond that point will be able to pursue Anthar and his accompanying Cyber Mastiff after a couple of warp jumps.
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This isn’t the only feature added by the DLC which the patch brings forward. The Heartless, a new escort ship for your Rogue Trader’s fleet, can also join up with you from Act II onwards. This apparently alters the trajectory of the story slightly, but Owlcat has smoothed this over with some “narrative adjustments”.
Continuing on the subject of narrative, the update gives Solomorne extra lines of dialogue, including the ability to voice his opinions when your Rogue Trader decides the fate of colonies he, uh, invests in. Meanwhile, dialogues relating to characters and locations introduced in the expansion have been improved and adjusted more broadly.
The update also makes numerous mechanical tweaks to Rogue Trader. These are way too numerous and nitty-gritty to go into in great detail, but it’s worth highlighting the changes directed toward Anthar’s cyber mastiff. The mastiff’s ‘Terror Battle’ mode now stacks up to 100 times, while its regeneration ability has been adjusted to function through several additional effects, such as warp burning.
Elsewhere, an array of in-game items have been tweaked, such as the vindicator flamer, which has an increased AoE attack pattern size for more widespread incineration. There are also numerous UI and localisation fixes, plus a few small adjustments to cooperative play. For example, Rogue Trader now stops cooperative players from touching one another’s familiars, which certainly sounds like something the Omnissiah would frown upon.
Hopefully, these changes will make the Lex Imperialis DLC a smoother ride for players, and perhaps raise it above its current ‘Mixed’ rating on Steam. Though it would be preferable if Owlcat could release games in this state from the outset. While I understand games like this are enormously complicated, and Owlcat tends to punch above its weight when making RPGs, the studio also isn’t exactly new to this, and it’s a shame the fundamental quality of its games is so often clouded by being released in a less-than-ideal state.
