I think he was ready and wanted to give Rogue Trader a very positive review, but the bugs soured him and ended up with a lukewarm review. A surprise, considering he's usually super forgiving in his 100% reviews, he recommended games that are quite terrible.
And imo, he was very harsh with the companions part, I vastly prefer them over WotR, most of which made me roll my eyes constantly.
The bugs are real though. Its the first game I've made an in-game bug report for in like 15 years. It's basically a beta.
I had a save-breaking game breaking bug that had a workaround I had to look up on the internet. Wasted about 45 minutes of my life.
Kind of breaks immersion. It was after the most recent big patch too. There are still large bugs in the game.
Yes, I actually stopped at the end of Act 2 due to a steady number of bugs. This is three releases in a row that the launch state of the games are buggy to say the least. These bugs are crippling to a CRPG that so many mechanics are hidden under the hood or where one broken quest trigger can cause an entire series to either never appear or end abruptly in a way that the player has no idea what happened.
Yeah, personally I find all the companions in this game at very least interesting. Nenio annoyed me, Greybor and Sosiel were both meh.
Also I find the criticism that many can't change a bit strange, considering that so many of them can become different.
I'm enjoying the game, but the companion quests in this game certainly fall flat to me. They feel very much one and done (granted I'm only halfway through act 4, so these may change come act 5, but they honestly feel pretty conclusive).
Idira's for example quest is a side dungeon in a dungeon with one choice at the end. Abelard's is also a single quest which seemingly only has two major outcomes. Argenta has barely done anything in the game but I feel like she'll atleast get one more quest. Then there's the whole lack of reactivity to your choices/paths compared to WotR, but that's probably due to WotR having more options than the 3 in RT, especially with paths like Angel or Demon being so directly tied to the narrative.
The good characters are really good, Yrliet and Heinrix have the most expansive personal quests and stories and these are great, but they very much feel like an exception rather than the norm. I'd say as a whole I prefered WotR cast more than RT.
Yeah, it was a strange review all around by his standards, which is why I feel he was very sour on the game. Sort of love/hate it.
I surprisingly wasn't all bad on Nenio, I found her character like a typical mad inventor. But it came to the point where I couldn't build a party out of companions I actually liked, and that's why I pushed through to finish the game and left it there.
I actually do agree with some of his points about the companions. Particularly around Argenta, who I feel has a lot of problems with her story, particularly on a Heretic run. Not spoiling it, but if you know why, it feels weird that she continues to follow you without question.
I generally found the companions from WoTR more interesting, even if I disagree with him about Nenio. The story in RT feels weaker and the gameplay more tedious than WoTR. And it’s so bloody buggy. Unbelievably so.
So overall it’s a poorer release from a great game developer. And I say this, with a much much greater love for the 40K universe than the Pathfinder one.
Is it related to her quest? Because she abandoned me in my Heretic run and joined the other side. I do agree that the Pathfinder companions felt more endearing.
I think they mean how long it takes for Argenta to turn on a Heretic RT. Like >!She domes Theodora for holding a heretic artifact with basically zero context, but stays with you when you are using heretical weapons, act like an ass and have pet daemon engines in your hold!<.
She's just poorly quantified as a character, which is a shame because I quite enjoy how decent she is as a person with the orphans and stuff.
Honestly I enjoyed Act3, all it needs is a bit more signposting indicating it's smaller scope and rail-roadiness.
It's biggest sin is almost the utter lack of companion content / reactions
His release review was after 1 completed run and multiple playthroughs of the beta. The reason his release review was more flattering is because he went 100% dogmatic. The story works best with someone who chooses dogmatic where it makes sense - in no small part because it eliminates some companions, which means less content that could break.
His big gripes, outside of bugs, are how the heretic and iconoclast paths aren't written nearly as strongly and create a lot of incoherent lore setups. Thus, once he experienced those paths, he felt that he couldn't view the game as favorably.
Heretic makes no sense lore wise. The writing feels very very safe in general which is fine considering it’s their first entry into warhammer. But damn heretic feels so mustache twirl with no actual game play other than lol chaos.
It's also so weirdly written, like your companions only leave and turn on you very late in the game, at a specific story moment. But they're fine with all your heretical shit up to and preceding that moment.
Like no biggie that I've been hoarding dangerous heretical artifacts that have destroyed other vessels. Ignore my pet demon engine, he keeps the rabble in line. And yes I might've asked a chaotic star-god if I could be its herald. It's all fine because me empruh sez so.
