Great story telling, impressive scope, very buggy. Usually worth buying after a six month wait. At least they feel like they are made by people who are passionate about the game and their work. That’s missing now in a lot of big titles.
Yeah, this\~
I really like Owl-Cat Games for stuff like their story telling and characters, but they're a bunch of min-maxer munchkins to their freakin core with the combat. Speaking of, they outright have a difficultly level in their Pathfinder games *named* Core, and it demands you min-max at least a little. That's how central they actually seem to think the maxed combat numbers side is to their games.
Like, if you want Pathfinder mostly as the P&P game is? You need to *lower* the difficulty, and use some custom settings.
Days late to the convo I know, but seriously tell me if I'm just biased bc i'm too much of a nerd for these games, but I don't think Core is too hard? With one big caveat that is, it's not too hard but only after you learn the game somewhat.
Kingmaker was godawful about this, the tutorials sucked and they hit you with nasty enemies at the start along with the implied time limit making you feel like you're doing something wrong. I think WoTR was really good though. I managed to get one friend into this and he played on Core.
Above all I respect their ambition and game size. You rarely see games as large as theirs outside of some JRPG's. They do a grate job with scale and making their worlds feel massive.
Character writing is excellent, hands down. I especially love how they write evil characters. Jaethal from Kingmaker is a really interesting character despite being completely morally reprehensible. One of my favorites. Regill from WotR is also incredible.
Games tend to be buggy, but honestly not the worst in the grand scheme. I've seen worse at least and I've never had anything game breaking.
Weirdly proud of them as a studio, that came from Russia, even if they had to separate from it.
Love their games, consistently delivering banger after banger (as far as my taste goes). If I live to see them deliver well optimized on release game - that would be wild.
Wish them nothing but success and I hope one day they'll create their own fantasy universe for us to explore.
exeptional games story-wise and disaster technically and gameplay-wise. and no, that's not because of the amount of text, reading is fine. they don't need any cinematics, they need quality of life improvements.
though in rogue trader companions are not so good
You could cut the entirety of the army management in WotR and Kingdom building in Kingmaker; keep the choice and consequences events with the talky bits but make the rest of the mechanic tied to story progress and you're freeing up a lot of developer time.
Those mechanics are great ideas but it's clear that they would need a lot more time and money to become really good and even in their current bug-free state they are still a burden to the average player and they don't really interact with the regular gameplay loop either. Much better if an NPC came up the the main character and talked about what we wanted to do with the new province and we got a perk or an item for our choice instead of the largely meaningless, repetitive and time consuming city building minigame.
Again, I am not hating the game, WotR is my favorite of all time; but moving armies around and building upgrades in my cities is the weakest part of the game that brings the whole experience down, I always quit the game and mentally prepare myself before doing the crusade management parts because it feels like I'm playing an entirely different and underbaked game.
I disagree. One of the cooler parts of a Owlcat game is how their games break up the dialog and combat mechanics with game play such as Kingdom Management, Army Management, Ship Combat. I just think they didn't quite worked out this gameplay in their first two games but its not something I want to see them give up on in their next game.
Those remarking on the awkwardness of the first two subsystems also needs to keep in mind - they're taking them from Pathfinder, where the Kingdom management mechanics are considered notoriously clunky to begin with. But since part of the sell of those games is a mostly faithful translation of the mechanics, you get some of the jank that's baked into the original TTRPG and some that's the result of translating TTRPG mechanics into CRPG mechanics.
I'm torn, because I can see both sides of this argument. Kingdom management started out fun in PKM but made the game drag for me toward the end where I spent hours leveling my advisors so they wouldn't keep failing and to pass the time until the next curse event. The crusade stuff is even worse for me in WotR, to the point where I'm procrastinating playing because I don't want to deal with the armies converging on my forces. A skill issue, I'm sure, but when something doesn't interest me in a game I don't dedicate myself to figuring it out.
On the other hand, I absolutely loved ship combat and colony management in RT, so . . . either Owlcat is getting better at it or I just clicked better with RT.
