Rogue Trader - About Player Choice

The Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader devs explain why they’re limiting player choice on The Gamer:

Between Owlcat Games’ CRPG heritage and Games Workshop’s deep, sci-fi lore, Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader is a match made in heaven

Owlcat Games always wanted to make a Warhammer video game. In fact, Owlcat approached Games Workshop with an idea specifically for a Rogue Trader video game right off the bat, and the two companies immediately hit it off. Owlcat devs are gamers, whether that be video, board, or tabletop, and many of them have played Warhammer for decades. As it turns out, many Games Workshop employees were big fans of Owlcat’s games like Pathfinder.

CRPGs are probably the closest genre of video game to tabletop battles, offering freedom to explore their worlds in almost any imaginable way. And after sharing their mutual appreciation for each other’s work, Owlcat and Games Workshop put their collective heads together and came up with the premise for Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader.

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Everything in Rogue Trader is used to make it more immersive. Perspectives of regular people make its world feel far more grounded than, say, the superhuman feats of Captain Titus in Space Marine 2, and that immersion makes players care about the decisions they make. Executive producer Anatoly Shestov explains that to fully immerse players, and to keep the game accurate to Games Workshop’s extensive lore, Owlcat often needed to restrict players, even when it seems counterintuitive to the gameplay of a CRPG.

“People shouldn’t go naked in Warhammer,” Shestov explains. “It’s not how the setting works […] so we have outfits that can’t be changed. If you’re picking an Adeptus Ministorum character, you will always have the base of the outfit, and some parts of that outfit will always be visible, whichever equipment you wear.

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Thanks Couchpotato!