YMMV / Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader

• Adorkable:
  • When trying to romance the Rogue Trader, Cassia humble-brags about her abilities in painting (which is crucial for her methods of navigating the Warp), as well as how well-read she is. The best gift to give her as part of your courtship is a very well-stocked library aboard the ship.
  • Heinrix, meanwhile, is *very* enthusiastic about regicide (the chess-derived board game, not the act of political violence). Also, during his romance, the Rogue Trader can lampshade the fact that him inviting her to dinner sounded like he was summoning her for an interrogation, which leaves the normally stoic Interrogator crestfallen at his awkwardness.
  • Yrliet has a tendency to come off as rather Tsundere when it comes to her Interspecies Romance with the Rogue Trader, as many of their conversations feature the Aeldari Outcast trying to keep her outward appearance as an Aloof Cold Sniper only for the Trader's acts of Unexpected Kindness to render her a flustered tongue-tied mess.
• Awesome Music: The Main Theme of the game.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
  • Judging by the forums, the primary meta employed by most players appears to be a combination of the below Officer stacking and Arch-Militant Game-Breaker strategies on Argenta with a heavy bolter, allowing her to clear most of the battlefield before turn one has even concluded. This build was explicitly patched out, by preventing characters from getting consecutive extra turns within a round, and changing how damage buffs work with burst weapon. The build is still potent but no longer "Argenta solos the entire game" strong.
  • Arch-Militant in general is the best second tier class for most party members. Abelard, Argenta, Heinrix and Ulfar all benefit greatly from it (and in the later case, Ulfar literally can't be anything else). If you want to make a combat-focused Rogue Trader (and thus aren't going for Officer as tier 1 class), then Arch-Militant is a popular pick for soldiers and warriors. The class comes with a huge damage output thanks to incredible accuracy and being a Critical Hit Class, incredible survivability due to being able to max out parry and dodge very easily, and flexibility since it allows characters to master both melee and ranged weapons. This can lead your average party on a mission to have anywhere from 3 to 4 arch-militants in it. This is especially true after a patch limited how much officer could stack extra turns.
• Fan-Disliked Explanation: While Yrliet is a popular character by virtue of being one of the two only xenos companions in the game and a rather nuanced romance option for the Player Character regardless of gender, there were many people who took umbrage with how her epilogue slides panned out. Specifically the epilogue where the Trader fails to secure a new spirit stone to replace Yrliet's shattered one and dies of natural causes after a scant few decades^noteWhich in itself is hard to believe when there are numerous Rejuvenat Treatments in the lore that a person of the Rogue Trader's station would have access to, which would increase their lifespan by around 4-5 centuries without resorting to mechanical augmentation., forcing Yrliet to depart the von Valancius Worlds in grief. Players have called out how preposterous it sounds that they couldn't obtain a single spirit stone in world states where they have a strong relationship with the Kassibilica Mission^noteA vast network of smugglers who specialize in xenos artifacts and technology., secured a lasting alliance with the surviving Aeldari in the Expanse^noteWhich includes two Farseers who are both indebted to the Rogue Trader and a Solitare they've essentially befriended, discovered a Crone World^noteA rare type of planet where spirit stones are harvested courtesy of Cassia's personal quest, and achieved the Golden Ending where they now have a Reality Warping Star God in their corner.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Cassia's Navigator abilities make her not just an immensely powerful psyker, but one that can use her powers without Veil Degredation, and can potentially even reverse it with certain upgrades. All her attacks also scale off of Willpower, which she can boost to ridiculous levels. She can take talents that allow Willpower to substitute for Toughness, Perception for Agility, and boost her Fellowship characteristic for every Navigator perk she takes (and almost all of the 20 or so available are useful). Given that she already has no need to invest in Strength, Weapon Skill, or Ballistic Skill, she's incredibly easy to min-max, with at least five obvious dumpstats. If all that wasn't enough, she's also an Officer, widely recognized as the strongest Archetype in the game.
  • As noted above, the Officer Archetype in general, due to it specializing in granting free turns that ignore the regular initiative order, in a combat system based on the player managing an action economy. It gets even more insane if you have your Officers become tacticians, because they can them give themselves bonus turns when other party members use heroic actions which they can then use to give other people bonus turns.
