Rogue Trader’s post-launch patches paved the way for Void Shadows

polygon.com:

At launch, Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader was a tricky game to recommend, even though it’s a lovingly crafted adaptation of the Koronus Expanse, building off lore that I love from the tabletop RPGs. The initial conflict pulled me into the story, and I stuck around to help my companions achieve their goals. But there was an opaque leveling system that required constant math homework, there were bugs in the latter half of the game, and it had some awkward, fiddly bits. Luckily, developer Owlcat Games has continued to work on Rogue Trader, patching it regularly. Now, with the game’s first expansion within sight, I’m thrilled to see what the story looks like with extra layers of long-term polish.

Rogue Trader is both big and dense; it’s so complex that even Owlcat lost track of all the various interlocking scenarios. “There were some sequences and scenes that were performing in a way we didn’t expect. It was an almost scientific discovery to understand how things would work or not work together in combination,” said Anatoly Shestov, executive producer on Rogue Trader.

Having players go through the campaign provided much more data to Owlcat than internal playtests. Since the game’s original release, Owlcat has released 10 patches, fixing thousands of issues and implementing quality-of-life updates, and tweaks to UI art, difficulty, boss design, character progression, narrative issues, and more. This process paved the road toward the game’s first expansion: Void Shadows. According to Shestov, Void Shadows is inspired by mechanics that the team wanted to tackle for launch, but ultimately had to put on the back burner.

“The ship itself, we wanted to open it up to more points of view. We wanted to tell different stories about the people who live there, the difficult choices happening there,” said Shestov. “We found this compelling story about things that were happening previously and right now throughout the story with your crew.” This is an aspect that’s lightly present in