Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader

At it's core, this is a CRPG with a lot of promise and some really great moments - but that makes it even more baffling at the sheer number of obnoxious short comings which are fundamental parts of the game, yet which could so very easily be resolved. I'm a huge fan of CRPGs, and I'm not mad at this game for not being BG3 - and I feel bad that every CRPG is now compared to the BG3 standard - however this game did seem to invite those comparisons by clumsily half implementing co-op in response to BG3's release. My partner and I bought this excited for the co-op experience, only to realise that it isn't full co-op. You only have one main character, and at all times in the ship, whoever you're playing with doesn't get to play at all and must patiently wait for you to wrap up whatever you want to do, have all your conversations, and only then do you get to even play again. When you DO get to play, you are thrown into a game with a constant contradiction of mechanics - some lines are voiced, most are not. Some dialogue plays out in front of you in usual CRPG standard, but sometimes you enter into a situation which turns out to be just a book. Literally, just a book. With pages and pages of dialogue and no characters and no animation or even a visual context to attach yourself to - literally a choose your own adventure novel which takes you out of the action and asks you to read !! so !! much !! text !! before you can keep playing (and there's no way out). It's an ADHD person's nightmare. There are also no quest markers and the map is atrocious, so my party was often bumbling about with no idea of where to go or what to do. Combat is insanely easy, so putting the difficulty up is pretty much a necessity. Levels are often poorly designed. You might have to spend your first 5 turns slowly running up to your enemies before you have a chance to do anything. In co-op, if you accidentally start a combat or get ambushed, your friends don't start the combat with you, so they're left out entirely or must spend the entire combat slowly crawling towards you. Levelling up is confusing, overwhelming, and underwhelming at the same time. For an RPG so focused on decision making, it is lacking in any creativity with the decisions you do get to make. You must choose between "comically good", "comically evil, light version" and "comically evil, dark version." There is no grey morality, no complexity of decision, and you constantly feel like you're being paraded about by the story rather than having any agency in it. Aesthetically, it's always a huge issue for me when developers have such easily resolvable problems, yet force players to engage with mods just for a basic level of functionality. This is particularly true of the cosmetic component of your character. While this game does, on a surface level, implement character creation, it forces you to wear significant aspects of your starting costume for the rest of the game and gives very limited colour controls - bizarrely you can change the colours of some parts of your outfit, but not all parts of your outfit, for no reason. This is absolutely insane to me, and in the case of certain origins, like the psyker, you're stuck looking absolutely horrible for the whole game. Early on I got this really cool, roguish armour, but was forced to wear a skirt - specifically, an unchangeably green skirt - over it, rendering it more or less pointless to even wear from an aesthetic standpoint. It's so confusing because the game does allow for "outfit options" where you can hide certain things, but it just has lazily decided not to fully implement it. You can hide your helmet, backpack, entire armour, gloves, and boots - but god forbid we allow you to hide the entire massive skirt covering your entire character... There are moments early on where I found myself getting into Rogue Trader and at every turn, the game made sure to reliably get me out of it again. It's such a shame when the core elements of the game are so promising, to absolutely obfuscate them in a mountain of easily fixable obstacles. If you're a diehard Warhammer 40k fan, it might be worth it to you, but as a diehard CRPG fan, it was not worth it for me.