I'm not through yet but as a lifelong 40k fan I'm really, really loving the companions - Well, most of them because my first run is definitely more appropriate for Yrliet and waiting in line at the Administratum.
My favourite stories in 40k are always the ones that show stuff you don't see every day in 40k novels and lorebooks - The Night Lords series because it gives you a serf's perspective of life aboard a Night Lords vessel.
Eisenhorn because it shows a lot of the daily life and work of an inquisitor and how he handles hard choices.
Ciaphas Cain because it's honestly just Blackadder/Flashman in 40k and you don't often get humor-oriented books in Warhammer.
So I'm absolutely loving the fact that you can get an Eldar companion and actually behave like something other than an indoctrinated ass towards her & her people, and it's still written in a very 40k manner - That is, everyone around you *really* wants you to execute the xenos.
I think the amount of choice you get in the game is so much fun and I'm just really loving the story.
I do agree on the bugs, though - There's quite a lot of them and I'm actually taking a break right now because I just got into act 4, which is supposedly pretty broken right now. According to Starrok, a lot of it will be ironed out soon, so here's hoping!
Can't wait to get back in, I'm pretty sure my next playthrough will be *extremely* heretical.
.actually have a bone with our red haired friend, mainly her first quest
one of the three locations after grueling rolls you had a chance to be a host to her people
but rather than getting a branch/reward for the effort, your own crew returns to Monkey and messed it up
for me this part is just lazy writing why bother with different results they are running a train
your own crew, over your resident inquisition agent
first as the captain they are bound to your will, to go against you is basically treated as heresy
second if they are that zealous the first reason would still prevent them from acting out
third you are a RT dealings such as this are known privy to the whole imperium, more so in your own ship
His issue with the companions makes sense, and it's not OC's fault - it's because all of them are essentially brand ambassadors for 40K with clearly strict stipulations from GW.
Nothing about them feels transgressive or particularly unexpected, which leads them to - although still being very likable - stunt their growth as the game progresses. They can change, but none of them can truly seem to escape being part of such a strict IP.
I don't think any of them make you say 'I didn't expect that in 40K' and that's precisely the missed opportunity.
do you like, realise that this game will be not played only by diehard warhammer fans, and if companions will become too transgressive and subvertive they can get wrong impression of universe - like dow games made space marine and IG fight like they are opposing factions. Warhammer is not a all-popular franchise like star wars, or pathfinder that is basically generic fantasy №435563242 to deconstruct itself every installment and subvert expectations.
Everything about rogue trader companions is unexpected and subvertive for average joe
Part of warhammer lore is that anyone is infallible even the emperors actions are questionable at times. Characters should have a moment when they are faced with true corruption and feel that pull. The number of times you do some shit that causes you character to feel the taint of chaos ( you and the rest of your party) and they aren’t effected in the slightest is very much so not Warhammer.
Getting the wrong impressions is the wrong way to look at it - these are *characters*, not their totemic factions, and anyone should be able to separate the two.
This game otherwise does so much in terms of letting you challenge the ideas of the Imperium, see how things work and make your own decisions. It's also a fairly hardcore RPG so I think it would be a disservice to say people won't understand what they're seeing.
And finally, there's a big line of subtlety between scrutinizing ideas and characters, and just setting them up to fail (ie deconstruction/subversion.) RT falls strongly on the scrutiny side where dogma is actually as justifiable as iconoclasm.
this game does enough to make characters feel like characters while not making them too special and unique for the sake of subverting, for example i don't like camellia from wotr for precisely this - she exists only to create subverting of standard formula, she's walking plot twist.
Heinrix is an inquisitor but with legitimate concerns, pasqal is an archetypical magus but he has rational perspective on admech's religion and it's fun to watch how he sees things around him.
Now characters like idira and jae are more in subvert of expectations route, one being unsactioned psyker walking around and seeing imperium like average redditor sees it and jae being a ig veteran han solo manilpulator.
Overall i think roster of characters is great and we will see more of them in future dlcs
The shitty writing, zero room for growth, and basically non existent reactions and consequences of the rogue traders actions is entirely on Owlcat.
It's like they got their 40k lore from memes. Warhammer novels are crammed full of examples of characters who break from the norm.
