Ahead of its reveal at today’s Warhammer Skulls event, I got to speak to Owlcat producer Anatoly Shestov about Warhammer 40K: Dark Heresy, the studio’s next big CRPG to follow up the breakout Rogue Trader. Here are my big takeaways from the conversation:
- Dark Heresy is based on the TTRPG of the same name, like how Rogue Trader was based on, you guessed it, Rogue Trader.
- You play as an Imperial inquisitor investigating heresies and conspiracies on an embattled world.
- Jaunts offworld didn’t sound like they were off the table, but the focus is a single planet with diverse biomes, rather than Rogue Trader’s sprawling sector of space.
- Contrasting with the enormous Von Valencius flagship, we’ll get a smaller, sleeker ship more like Knights of the Old Republic’s Ebon Hawk.
- Replacing Rogue Trader’s trinary morality meter (iconoclast, dogmatic, heretical) is an inquisition-focused radical-traditionalist spectrum.
- Shestov promised a big graphics overhaul and revamp of the RPG system from Rogue Trader—both sound like a much bigger jump than the one between Pathfinder: Kingmaker and Wrath of the Righteous.
- There’s a morale/intimidation system for both your party and enemies, and I was told you could tailor whole character builds around scaring your enemies so much that they surrender.
- Shestov described a significant detective/investigative element to the game, one where there wouldn’t be “canon” or “correct” answers, and instead an emphasis on the Imperium of Man’s idea of justice.
Due Process
“You will be actually gaining clues, you will be analyzing them,” said Shestov. “You will be making deductions. Do you know this meme of the crazy person with all the ties? That’s basically what we are doing.”
I’m a real sicko for detective stuff, so I had to ask how Shestov thought Dark Heresy slotted in with examples like Disco Elysium or Alan Wake 2. It actually sounds like this brutal dark future RPG is taking a page from Obsidian’s historical, pastoral murder mystery Pentiment: There won’t be any “right” answers.
“Because this is an Inquisition game, you won’t ever know,” said Shestov. “You can just name any person… and there will be dire consequences.” The game will continue proceeding as normal, but there will be multiple factions with and without the Inquisition to account for when you declare someone a heretic.
“One of the worst experiences in detective games is when you go ‘I will just click all the things, I don’t see the logic behind these,'” Shestov explained as part of the reason behind this structure for Dark Heresy’s investigations. “We don’t want to show if you made the right choice or not, because we want you to blame innocent people. Because it’s Inquisition.”
You can blame a complete innocent if you want and they’ll be terminated with no repercussions for your cruelty—but there will be “some reactions in the world” as a result of your judgments.
This sounds like Dark Heresy’s answer to the “game within a game” elements from previous Owlcat RPGs, like the Might and Magic army battles in Wrath of the Righteous. In Dark Heresy, though, the investigations have the potential to be more closely tied to the core roleplaying gameplay, rather than siloed off as their own “thing.” This ties into one of Shestov’s big ambitions for Dark Heresy: That it be a more cohesive, less scattered game than Owlcat’s previous, eccentric RPGs.
Terrifying Presence
Even with the new investigative gameplay, the core of Dark Heresy still sounds like the tactical, turn-based combat Owlcat has become known for. Shestov said that the hallmarks are still here: Romanceable companions, flexible character building, and challenging, puzzle box fights. Here are the big changes Shestov outlined coming from Rogue Trader:
- Reworked cover system.
- Reworked line of sight.
- New character abilities and attributes added, with some old ones removed.
- Removal of Rogue Trader’s momentum system.
- The addition of a morale system.
“Any unit can lose their grip in combat, start to panic, even shooting their own [teammates] or fleeing from combat,” Shestov said. “We decided that when you’re playing as Inquisitor, you need to frighten your opponent. So you’ve got an option to not just kill everyone or talk.
“You can just make them scared as fuck, and you can make them surrender to you. One of the ways to complete the fight is for enemies to surrender, and this morale is a separate entity. Lots of abilities work with [the morale system].”
One of the great joys in Kingmaker, WotR, and Rogue Trader is Owlcat’s permissiveness with off-the-wall character builds. I always fancied being a dual throwing axe Orc machine gun turret in the Pathfinder games, but I hear mounted combat is what’s really OP, and I’m looking forward to trying out this dual wielding pyromaniac Fighter/Mage build from CRPG Bro in Rogue Trader.
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That tradition sounds like it will remain beautifully intact in Dark Heresy, with morale/intimidation included as yet another tool for buildcrafting sickos to play around with.
“You will be able to use the whole morale system to win, instead of damage,” said Shestov. “Vice versa, you will be able to play as a support character or buffer, not in terms of boosting the defense or offense capabilities, but by boosting the morale capabilities. It’s one of the cornerstone elements of the whole battle system for the new game.”
These all sound like killer RPG experiments that I want to be a part of, and bundling them with further technical and graphical advancements on top of Rogue Trader could be a real winner. My biggest concern will be polish: Owlcat’s games have taken a beating from us review score-wise—69%, 76%, and 59% for Kingmaker, WotR, and Rogue Trader respectively—due to their prodigious bugs and lack of polish on launch.
I love these games, but I don’t think I’ve played one less than a year out from release. Not only does Owlcat do a ton of patching, it also supports its games with oodles of substantial DLC: Last year, Wrath of the Righteous got a massive epilogue expansion capping off three years of DLC, and Rogue Trader’s second story DLC was also shown off at today’s Skulls event.
Here’s hoping we get the best of both worlds with Dark Heresy: All that sweet follow-through, but they manage to stick the landing first. You can wishlist Dark Heresy on Steam.