Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader
I’ve got bad news. Last week, when I published an interview with Owlcat Games director Anatoly Shestov covering all things Dark Heresy, I wrote, «what if I told you that you’ve only seen half the pets that are being added in the Lex Imperialis update?» What I should have written was, ‘what if I told you that I’ve only seen half the pets that are being added in the Lex Imperialis update?’
Unfortunately, I must have missed the press release that teased the Servoskull Swarm and Psyber-Raven arriving in Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader’s imminent expansion. The only marketing I’d seen up until my interview with Shestov had included the Cyber Mastiff and Cyber-Eagle. I could blame my infant son or the fact that I’ve only just returned from the peril-laden voyage through the warp that most call ‘paternity leave’, but I’m instead going to hold my hands up and say I got it wrong. Sorry for getting your hopes up, and shoutout to the kind Owlcat devs on social media who quickly corrected me before things got out of hand.
Eight pets, Jeremy? That’s insane!
Looking To Lex Imperialis
However, Shestov did give me plenty of other juicy details about Rogue Trader’s Lex Imperialis update, including how pets work, Owlcat’s futureproofing for further furry friends, and where pets sleep aboard your ship. There was non-pet stuff, too, like how the team decided that the Arbites were the best new ally to add to the game, but I figured you’d mostly want to hear about the pets.
This time, I made sure to quadruple check everything so I don’t publish anything unintentionally misleading or just plain wrong. In that spirit, I first asked Shestov about the decision to add space cops to Rogue Trader.
«They’re not space cops,» he immediately corrects me. «They’re space FBI maybe, but not space cops.»
Arbites via Games Workshop
I try to argue the semantics, but he has a point. And from my numerous interviews with him and the wider Owlcat team, I should know better than to argue. They’ve spent the last years of their lives breathing Warhammer, and their adherence to the lore is equal parts consistent and admirable. Sufficiently chastised, I still wanted to know what landed the Arbites at our Rogue Trader’s space-door for the second piece of DLC.
“We started from the idea of the stories that we didn’t touch enough,” Shestov explains. “We explored the Necrons, Chaos, the rotten governors, all the noble shenanigans around you. We touched everything on this particular matter, but we didn’t touch the regular means of how Imperium governs itself with such situations.
“We felt that it would be interesting for the Rogue Trader – as an external agent who changes everything, who is a joker, who has immense power and freedom – to clash with a regular means of how the Imperium proceeds with this.”
The Rogue Trader is a renegade, a loose cannon, and that’s part of what makes roleplaying so satisfying. A lawful foil to your lawless justice could prove annoying – think of that one friend who always brings a Lawful Good character to the D&D table and berates you for even thinking of torturing an innocent NPC for information – but Owlcat is sweetening the deal with pets, and lots of them.
“We decided that one of the main things that we want to deliver to the players is pets, completely playable entities,” Shestov continues. “And when you’re speaking about pets, there’s an Arbites who has a Cyber Mastiff, it’s a match made in heaven.”
Looking Further
While Owlcat had thought about introducing an Ecclesiarchical character, the allure of pets was too strong. And the developer has gone all-in on their implementation. Each pet has its own combat mechanics, abilities, and even places to sleep on the ship. Shestov shows me a screenshot of the current build of Lex Imperialis, and he has four pets in his party. His Rogue Trader has a loyal Cyber Mastiff at his side, Idira has a Psyber-Raven, and both Cassia and Pasqal have Servoskull Swarms joining the fray.
We can extrapolate some information from this. We can clearly have as many as four pets in our party at a time, but I don’t see why this would be a hard limit. Your companions can also have pets, which is cool. And you can double up on the same pet with multiple characters. It remains to be seen how far this can be taken – I want to see a party with six good boys roving through the sector – but Shestov’s confidence in the system suggests fans will be pleased.
“It plays like a totally different game,” he explains. “They won’t just [be used in battle], there will be story interactions, there will be emotional interactions with them, and they will even have their own place inside your ship.”
You can, of course, pet the Cyber Mastiff.
Shestov describes the pets as “a full-scale subsystem”, suggesting that it would be really easy to add more pets in future updates. “One of the things that everyone inside the team really wants to do is a Daemonhost pet,” he laughs. “It would be cool, but it won’t happen. Never. But that’s the way of thinking.”
Looking further ahead, Shestov plays his cards close to his chest. It’s only natural, given the second piece of DLC hasn’t even been released yet. However, he promises that The Infinite Museion will take us to “unexpected places” and, “there will be ways to understand the internal dealings of the [Processional of the Damned] and to make some important decisions based on this.”
With Dark Heresy and The Expanse: Osiris Reborn on the horizon as well, Owlcat Games is pushing the throttle and aiming for the stars with its science-fiction CRPGs. What will become of Rogue Trader after its two season passes and four pieces of DLC are over, though?
“I highly doubt that the fourth DLC will be the last for Rogue Trader,” Shestov says. “So the fans can be safe and sure that for several years at minimum, we will not just be making DLC, but working on making the game better, fixing bugs, and providing new content.” Owlcat has staked its claim on this corner of the 41st millennium, and recent weeks have proved that it’s here to stay.