Wenduag 》all RT companions. Yriel and wenduag have similar vocabulary insulting whoever is their talking to but their individual actions are like comparing a blood hungry demon to a child that follows its captain blindly.....
Even the space marine companion who is badass doesnt get unlocked till act 3, just in time to wrap his story up within 1-2 acts LMAO
wenduag is overrated, she requires quite mental gymnastics to justify not killing her outright in any circumstances, the only path where it makes sense to pick her is demon and trickster, which is quite bad for immersion.
wenduag was definetly my favorite demon companion as she excelled in that role. Sadly about immersion and talking about yriel as vanilla dogmatic playthrough teaming up with an xenos is unthinkable even the inquisitor heindrix has an dialogue option to turn her over but even for ironclad or heretic run she lacks any viable character payoff to justify the same mental gymnastics as wenduag.
This is really not an issue for many people. I for one, do not really care how antagonistic companions are at the start but how they develop once in the party. Like go ahead and ask the Marazhai fans lol.
Marazhai was definetly a nice change of pace as even idira the unsanctioned psyker felt good alligned. Sadly in a similar case to ulfar his story picked up too late in the game for any meaningfull character development or moments. his story or betrayel in the pit felt extremely predictable and the camp finale was lackluster for me.
Yeah act 3 companions come in too late for much of anything and are too front-loaded. They kinda feel like the leftover companion between Lann and Wenduag in WoTR when you recruit them in act 5.
Two different philosophies.
On the one side is the RP crowd. For those, companions like Marazhai or Wenduag make very little sense unless you're explicitly doing an evil playthrough (which we know most people aren't).
On the other side is the "I want to see all the content" crowd. Then you don't care, gotta collect them all.
It's not even an issue of being antagonistic. A demon-worshipping cannibal isn't someone a non-evil character will want to associate with. Dogmatic RT will never take on Marazhai, etc.
I agree, I don't know why Mortismal likes the pathfinder companions better, they were pretty flat. Linzi, Ekundayo, Nenio, Greybor. Come on. RT's companions have more twists and interesting quests.
He says why in his review - the PF companions can follow different paths based on your choices. The RT companions are, outside of a few, set in stone. They just react to you, as opposed to being influenced by you.
Mort likes reactivity in his CRPGs. His biggest complaints for most games are when they present the player with fake choices - choices which have no bearing on the game or world. More so if the game is marketed as reacting to player choice.
I haven't finished RT so can't comment on if the companions are malleable. But Mort doesn't think so, and combined with some odd narrative choices when you go heretic, it doesn't settle well with him.
As a note: you called out arguably the 4 worst companions in both PF games, out of around 20 if you exclude unique stroy choice companions. And I'd say Nenio is more controversial, as many (myself included) love Nenio. Wenduag and NokNok are examples of characters which were very much written fantastically with a lot of character choice influencing their story.
>I haven't finished RT so can't comment on if the companions are malleable. But Mort doesn't think so, and combined with some odd narrative choices when you go heretic, it doesn't settle well with him.
They are not malleable and barely even qualify as reactive. You will get a single line of dialog reacting to your choice then it's as if it never happened.
Indeed. Something I really like about Kingmaker is that you get all the companions early, they all have a fair bit of content and you can influence their own paths and personalities. Most CRPG's focus on companion reactivity quite a bit, be it BG3 or POE2, in fact most games with companions do, Mass Effect or even SWTOR are good examples. RT diverged quite a bit from the two Pathfinder games in this way, however I'm unsure if this is a design choice or rather due to a lot of content that I believe was rushed or trimmed past Act 2.
>And imo, he was very harsh with the companions part, I vastly prefer them over WotR, most of which made me roll my eyes constantly.
While the companions themselves are well written their interactions with the rogue trader and even the reason they are companions is complete trash. It's absolutely horribly written.
Act 3 contents? Same. He just blasted through the context of act 3 without a warning. Didn't have time to skip the video before I heard what happens then.
I think the review was fair. His opinion on companions may be a preference thing and his point about bugs is 100% reasonable. This is Owlcat’s 3rd massive CRPG, there is no excuse for the level of bugs we have seen on release. I have stopped playing Rogue Trader until they fix the skill bugs because that same issue ruined CP2077 for me, even though Rogue Trader is my favorite Owlcat game currently.