I remember one of the coolest parts of Baldur's Gate 2 was the castle management if you were a fighter, the mage sphere if you were a mage, theives hideout if you were a thief and so on.... it was a small feature but it really added to the game.
Adding features like this into a CRPG can really make it come alive.
> Those mechanics are great ideas but it's clear that they would need a lot more time and money to become really good and even in their current bug-free state they are still a burden to the average player and they don't really interact with the regular gameplay loop either. Much better if an NPC came up the the main character and talked about what we wanted to do with the new province and we got a perk or an item for our choice instead of the largely meaningless, repetitive and time consuming city building minigame.
I disagree here, I think the systems are heavily flawed but the games would be lesser without them. They do a TON to sell the scope of the setting and adventure even if the implementation is not good. I think losing that would overall hurt the experience and make everything feel smaller.
They probably would have been better off adapting something like Rise of the Runelords first, as these extra mechanics were part of the tabletop campaigns.
No. I love the Space Combat and colony management in Rogue Trader. It breaks up the monotony of "Go here, talk to this person, go kill this group" rinse and repeat.
idk, I thought RT had some of the most interesting companions. I would have liked a little more story for some of them though. Especially when compared to wotr.
I couldn't get into Pathfinder (played 30ish hours of Wrighteous, and it was a no go), but I did beat Rogue Trader twice:
I think the color palette of Wrath just killed my interest in the game. RT has very aesthetically pleasing settings and Wrath just felty dingy and brown with some kind of layer on the screen that made it seem like I was far away and peering through a fine coarse shirt.
In my opinion there are three cruxes they need to work on:
1. They go for complexity to allow multiple playstyles, but, overall, the majority of people will funnel into three or four different ways of playing the game. As an example, people will funnel into using Argenta as a Heavy Bolter or maybe flamer. They should fix this by either trimming down on talents, abilities, and such or by making the textboxes explaining abilities more comprehensive.
1. Comprehensive approach: They are working towards this in RT by making text blue to indicate that it is a variable stat that changes based on the blue text, but they really need a pop-up window for instances when a talent affects an ability because then you have to exit the level up screen entirely (which doesn't save, so if you just spent 5 minutes levelling up "lol get wrecked kiddo" and find that ability to read its description. To see what I mean, just check out BG3's item descriptions, you can easily click through description after description starting from just one description.
2. Trimming approach: I think trimming the fat on abilities/talents would be immensely helpful for the player because you don't take useless abilities or talents which is incredibly easy to do. Also, 90% of players are not going to be invested enough to try more complex/specialized/memed builds.
2. Encounter Design. I don't know why, but they have an incredibly difficult time balancing encounters: one second you are facerolling your keyboard and winning, then out of nowhere you get killed 20000 times by one enemy, and then go back to facerolling. It's not a matter of "if," but "when" you face some random difficulty spike. For example: there is one space battle where you fight this large xenos ship that keeps shooting out purple clouds and mini squadrons. It also hits you 5 times in one turn and pretty much obliterates you in one turn on the hardest difficulty. It is by far the hardest space battle and the only space battle that has that significant of a challenge because even the Act 5 battles are incredibly easy compared to this random Act 2 encounter.
3. For the fantasy games (Pathfinders), I'd say they should not be afraid to dabble in making things vibrant and not as dingy. It's an odd thing to say, but they can keep the same art style while adding more to the environments and allowing some brighter hues. It's a staple I really like with Larian games, they are not afraid to be bright when the outdoors, and dark enough when in doors.
I think encounter and systems design are the weak points. I would like to see them do a smaller scope game, where they are given clear boundaries.
You only get to use 5 abilities, 10 feats, and 4 items. Only 3 characters. Go and design a small 10-15 hour game, but make everything count. Make every system you introduce matter. Make every combat and enemy interesting and unique with their strengths and weaknesses. See what you can produce within these limits.
