Rogue Trader Devs Chose More Bugs Over Less Immersion

Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader got off to a pretty rough start, as the game’s launch was mired in performance issues, burying what is now a beloved entry into Games Workshop canon beneath a murky reputation. But it’s not one that developer Owlcat shies away from, and in a recent interview, the studio was candid and open about what went wrong.

“We were more ambitious than it was practical to be [with Rogue Trader], and that’s why we delivered a game that wasn’t in its most polished state – not because we were eager to save some money on QA. No. It was months before release that we decided the fourth chapter needed to be redone,” executive producer Anatoly Shestov told PCGamesN.

We, as a studio, decided to go [with more bugs].

“Usually, you don’t do such things in a proper development cycle, but the choice was either to deliver something with less bugs or less immersion potential, with less ‘burning’ things inside it,” he continued. “We, as a studio, decided to go [with more bugs].”

Owlcat Learned A Lot From Rogue Trader, Which Is Already Proving Useful For Its Next Project – Dark Heresy

elf-like scientists injecting monster with green serum.

It doesn’t take a seasoned game developer to tell you that redoing a huge chunk of the game mere months before launch is a risky idea, and unfortunately for Owlcat’s ambitious CRPG, it meant a dire first impression that stifled Rogue Trader from reaching the heights it might have otherwise climbed to. But that hasn’t dissuaded the team, and in fact, there’s even more passion burning at the centre of its next project.

“With Dark Heresy – and I understand it sounds stupid – we are more ambitious than we were in the Rogue Trader times,” Shestov said. “From my perspective, the difference is that the team knows precisely what it wants to do and how they want to achieve it. It’s like ‘I know you think you can make this boss fight in one week, but the proven data says that it will take you three weeks, not one.’ That’s why we’re able to mitigate some of the difficulties from the previous production.”

Hopefully, things pan out, and Dark Heresy fares better at launch than its predecessor when it arrives next year. If you want to find out more about Owlcat’s new game in the meantime, check out our interview with Shestov here.