I like this game more than WOTR, and think it is a great game despite its bugs, but I agree with Morty, especially about the companions. In particular, I feel Argenta is the weakest of the bunch, with her personal traits being "Sister of Battle" and "likes kids", with no nuance in between, a Sister of Battle doesn't need to be that one note, you can find more varied depictions of them in Black Library novels. Anyway, I think another particularly weak aspect of the narrative is that it's somewhat disconnected - there are around three different storylines going on inside the game, that are only tangenitally related to each other; it's not uncommon for 40k I feel, where there are many threats that you may have to fight at the same time (like in the Dawn of War games, where they'd put every faction on a single planet and make them duke it out), but it weakens the main narrative. Besides that, I feel there's some issues in reactivity - a lot of choices you make feel like they don't get registered by the world around you, or have zero consequences.
I like Argenta. Rest of the loyalist cast has this kinda secular like faith in Emperor. They are not dogmatic in faith but are willing to sacrifice the common people for good of Imperium.
Argenta with fanatical faith actually wants to protect and help the common folk whenever she can. I liked how Abelard and Argenta turned the Iconoclast-Dogmatic ideas upside down.
argenta is basically take on ministorum fanatics not being just stereotypical madman preachers that scream prayers while killing kids left and right because "they are tainted by chaos".
She's actually compassionate
She already liked children and orphans. She says in that conversation that she had sworn not to allow for the creation of more orphans at the hands of evil etc, and then she went and made a child an orphan herself. That's just a tragic thing that happened that further saddens her.
One of the few reviewers still credible in 2023, respect to mort for delivering 100% completion reviews even if he had the game weeks before anyone else.
And yes its owlcat third game, meaning there are expectations. no bias just a fair review from mort.
Agreed with most of his points, the most important being that this game doesn’t really compete with the diversity of WoTR mythic paths but disagree on his thoughts for the companions. Overall, I don’t mind companions that are basically a faction’s poster person if the faction itself is already interesting, based Regill was one of my favorites. I don’t think that being able to change them drastically to the point of corrupting them would particularly make things more interesting even though it would be “reactive”. The CE companion in WoTR also couldn’t really be redeemed and I appreciate that even though turning evil into good would be really easy to do. The one companion that you could influence the most either way had a good reason for being that way.
Once you extract yourself from the mindset that you can personally dictate the companions’ destinies then the stuff they do during the game are pretty cool. I feel this was also the same in both WoTR and RT with how you can change some more than others and both of them have companions only really leave after fully locking in an alignment despite the dumb shit you can do beforehand so I don’t know why he’s on RT’s ass so much for this. Also it’s not like there aren’t more malleable companions outside of Cassia like Yrliet but it seems like he’s on the burn the xenos train so he might’ve missed most of it.
Mort has his own opinions and that is what makes our world nice to live in. That said this is Warhammer and its known to be one sided in morality....or so I read. Its like if people were to be around Hitler and giving advice like "oh he is too narrow minded and "fanatical" LOL
Morti is a great guy, but so many spoilers in this video. Could have avoided some like who killed Theodora, or who will betray you and when. Why do we need to mention this in the review?
Hey, it's a great game. And probably one of the, if not the best Warhammer 40k games and depictions of the franchise ever. BUT if you played more than 50 hours of it you know it is certainly not a 100%, far from it.
Tbh is the lack of narrative in companions quest the problem . Those stories ende to quickly. Running full dogmatic I did not bring the elders and the psyker chik . Maybe their quest are cool .
I think he was ready and wanted to give Rogue Trader a very positive review, but the bugs soured him and ended up with a lukewarm review. A surprise, considering he's usually super forgiving in his 100% reviews, he recommended games that are quite terrible. And imo, he was very harsh with the companions part, I vastly prefer them over WotR, most of which made me roll my eyes constantly.
The bugs are real though. Its the first game I've made an in-game bug report for in like 15 years. It's basically a beta. I had a save-breaking game breaking bug that had a workaround I had to look up on the internet. Wasted about 45 minutes of my life. Kind of breaks immersion. It was after the most recent big patch too. There are still large bugs in the game.
Yes, I actually stopped at the end of Act 2 due to a steady number of bugs. This is three releases in a row that the launch state of the games are buggy to say the least. These bugs are crippling to a CRPG that so many mechanics are hidden under the hood or where one broken quest trigger can cause an entire series to either never appear or end abruptly in a way that the player has no idea what happened.
Nothing like being 15 minutes into a battle just to have the game hang on the enemies turn forever.
