Warhammer 40K: Rogue Trader – How Did it Take This Long to Get a Warhammer CRPG?

ign.com:

It’s truly bizarre that across the nearly 30 years of Warhammer video games, we haven’t had a single one that attempted to channel the tabletop Warhammer experience by utilizing the genre that feels best suited to do so: CRPGs. But that’s all about to change, as Pathfinder developer Owlcats has been cooking up something to fill this void. During an extensive hands-off demo of Warhammer 40K: Rogue Trader, I checked out its extremely chunky turn-based combat system, drowned in its plethora of dialogue options and social skill checks, and nodded approvingly at its lovingly faithful depiction of Warhammer’s morbid universe. While it’s still very early, so far this CRPG is shaping up to be everything I’ve wanted from a Warhammer video game.

If you’ve ever played (or even glanced at) a game of Warhammer 40K, then you probably know it’s designed for a hyper-specific kind of nerd who loves calculations, large-scale drama, and an incredibly detailed world one could easily get lost in. Warhammer 40K: Rogue Trader caters to that same kind of player by being as much of a CRPG as one could imagine.

The first and most immediately obvious example is the combat, which takes a classic turn-based tactics approach that should feel very familiar to Warhammer players and scales it down from a military mass combat encounter to fit a smaller group of ne’er-do-wells that’s more appropriate for a party-based RPG. Galactic scale aside, everything else a Warhammer fan could expect appears to be present and accounted for, whether it’s detailed maps littered with cover, a sandbox of weapons and abilities that allow for slow and strategic engagement of the enemy, and a wide variety of iconic Warhammer factions to fight. If you’re looking to capture the