Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader devs have ideas for four more expansions

But first your ship becomes the star of its own story

Owlcat

Players of Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader have been itching to get back into the game and dive into Void Shadows, the first DLC for the grimdark CRPG, but its recently announced delay means that more patience will be needed before it lands on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X|S.

While Owlcat is busy polishing the upcoming expansion and the massive update accompanying it, creative director Alexander Mishulin took some time out of his filled schedule to answer some questions about the game’s journey so far, what Void Shadows will have in store, and what the uncertain future of the 41st millennium may bring for fearless Rogue Traders. If you’re a little lost, check out our Rogue Trader review before reading on.

Back before Rogue Trader launched, I asked Mishulin during a preview session whether being the first big CRPG to come out after Baldur’s Gate 3 was going to be a blessing or a curse. He was very positive back then, trusting in the momentum BG3 generated for the genre. Speaking now, I asked whether that opinion remains unchanged – and it sounds like that is still the case: “Choosing a release date is a complex issue, with a huge number of factors intertwined,” he tells me. “Production, business, marketing, and many others. Was it possible to find a better date for each of these factors individually? Yes. Was it possible to find a better date that took all of these factors into account? I doubt it.”

Aside from bug fixing, a lot of work post-launch has gone into tuning the game’s balance – a task both daunting and delicate due to the thousands of variables interacting with each other during a battle in the Koronus Expanse. Owlcat’s player base is infamous for finding even the smallest of loopholes to exploit and according to Mishulin this was also the case for Rogue Trader.

Some players were able to synergize certain abilities to gain “about a dozen turns at the very beginning of the fight, using several heroic acts even before the opponents can move.” If you ever get back into the game after taking a break and wonder why your Rogue Trader from the Officer class has been nerfed into the ground, that’s your answer. 

Other players used the despicable power of math to stack so many multiplicative stat modifiers on their characters that they had “thousands” of points in some attributes during battle.

Even Necrons weren't a problem when you could exploit the game mechanics. / Owlcat Games

To give you an idea on the sheer amount of work that went into these adjustments: Update 1.2 for the game consisted of around 2,500 individual changes. Mishulin says that “a significant part of the updates on this list was done ‘based on player feedback’ – only because people played and shared their impressions, we were able to correctly prioritize problems, tackle the most pressing ones first, and add completely new items to the list of work.”

Naturally, Owlcat wants to avoid breaking more things than it fixes in patches, so it follows a full regressive testing regimen. “For about three weeks, the entire QA team plays the game from scratch, each with their own version of the party, elections, romances, and decisions,” Mishulin explains. “And the rest correct the errors that have crept in.” 

On top of all the work needed to make a change in the first place, about a month of testing is necessary before something can make it into the updated build, he elaborates. The process ensures that Owlcat can deliver quality updates – even though it also means that the team can’t put updates out “as often as we would like.”

Extra work recently came the crew’s way in the form of its efforts to obtain Steam Deck-verified status for Rogue Trader – which it did. According to Mishulin, the biggest challenge to get Rogue Trader into a good place on the handheld was the sheer amount of text in the game. “The games our studio develops are truly ‘classic’. Old-school even. Among other things, this means the ‘PC First’ approach to working on interfaces and UI,” he explains. “When we started with the Steam Deck version, we realized that our volumes of text were physically inconvenient to read on a small screen. We had to find and fix a huge number of places where at least some text was displayed.” Another item on the agenda was fine-tuning how the game feels on a controller.

Of course, that’s not everything the team has been busy with – Void Shadows, the first DLC for the CRPG, is well underway. For the team, the decision to focus not on adding more planets to the game, but focusing on the already existing voidship of the Rogue Trader, came down to the possibility of telling a unique story, according to Mishulin.

“As a studio, we tell stories. Stories about the void and its inhabitants are an area we definitely want to explore, but at the center of most of these stories will be those who walk in this void, who interact with it,” he says. “Warhammer as a setting allows us to look at this issue from a unique perspective – from the side of the voidship itself. We simply couldn't resist the pleasure of starting with this.”

One important aspect to emphasize is that the DLC’s story won’t chain you to your ship for its full runtime of 15 hours. 

“The DLC gameplay time runs parallel to the main plot,” Mishulin clarifies. He explains that the story is essentially split into different episodes, which take place in-between points of the main story. They “invite you to immerse yourself in the nuances of what's happening on your own voidship for one, two, three, or four hours.” Each of these episodes, he goes on, “has a very different narrative, visuals, and gameplay challenge, and the sections of the voidship that are shown are not similar to each other and have not been seen in the main game.” 

That’s good news for anyone who feared being stuck on their ship for hours on end, staring at the same environments. Players starting a new game will find organic story branches to lead them into these episodes, while those buying the DLC and not going for a new playthrough will be able to find a “shortcut” in Chapter 4 to gain access to the content in a block. “Whichever option the players choose, we are sure that they will appreciate both the qualitative change in the main story and the original, complete plot of the DLC itself,” Mishulin states.

With the voidship being the star of the show, the DLC will have some new content centered on the massive space hulk in store – though Mishulin remains vague: “New equipment for the voidship, new space encounters, new unique ‘entertainment’ in these encounters – these are the voidship-related game mechanics that we will give away in this DLC.” To him, though, the most significant voidship moments lie in the DLC’s story.

Naturally, the game director remained equally vague when I asked about our new antagonists, the insidious Genestealer Cult. “We needed an enemy with whom interaction begins a little earlier than ‘bullets whistle, blood flows’,” he explains. The Cult is “capable of being interested in something other than the total destruction of opponents at the tactical level, having a whole palette of options for influencing the opponent.” 

Genestealers are generally pretty bad news. / Owlcat Games

That sounds like a headache to deal with for our brave Rogue Trader – and that’s precisely what a Genestealer infestation should be all about. In the DLC’s story, players will once again be asked to make some tough decisions with huge consequences, which “will have implications for the officer corps, the dynasty, and Koronus.” No pressure, Rogue Traders.

Fortunately, players will have a new helper on their side: the Death Cult Assassin Kibellah. She is a new companion available in the DLC and can be romanced by the player. Mishulin says that an assassin left “enough room for creativity” for Owlcat while offering “a different perspective on the Imperium, Imperial Creed, and Rogue Traders.” He tells me that Kibellah sees herself an integral part of the voidship, which itself is an integral part of the Von Valancius dynasty, which in turn is a part of the Emperor’s plan for the universe – and “she's ready to do absolutely anything to serve that plan.”

While Mishulin wouldn’t expand more on Void Shadows, the future of Rogue Trader goes beyond just this one DLC. Some issues are still on the to-do list and player feedback is an ever fruitful source of work for the team. Mishulin says that “convictions and level-ups, reactivity to the options chosen during character creation, and unique content and narrative beats of Chapters 4 and 5” are on the team’s agenda.

What’s more, Void Shadows is not the only DLC the crew has ideas for. “The team has concepts for 4 DLCs besides Void Shadows,” Mishulin tells me. “As a fan of the genre and setting, I would be incredibly happy to play any of them – they are that cool. But don't take this as a commitment. In reality, to decide which DLC to make next and with what specific content, we need to take into account a huge number of factors.”

Finally, I ask what the creative director himself would like to explore the most in a potential future DLC. “I will answer not as a project lead, but as a player. Without any guarantees that this will actually happen,” he emphasized. “The corruption of Sister Argenta.” Corrupting a Sister of Battle? That’s some bold heresy – and now I’d like to see that, too.

Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader – Void Shadows will be out on September 24, 2024.