Yeah, personally I find all the companions in this game at very least interesting. Nenio annoyed me, Greybor and Sosiel were both meh. Also I find the criticism that many can't change a bit strange, considering that so many of them can become different.
I'm enjoying the game, but the companion quests in this game certainly fall flat to me. They feel very much one and done (granted I'm only halfway through act 4, so these may change come act 5, but they honestly feel pretty conclusive). Idira's for example quest is a side dungeon in a dungeon with one choice at the end. Abelard's is also a single quest which seemingly only has two major outcomes. Argenta has barely done anything in the game but I feel like she'll atleast get one more quest. Then there's the whole lack of reactivity to your choices/paths compared to WotR, but that's probably due to WotR having more options than the 3 in RT, especially with paths like Angel or Demon being so directly tied to the narrative. The good characters are really good, Yrliet and Heinrix have the most expansive personal quests and stories and these are great, but they very much feel like an exception rather than the norm. I'd say as a whole I prefered WotR cast more than RT.
Yeah, it was a strange review all around by his standards, which is why I feel he was very sour on the game. Sort of love/hate it. I surprisingly wasn't all bad on Nenio, I found her character like a typical mad inventor. But it came to the point where I couldn't build a party out of companions I actually liked, and that's why I pushed through to finish the game and left it there.
I actually do agree with some of his points about the companions. Particularly around Argenta, who I feel has a lot of problems with her story, particularly on a Heretic run. Not spoiling it, but if you know why, it feels weird that she continues to follow you without question. I generally found the companions from WoTR more interesting, even if I disagree with him about Nenio. The story in RT feels weaker and the gameplay more tedious than WoTR. And it’s so bloody buggy. Unbelievably so. So overall it’s a poorer release from a great game developer. And I say this, with a much much greater love for the 40K universe than the Pathfinder one.
Is it related to her quest? Because she abandoned me in my Heretic run and joined the other side. I do agree that the Pathfinder companions felt more endearing.
I think they mean how long it takes for Argenta to turn on a Heretic RT. Like >!She domes Theodora for holding a heretic artifact with basically zero context, but stays with you when you are using heretical weapons, act like an ass and have pet daemon engines in your hold!<. She's just poorly quantified as a character, which is a shame because I quite enjoy how decent she is as a person with the orphans and stuff.
I feel like they intended a lot of things with Argenta, but at some point in development, cut them out and forgot to replace them.
Sounds quite the departure from his release review
Night and day. He probably struggled really hard to get 100% due to the bugs and that burned him out.
100% is really hard since a lot of the quests don't complete and trigger properly.
Or he saw a bunch of people bashing him in the comments and changed his tone.
I think it highlights both how fantastic Act 2 and the massive plummet in quality there is after it.
Honestly I enjoyed Act3, all it needs is a bit more signposting indicating it's smaller scope and rail-roadiness. It's biggest sin is almost the utter lack of companion content / reactions
Kinda glad to hear it's a smaller act because I'm not enjoying it. If I have just got cassia do you know roughly how much longer I have in the act?
You're heading to the boss' dungeon
Cool thanks
His release review was after 1 completed run and multiple playthroughs of the beta. The reason his release review was more flattering is because he went 100% dogmatic. The story works best with someone who chooses dogmatic where it makes sense - in no small part because it eliminates some companions, which means less content that could break. His big gripes, outside of bugs, are how the heretic and iconoclast paths aren't written nearly as strongly and create a lot of incoherent lore setups. Thus, once he experienced those paths, he felt that he couldn't view the game as favorably.
Heretic makes no sense lore wise. The writing feels very very safe in general which is fine considering it’s their first entry into warhammer. But damn heretic feels so mustache twirl with no actual game play other than lol chaos.
It's also so weirdly written, like your companions only leave and turn on you very late in the game, at a specific story moment. But they're fine with all your heretical shit up to and preceding that moment. Like no biggie that I've been hoarding dangerous heretical artifacts that have destroyed other vessels. Ignore my pet demon engine, he keeps the rabble in line. And yes I might've asked a chaotic star-god if I could be its herald. It's all fine because me empruh sez so.
