The developers of the role-playing game Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader from the Owlcat Games studio shared the results of a post-release survey about user attitudes to various aspects of the project.
Image source: Owlcat Games
Four months after the release, more than half of the survey participants had more than a hundred hours played in Rogue Trader: 69% turned out to be CRPG fans, and 7% became acquainted with Warhammer 40,000 thanks to the game.
The most popular Rogue Trader biography was Sanctioned Psyker by almost a two-fold margin, and the most popular combination was Voidborne Psyker (it beat out Imperial World Aristocrat by almost a third).
More than 15 thousand people took part in the survey; it took them a total of over 5.5 thousand hours to fill it out
What Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader developers learned about player preferences from the survey:
- 37% felt that there were too many options when creating a character (more than 500 talents);
- Players rated the ground combat system 4.3 out of 5 points (versus 4.2 in the beta);
- Soldiers and Officers were the poll’s favorite archetypes, with the Grand Strategist being the least liked by the public;
- Respondents considered “Heat of Battle” (Archmilitant), “Rapid Fire” (Soldier) and “Whisper of Death” (Assassin) to be the most powerful special abilities, and “Intimidation” (Operative) to be the weakest;
- The key mechanic of the Officer with the ability to grant an ally an extra turn has again become a favorite among users;
- The most memorable opponents the players named were Evening Dawn (Chaos Space Marine), Dawn’s Reach and the Steel Devil;
- Most of the players were tormented between Puritan and Radical Beliefs, and 89 people chose not to get acquainted with this value system at all.
As for companions and NPCs, according to the results of beta testing, Argenta won in all categories. After the release, player preferences turned out to be more diverse:
- The most interesting companion of the Rogue Trader was his seneschal, Abelard;
- Primacy in matters of combat effectiveness and the art of seduction went to Cassia;
- Argenta topped the list of most attractive characters;
- Xavier Calcazar was recognized as the best NPC.
Based on the survey results, Owlcat Games has already fixed many of the “pain points” (such as the cargo interface in the third act or calculating the difficulty of skill checks) of the game, for which it says “many thanks” to all survey participants.
Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader was released in December 2023 on PC (Steam, GOG, EGS), PS5, Xbox Series X and S. On September 24, the game should receive the first of two story additions – Void Shadows.