Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader might be seen as a tremendous CRPG today, but when it launched it faced staunch criticism thanks to heaps of bugs in the game. Owlcat Games acknowledged this, but in a recent interview with PCGamesN, executive producer Anatoly Shestov it was revealed the team purposely went for a more ambitious approach even if it meant more bugs.
“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,” Shestov explained. “It was months before the release that we decided that the fourth chapter needed to be redone. 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. We, as a studio, decided to go [with more bugs].”
Owlcat is taking the lessons learned from Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader and applying them to Warhammer 40,000: Dark Heresy, a new CRPG from the studio, set to release next year. “With Dark Heresy – and I understand it sounds stupid – we are more ambitious than we were in the Rogue Trader times,” said Shestov. “From my perspective, the difference is that the team knows precisely what it wants to do and how they want to achieve it.”