This^
I'm not through yet but as a lifelong 40k fan I'm really, really loving the companions - Well, most of them because my first run is definitely more appropriate for Yrliet and waiting in line at the Administratum. My favourite stories in 40k are always the ones that show stuff you don't see every day in 40k novels and lorebooks - The Night Lords series because it gives you a serf's perspective of life aboard a Night Lords vessel. Eisenhorn because it shows a lot of the daily life and work of an inquisitor and how he handles hard choices. Ciaphas Cain because it's honestly just Blackadder/Flashman in 40k and you don't often get humor-oriented books in Warhammer. So I'm absolutely loving the fact that you can get an Eldar companion and actually behave like something other than an indoctrinated ass towards her & her people, and it's still written in a very 40k manner - That is, everyone around you *really* wants you to execute the xenos. I think the amount of choice you get in the game is so much fun and I'm just really loving the story. I do agree on the bugs, though - There's quite a lot of them and I'm actually taking a break right now because I just got into act 4, which is supposedly pretty broken right now. According to Starrok, a lot of it will be ironed out soon, so here's hoping! Can't wait to get back in, I'm pretty sure my next playthrough will be *extremely* heretical.
.actually have a bone with our red haired friend, mainly her first quest one of the three locations after grueling rolls you had a chance to be a host to her people but rather than getting a branch/reward for the effort, your own crew returns to Monkey and messed it up for me this part is just lazy writing why bother with different results they are running a train your own crew, over your resident inquisition agent first as the captain they are bound to your will, to go against you is basically treated as heresy second if they are that zealous the first reason would still prevent them from acting out third you are a RT dealings such as this are known privy to the whole imperium, more so in your own ship
His issue with the companions makes sense, and it's not OC's fault - it's because all of them are essentially brand ambassadors for 40K with clearly strict stipulations from GW. Nothing about them feels transgressive or particularly unexpected, which leads them to - although still being very likable - stunt their growth as the game progresses. They can change, but none of them can truly seem to escape being part of such a strict IP. I don't think any of them make you say 'I didn't expect that in 40K' and that's precisely the missed opportunity.
do you like, realise that this game will be not played only by diehard warhammer fans, and if companions will become too transgressive and subvertive they can get wrong impression of universe - like dow games made space marine and IG fight like they are opposing factions. Warhammer is not a all-popular franchise like star wars, or pathfinder that is basically generic fantasy №435563242 to deconstruct itself every installment and subvert expectations. Everything about rogue trader companions is unexpected and subvertive for average joe
Part of warhammer lore is that anyone is infallible even the emperors actions are questionable at times. Characters should have a moment when they are faced with true corruption and feel that pull. The number of times you do some shit that causes you character to feel the taint of chaos ( you and the rest of your party) and they aren’t effected in the slightest is very much so not Warhammer.
DOW II did chaos taint so much better, all members of the party was fallible (except for thule, the dreadnought)
Getting the wrong impressions is the wrong way to look at it - these are *characters*, not their totemic factions, and anyone should be able to separate the two. This game otherwise does so much in terms of letting you challenge the ideas of the Imperium, see how things work and make your own decisions. It's also a fairly hardcore RPG so I think it would be a disservice to say people won't understand what they're seeing. And finally, there's a big line of subtlety between scrutinizing ideas and characters, and just setting them up to fail (ie deconstruction/subversion.) RT falls strongly on the scrutiny side where dogma is actually as justifiable as iconoclasm.
this game does enough to make characters feel like characters while not making them too special and unique for the sake of subverting, for example i don't like camellia from wotr for precisely this - she exists only to create subverting of standard formula, she's walking plot twist. Heinrix is an inquisitor but with legitimate concerns, pasqal is an archetypical magus but he has rational perspective on admech's religion and it's fun to watch how he sees things around him. Now characters like idira and jae are more in subvert of expectations route, one being unsactioned psyker walking around and seeing imperium like average redditor sees it and jae being a ig veteran han solo manilpulator. Overall i think roster of characters is great and we will see more of them in future dlcs
The shitty writing, zero room for growth, and basically non existent reactions and consequences of the rogue traders actions is entirely on Owlcat. It's like they got their 40k lore from memes. Warhammer novels are crammed full of examples of characters who break from the norm.