  • The Arch-Militant mid-game archetype gets a stackable boost to Ballistic and Weapon skill each time they change weapon. In this case "change weapon" means using any different attack from the last one. alternating single shot with burst fire from the same gun counts. Once they have 4 stacks of the buff, (and a passive lets them start combat with 2) they can use an ability to make the next attack free, not count against the attack limit and count as a "new" attack to gain another stack of the buff. Abuse officers' free turns, and you can make Argenta have a 200+ Ballistic Skill and have a weapon skill higher than Abelard despite spending literally no advancements to improve it. The buff also gives the arch-militant a flat damage buff, which on automatic weapons applies to each shot in a burst (until this was patched). Another skill lets them double their rate of fire, at a 25% damage penalty (which another talent removes). Give Argenta the highest rate of fire weapon you can find (say a heavy bolter with its high armor penetration), and your arch-militant will solo Chaos Space Marines in endless hails of bolts. Add on top of that the Soldier and Arch-Militant Archetype's numerous mechanics to improve crit chances (along with officer buffs to same), and you achieve some absurd damage with a character who gets several turns, fires several full bursts per round, and insane rate of fire and 100% critical hit rates, and you can finish several boss encounters before your party tanks even get a turn.
  • Abelard is the first companion the Rogue Trader gets in their party, and is set up to be a melee tank with good damage, a role he'll be great at early game. Whether you want to emphasise his speed and damage, or his ability to shrug off wounds, Abelard will remain consistently powerful. His role in battle syncs up really well with the Officer archetype as well, who can help pump up his stats and give him the extra AP he needs to finish off a tough enemy, charge into new foes, or do some quick healing.
  • A lot of the above has been fixed or nerfed in patch 1.1.28. Officers can no longer give bonus turns to the same ally several times in a row. Damage bonuses to burst fire no longer apply fully to each shot but rather as a percentage to each shot in the burst.
• It's Easy, So It Sucks!: In an amusing inversion of the combat encounters in previous Owlcat titles that were often criticized for being overtuned and artificially difficult, players' consensus regarding the difficulty of the game is that it is extremely easy to find builds that break combat in half without even really trying to min-max characters' progression. And once the initial hilarity of Cassia utterly destroying encounters by herself has worn off, it can make combat feel more like a chore than an actual challenge.
• Just Here for Godzilla: As in common in the classic CRPG and especially the Owlcat community, the romance options attract a significant amount of attention disproportionate to their actual level of in-game presence. Being a Warhammer 40K game, this is not surprising, considering both the novelty of such a storyline in the setting itself, as well as some of the unusual options. Lady Cassia and the Drukhari Marazhai seem to receive the most attention, though many fans are also begging Owlcat to finally fulfill the dream of making Argenta, the resident Sister of Battle romanceable.
• Memetic Badass: Abelard has quickly become this amongst fans of the game, thanks to him being very powerful from the get-go, and how impressive it is to have your Senechal potentially kill an actual traitor Space Marine in melee without suffering much damage himself and in one turn.
  • Cassia too, partially due to the contrast between her demeanor and absurd power level.
• Memetic Mutation: "Abelard, introduce me/do something" ^ExplanationThere's a Running Gag where, if Abelard is in your party, you can delegate your introductions to him, which he does with a level of ostentation befitting your status. This, combined with his general status both in story and gameplay as your Hypercompetent Sidekick, has led to players making memes where Abelard has all sorts of insane tasks delegated to him akin to Ramirez.
• Obvious Beta:
  • To a degree remarkable even by Owlcat standards; at the time of release, each chapter has increasingly severe bugs, to the point of the game becoming hopelessly broken for many players by Chapter Four. Issues include plot critical characters vanishing, event flags not triggering, and doors randomly failing to load in rooms, blocking further progress. Numerous abilities either don't do what their descriptions say, or are entirely nonfunctional. For the first couple months following the game's release, bugs made possible to soft-lock further progress if the player wasn't judicious in spending warp navigation points. Owlcat has been patching the game several times a week since it came out.
