Warhammer games are funny things. The most popular are the battlefield simulators, for obvious reasons. The Dawn of War and Total War series transfer your favourite units from table to screen, and the likes of Mechanicus and Chaos Gate: Daemonhunters add turn-based tactics to great effect. It’s like the game you play at your local gaming store, but from the comfort of your sofa and/or gaming chair.
Then you’ve got your power fantasies. These are first- or third-person shooters like Space Marine, Darktide, Necromunda, and, to a lesser extent, Boltgun. These are more varied in their execution than their large-scale counterparts, but Space Marine has become a cult classic, Darktide has some redeeming features for proper 40k fans even if the live-service elements are incongruous and overbearing, and Boltgun is a retro blast from the past that is good, light fun.
None of these really appeal to me any more. I liked the details in Darktide but can’t add another live-service title to my life, especially not one so broken. I loved Chaos Gate: Daemonhunters but would like a bigger narrative pull. I spent hundreds of hours in Dawn of War as a child but am reluctant to spend so much of my precious free time in it nowadays. I’m the same for the tabletop game, too; I much prefer Games Workshop’s boxed games to the full-scale battles that took up entire teenage weekends, thousands of miniatures spread across my poor mum’s living room floor.
I don’t collect whole armies any more, much like I don’t play full-scale battles. I buy individual miniatures that look great or tickle my imagination, and paint them up for display. Maybe I’m old, but I spend far more time reading Warhammer novels than I do painting Ork Boyz. And it’s those stories, of plucky Inquisitors fighting the horrors of the Warp and oddball Ogryns forming bizarre friendships, that I miss on both the tabletop and the screen.
Enter Warhammer 40,000 Rogue Trader. A CRPG from genre veteran Owlcat Games, there’s as much reading in here as most Dan Abnett novels. There’s also customisation, backstories, and lore aplenty. Oh, and fighting too, if you want. I’ve barely scratched the surface of the game’s Closed Beta, but it’s already shaping up to be my favourite Warhammer experience in years.
I’ll start with the character creator, which I could write an article about in itself. It’s got all the usual options for face shapes, body sizes, and scars, with that added Warhammer flair of Imperial tattoos and augmetic enhancements. However, then it adds in a Warhammer-flavoured D&D backstory, which not only gives you a sense of the character you’re creating, but affects their stats and proficiencies as a Rogue Trader. This kind of thing isn’t uncommon in RPGs, but it’s the first time I’ve seen as fully a realised character creator in Warhammer. While not every roleplaying option is finished (this is a beta after all), the backgrounds and their effects on your character’s capabilities immediately immerse you in this universe. Whether you’re a Warhammer veteran or don’t know a Catachan from a Carnifex, these flavourful biographies are the perfect intro to Rogue Trader’s vision of this universe.
Rogue Trader has the detail of Darktide with the tactical gameplay of Daemonhunter. The grimy splendour of your spacecraft’s cathedral is 40k in a nutshell, and the grid and ability-based combat is tactically exhaustive. My trader isn’t too adept in this arena, and there are still plenty of options to support my more combat-oriented party members. Rogue Trader is like 40k D&D mod, with a thick layer of lore lathered on top. It’s more than a reskin, it’s more than a ‘how about CoD but Space Marines’ or ‘what if Total War but Orcs’. It’s Warhammer to its core, and feels like a more authentic part of this world because of that.
Warhammer games too often forget that many of us aren’t here for the fighting, we’re here for the setting, but Rogue Trader nails this along with the gameplay. It’s more Disco Elysium than Halo Infinite (albeit not a fraction as radical or well-written), and in many ways it doesn’t feel like a Warhammer game. I’m writing my own 40k novel with every dialogue choice. I’m building my own 40k solar system with every trading decision. I’m living out my 40k dreams.