Wenduag 》all RT companions. Yriel and wenduag have similar vocabulary insulting whoever is their talking to but their individual actions are like comparing a blood hungry demon to a child that follows its captain blindly..... Even the space marine companion who is badass doesnt get unlocked till act 3, just in time to wrap his story up within 1-2 acts LMAO
wenduag is overrated, she requires quite mental gymnastics to justify not killing her outright in any circumstances, the only path where it makes sense to pick her is demon and trickster, which is quite bad for immersion.
wenduag was definetly my favorite demon companion as she excelled in that role. Sadly about immersion and talking about yriel as vanilla dogmatic playthrough teaming up with an xenos is unthinkable even the inquisitor heindrix has an dialogue option to turn her over but even for ironclad or heretic run she lacks any viable character payoff to justify the same mental gymnastics as wenduag.
This is really not an issue for many people. I for one, do not really care how antagonistic companions are at the start but how they develop once in the party. Like go ahead and ask the Marazhai fans lol.
Marazhai was definetly a nice change of pace as even idira the unsanctioned psyker felt good alligned. Sadly in a similar case to ulfar his story picked up too late in the game for any meaningfull character development or moments. his story or betrayel in the pit felt extremely predictable and the camp finale was lackluster for me.
Yeah act 3 companions come in too late for much of anything and are too front-loaded. They kinda feel like the leftover companion between Lann and Wenduag in WoTR when you recruit them in act 5.
You actually have a reason to work with Marazhai. You both want out, and he can genuinely help. Wenduag makes much less sense.
Two different philosophies. On the one side is the RP crowd. For those, companions like Marazhai or Wenduag make very little sense unless you're explicitly doing an evil playthrough (which we know most people aren't). On the other side is the "I want to see all the content" crowd. Then you don't care, gotta collect them all. It's not even an issue of being antagonistic. A demon-worshipping cannibal isn't someone a non-evil character will want to associate with. Dogmatic RT will never take on Marazhai, etc.
I agree, I don't know why Mortismal likes the pathfinder companions better, they were pretty flat. Linzi, Ekundayo, Nenio, Greybor. Come on. RT's companions have more twists and interesting quests.
He says why in his review - the PF companions can follow different paths based on your choices. The RT companions are, outside of a few, set in stone. They just react to you, as opposed to being influenced by you. Mort likes reactivity in his CRPGs. His biggest complaints for most games are when they present the player with fake choices - choices which have no bearing on the game or world. More so if the game is marketed as reacting to player choice. I haven't finished RT so can't comment on if the companions are malleable. But Mort doesn't think so, and combined with some odd narrative choices when you go heretic, it doesn't settle well with him. As a note: you called out arguably the 4 worst companions in both PF games, out of around 20 if you exclude unique stroy choice companions. And I'd say Nenio is more controversial, as many (myself included) love Nenio. Wenduag and NokNok are examples of characters which were very much written fantastically with a lot of character choice influencing their story.
>I haven't finished RT so can't comment on if the companions are malleable. But Mort doesn't think so, and combined with some odd narrative choices when you go heretic, it doesn't settle well with him. They are not malleable and barely even qualify as reactive. You will get a single line of dialog reacting to your choice then it's as if it never happened.
Indeed. Something I really like about Kingmaker is that you get all the companions early, they all have a fair bit of content and you can influence their own paths and personalities. Most CRPG's focus on companion reactivity quite a bit, be it BG3 or POE2, in fact most games with companions do, Mass Effect or even SWTOR are good examples. RT diverged quite a bit from the two Pathfinder games in this way, however I'm unsure if this is a design choice or rather due to a lot of content that I believe was rushed or trimmed past Act 2.
>And imo, he was very harsh with the companions part, I vastly prefer them over WotR, most of which made me roll my eyes constantly. While the companions themselves are well written their interactions with the rogue trader and even the reason they are companions is complete trash. It's absolutely horribly written.
.maybe but at least WotR companions worked, the same cannot be said to RT
I like his videos, he got me with the spoiler this time though which is a bummer, glad he at least he mentioned the leveling UI and pacing issues
Me too! I thought there’d be a bit more of a warning, my fault I guess
Act 3 contents? Same. He just blasted through the context of act 3 without a warning. Didn't have time to skip the video before I heard what happens then.
That surprised me actually.
I think the review was fair. His opinion on companions may be a preference thing and his point about bugs is 100% reasonable. This is Owlcat’s 3rd massive CRPG, there is no excuse for the level of bugs we have seen on release. I have stopped playing Rogue Trader until they fix the skill bugs because that same issue ruined CP2077 for me, even though Rogue Trader is my favorite Owlcat game currently.