  • Aside from the many bugs, a growing consensus among players, reflected in user reviews, is that the quality of the game noticeably declines following the very polished prologue and first couple chapters, primarily due to content that appears to have been hastily truncated or cut entirely to make the release date. Many plot threads set up in the first half of the game are abandoned or given only a perfunctory conclusion, chapters become much shorter, and there's very little new exploration.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • The levelling system is often considered a bit overcomplicated, involving both a lot of levelups (a total of 60, which is about twice or three times as much as the average CPRG) and an equally enormous amount of options to choose from, many of which aren't necessarily all that impactful or clear in what they do. On top of all that, the UI is somewhat basic, and while it allows you to earmark talents for later on single characters, you cannot do this globally, nor create pre-sets or auto-level. Put it all together and you have a levelling system that often makes players go "Oh no, Here We Go Again!" on a level-up instead of feeling rewarded, because of the sheer amount of time you'll be spending sifting through options and agonizing over decisions.
  • The random chance of unsanctioned psykers, most notably Idira, to get negative effects whenever they use any of their powers, regardless of veil degradation level, is quite unpopular. This includes summoning demons and even instantly dying while also summoning a demon at the same time. Although the uncontrollable nature of the Warp is lore-accurate, the implementation differs from its source material, as the Warhammer 40K TTRPGs always give you the option of casting powers safely in exchange for using only half your Psy Rating for calculations. The fact that this was not implemented in the game, combined with how heavily the meta of Owlcat titles, including this one, usually centers on buffs, means players will experience this sooner or later, oftentimes as the result of casting a harmless power, frequently leading to players in frustration benching, firing or killing Idira ASAP, even if that means missing out on her storyline. Not helping are scripted fights where the veil degradation is already very high, meaning the unsanctioned psyker not only will likely cause it to remain high if they want to use their abilities, but they can add onto the already chaotic situation with their own chance of causing random stuff.
• Sequel Difficulty Drop: Previous Owlcat titles, particularly Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, were noted for having extremely difficult combat on "Core" difficulty, which is advertised as being the most accurate recreation of the tabletop rules. Rogue Trader is much easier with multiple easily found Game-Breaker strategies, which is especially amusing since Warhammer d100 is generally regarded as a much less-forgiving ruleset than the d20 System that Pathfinder relies on.
• That One Level:
  • The Rykad Minoris Spaceport. It is absolutely chockfull of enemies that come in massive packs at a time, all led by an Agitator who will always have the first turn, and use that turn to give every enemy in the encounter a permanent buff that permanently increases their damage and accuracy every time one of their comrades dies, and this buff can stack up to ten times. Whether or nor you manage to get through each encounter without at least one party member going down, if you even win at all, is pretty much a Luck-Based Mission. It doesn't help that the game sends you there without a full party unless the player makes mercenaries, as you either have to go right after getting out of the prologue, or recruit Cassia to have a moderately sized party, but the later results in the game marking it as the player "arriving too late", which comes across as a Morton's Fork situation.
  • Also the cursed Mechanicus ship - mostly because of cursed megaphones that keep buffing all enemies (including each other - there is a room that has four) with extra health, getting the party bogged down fighting enemies that just won't die.
  • Jae Heydari's "Rat Hunting" quest, where the Rogue Trader and their party are suddenly forced to evade enemy patrols and hidden traps in a labyrinthine Sewer Level to rescue Jae's men in captivity. The problem? The game has no dedicated stealth system. Instead, Players are expected to somehow maneuver past patrolling guards with 360 degree vision that are also obscured by Fog of War that can't be cleared unless your characters are practically right on top of them, making it next to impossible to keep track of their movements without blowing your cover and failing the mission.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Doubles as They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot. A common criticism of the game's story is that, while all the adversaries and enemy factions showing up in the plot (The Cult of the Final Dawn, the Drukharii, the Necrons, the traitor Kunrad, Uralon the Cruel, the Lord of Change, the Grand Inquisitor, potentially the rival Rogue Trader houses, and, depending on how you want to look at it, even Theodora and her legacy) are interesting and have a lot of potential, the fact that they are sandwiched into one narrative together and have to share screentime means they all end up feeling from underused to downright Giant Space Flea from Nowhere levels.

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