The TLDR of Rougue Trader 12/28/2023

[Hanok]

Watching review videos and reading the Steam/Reddit forums since release, it would seem the overall reaction is...


First two Acts: Well done Owlcat, good writing and great atmosphere. Combat is fun to cheers.






Act 3-5: What the fu@k happened?!?

[EasternTime]

Act 3 is either love or hate. I liked it. Nice change of pace.
I enjoy act 4 so far. Haven't started act 5 yet, waiting for patches.

[corisai]

Act 3 is amazing too.

Act 4 is screwed by bugs but good.

Act 5 is WTF???

[J]

Last 3 acts suffer a lot from weird pacing. None of the resource management minigame ended up mattering, had about 100 more profit factor than i had reputation to use it for. Pretty much all combat numbers were off too and the game felt easier 3-5.

Was still fun, i just think it'll be more rewarding after a few balance, or just numbers patches.

[16/13]

Acts 1,2,3 are good
Acts 4,5 are buggy

[aramintai]

That sums it up:
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2F4576jeyr8x7c1.png

[Pure Brawn]

I didn't hate Act 3, it was cool from a lore perspective to get a change up like that. But compared side by side with Act 1 & 2 I definitely liked those more.

Act 4 is buggy AF... dialogue makes no sense... right off the bat a lot of my companion dialogue or quests are incorrectly referencing decisions that I made, pretty big ones. So its like I played for 90 hours and then all of a sudden the game mixed up all my decisions so nothing is really coherent.

Also Im pretty sure Ulfar is entirely bugged as a character lol. Lots of his abilities dont seem to trigger correctly or Im wildly confused. His charge doesnt end with an attack and his pistol wont fire in melee range... which is kinda like his whole thing.

Probably going to chill and wait on a patch until I continue. Its a shame, because honestly the game is fantastic. You can just almost tell the exact point they ran out of time with the bug fixing before release.

To be fair though I had a similar experience with BG3. Act 1&2 were amazing and then Act 3 was holy freaking bugs until they patched it up.

[sleeve]

Comparing the location in Act 3 to a similar adventure you go to in WoTR, the Act 3 location feels super empty. Lack, theres a lack of side quests and hidden nuggets to explore?

And the implementation is so bad. Theres the potential for so much more in Act 3, feels kinda squandered

[Pure Brawn]

Originally posted by sleeve:

Comparing the location in Act 3 to a similar adventure you go to in WoTR, the Act 3 location feels super empty. Lack, theres a lack of side quests and hidden nuggets to explore?

And the implementation is so bad. Theres the potential for so much more in Act 3, feels kinda squandered

I agree, between Acts 1-3 it felt the smallest and was my least favorite... but I did like some of the lore and just the change of pace since in Act 4 you get back to the galaxy exploration.

But it definitely felt smaller in scope compared to the other acts so far. Felt more like an interlude or something lol.

[corisai]

Originally posted by sleeve:

Theres the potential for so much more in Act 3, feels kinda squandered

Potential for multiple ways to die? :) You're in the most hellish place of the Galaxy, outside of Chaos Realms themselves...

[Amoc]

Originally posted by corisai:

Act 3 is amazing too.

Act 3 sucks. It seems to have been rushed, being very short and sort of slapped together. It feels like half the time you spent there is with pointless cutscenes every minute or so of you shaking your head and the game telling you that you feel sick.

The idea was good. The setting is cool, but the execution was terrible.

Originally posted by corisai:

Act 4 is screwed by bugs but good.

Act 4 is buggy and broken, but even if it wasn't, it's still a disjointed mess. The story falls off a cliff, and it's mostly companion and side missions that don't tie back into the story. Also, Quetza Tamer. Oof.

Originally posted by corisai:

Act 5 is WTF???

If Act 5 is worse than Act 4, then I'm glad I stopped there.

[Pure Brawn]

New patch looks like it has tons of narrative and dialogue fixes, maybe Act IV now makes sense with my choices lol. I'll give it a try and see, fingers crossed baby

[DeepDorkFantasy]

Act 5 is a joke of a handful unfinished companions quests and couple of **c*ons fights

[gurugeorge]

I'm in the camp that enjoys Act 3 thematically, but the bugginess started to rear its ugly head there (though some of that's been fixed now), and Act 4 seems to be a complete mess (which despite several patches still seems to have problems).

Act 5 I don't know, because my main game is stumped at Act 4, so I'm waiting till that's cleared up and I can go back a bit and get into it.

I've been doing another playthrough where I've been trying to go slow in the hope that some of the major later bugs are patched out by the time I get there, but that's coming perilously close to Act 3 lol

But it's not just the quest progression that's buggy af in the game, it's also talents and abilities, which seem to be all over the shop - with some things, nobody's sure what works and what doesn't, etc.

Owlcat really have to change something about the way they do things, whether it's in the sofftware development or the business side I don't know, but they can't keep on releasing their games in this state. They're great designers and the graphics/music implementation is great, but this buggy nonsense stops them from being hailed as the AAA developers they should be. The traditional "year before an Owlcat game is fixed" should perhaps be a year in Early Access.

[Ozzirian]

Should have called it what it is. Early access.

[Ro]

ACT 2 was amazing, Act 3 was decent (except the drukari section).

I just stopped playing at the ACT IV boss.

Difficulty spike that renders every decision i've made useless.
None of the options is fun:
Replaying 3 hours of the siege,
replaying everything (80h)
or cheat / mod .