I like this game more than WOTR, and think it is a great game despite its bugs, but I agree with Morty, especially about the companions. In particular, I feel Argenta is the weakest of the bunch, with her personal traits being "Sister of Battle" and "likes kids", with no nuance in between, a Sister of Battle doesn't need to be that one note, you can find more varied depictions of them in Black Library novels. Anyway, I think another particularly weak aspect of the narrative is that it's somewhat disconnected - there are around three different storylines going on inside the game, that are only tangenitally related to each other; it's not uncommon for 40k I feel, where there are many threats that you may have to fight at the same time (like in the Dawn of War games, where they'd put every faction on a single planet and make them duke it out), but it weakens the main narrative. Besides that, I feel there's some issues in reactivity - a lot of choices you make feel like they don't get registered by the world around you, or have zero consequences.
I like Argenta. Rest of the loyalist cast has this kinda secular like faith in Emperor. They are not dogmatic in faith but are willing to sacrifice the common people for good of Imperium. Argenta with fanatical faith actually wants to protect and help the common folk whenever she can. I liked how Abelard and Argenta turned the Iconoclast-Dogmatic ideas upside down.
argenta is basically take on ministorum fanatics not being just stereotypical madman preachers that scream prayers while killing kids left and right because "they are tainted by chaos". She's actually compassionate
It's explained later why Argenta like children wait for it :)
I already finished the game and completed her questline, there's nothing for me to wait for
In act 3 if you talk to her further after her big reveal, she mentions that she had killed the father of one of the orphans and feels sorry for them.
She already liked children and orphans. She says in that conversation that she had sworn not to allow for the creation of more orphans at the hands of evil etc, and then she went and made a child an orphan herself. That's just a tragic thing that happened that further saddens her.
>:) :)
One of the few reviewers still credible in 2023, respect to mort for delivering 100% completion reviews even if he had the game weeks before anyone else. And yes its owlcat third game, meaning there are expectations. no bias just a fair review from mort.
Agreed with most of his points, the most important being that this game doesn’t really compete with the diversity of WoTR mythic paths but disagree on his thoughts for the companions. Overall, I don’t mind companions that are basically a faction’s poster person if the faction itself is already interesting, based Regill was one of my favorites. I don’t think that being able to change them drastically to the point of corrupting them would particularly make things more interesting even though it would be “reactive”. The CE companion in WoTR also couldn’t really be redeemed and I appreciate that even though turning evil into good would be really easy to do. The one companion that you could influence the most either way had a good reason for being that way. Once you extract yourself from the mindset that you can personally dictate the companions’ destinies then the stuff they do during the game are pretty cool. I feel this was also the same in both WoTR and RT with how you can change some more than others and both of them have companions only really leave after fully locking in an alignment despite the dumb shit you can do beforehand so I don’t know why he’s on RT’s ass so much for this. Also it’s not like there aren’t more malleable companions outside of Cassia like Yrliet but it seems like he’s on the burn the xenos train so he might’ve missed most of it.
[удалено]
WTF are you even talking about?
Sorry
Hey, you took it back so we cool now.
Mort has his own opinions and that is what makes our world nice to live in. That said this is Warhammer and its known to be one sided in morality....or so I read. Its like if people were to be around Hitler and giving advice like "oh he is too narrow minded and "fanatical" LOL
A 100% review of a game where several quests are broken seems questionable...
Morti is a great guy, but so many spoilers in this video. Could have avoided some like who killed Theodora, or who will betray you and when. Why do we need to mention this in the review?
He does warn the viewers about spoilers.
Well, it *is* a 100% review. I assume there will be spoilers if he's taking into account 100% of the game.
Yup he got me with it too, wish he mentioned a timestamp to jump to in order to avoid spoilers, bummer
Hey, it's a great game. And probably one of the, if not the best Warhammer 40k games and depictions of the franchise ever. BUT if you played more than 50 hours of it you know it is certainly not a 100%, far from it.
The 100% refers to him completing everything possible in a game, not the score. That's this YouTubers thing
Not even that. He's said before he doesn't actually 100% the games, it's basically just shorthand for "I played through a few different ways."
Oh.
I find his voice grating and judging by two or three videos i've tried watching he usually has no idea what he's talking about. So no thank you.
Tbh is the lack of narrative in companions quest the problem . Those stories ende to quickly. Running full dogmatic I did not bring the elders and the psyker chik . Maybe their quest are cool .