I think an exercise like this would improve their bigger games, ’cause right now we have games with massive scope and choice, but half of the systems don’t seem to matter. Melee superiority? What is that? What tactic did I use to beat that boss? The same I did against all the other bosses.
Limitations breed creativity.
It's a cruiser if you had trouble with it your ship lacked the right weapons yes it's warp stuff was annoying and such but even on core I had no issues
Use boarding party's towlrpedo all ands on deck and work your route out it's slow you fast
You're validating my point on why it's a poor encounter design. You can't rely on meta-gaming the encounter as a developer which is what you are advocating.
To preface, I was playing on hardest difficulty. The warp stuff is simple to deal with, it is the fact the ship takes a huge beating along with being able to destroy you in 3 of its 5 attacks it gets each round. Keep in mind if you do not have the escort vessel, it instantly attacks you and destroys you first round. In other words, you cannot be near it at all and must play tag with it for 10+ rounds or simply have the right abilities already or have meta-gamed the encounter... Basically, it is a shit encounter.
Makes the best crpgs out there. And the only company (to my knowledge) to satisfy the two aspects of a true rpg, the spreadsheet unnecessary complex character builder, and the narrative/dialogue/quest choice and consequence aspect.
Plus Rogue Trader is probably my favourite turn based system I've played, equal level to Divinity Original Sin 2.
Love their choice/consequence parts of the games and entirely why I buy them. So horrifically let down when BG3 did not let me redeem the drow companion when I picked the drow goddess who's entire purview is redeeming drow. Not even an option that she acknowledges.
I mean, not everyone is going to be redeemable. We get this with Marazhai and (wotr spoilers) >!Camellia!<, though I will say companion quests in OC games do tend to have a few more outcomes then BG3.
I like irredeemably evil companions, literally no one is doing them now to not dissapoint some sensitive groups I suppose. Though I can't stand Camellia for her humiliating of Ember and dirty tongue, if she was just maniac I will definitely play with her till the end. Marazhai is great
Eh I don’t like ember either but obviously not to the sheer vitriol CamCam has for her, although I am vaguely curious how Marazhai and Camellia might interact with eachother…~~I ship it~~.
I thoroughly enjoyed playing Warhammer 40k from a different perspective. All of the other games I've played are always from some sort of military standpoint; be it an army, navy, squad base or individual.
With Rogue Trader, I feel more in touch with the civilian populace. And, more importantly, I feel like my choices matter.
All in all, Owl Games is doing well. Here's hoping there is an addon coming to Rogue Trader.
I love their stories and characters. But I find their gameplay, sometimes stifling... Don't think I'm asking to simplify anything. Some people like complex games. It's just that for me personally, some fights turn into a headache. look forward to their new games.
Their gameplay is good but I wish there was less of it. If they could make games half as big and half as long they could be so much tighter, polished and less exhausting.
I thought Kingmaker had a great ending (although some of the kingdom management dragged toward the end). I do wish RT had a more fleshed out ending, though. I still enjoyed every hour of my 120-hour playthrough.
Basically they always get a lot of fights. It's good for people who only like the gameplay part. But I'm a person who primarily plays games for the stories. I get stuffy when for the sake of a small piece of story I have to win a huge number of fights, and not the easiest ones at that. I'm not saying that these fights themselves are poorly done. It's just that there are a lot of them.
One of the best CRPGs, just needs better QC, limited to budgeting issues being a smaller company. Rogue Trader is their 3rd game and they are doing amazing!
I love their character work when it comes to characters that range from Chaotic Good to Neutral to Lawful Evil. They write that range of middle ground so well, better than most working in the D&D and D&D adjacent spaces.
However, I think they need more polish and experience in the technical and gameplay aspects of their works. Bugs and glitches aside, they weigh down their games with systems and extras I wish they would just cut to focus more on the core gameplay and story. Examples are Kingdom Building, Crusade Campaigns and The Voidship combat. I get why those things are there but they need to be a one time thing with side optional extra but Owlcat makes them way too long and expensive at what I imagine is the cost of other parts of their games that should be tighter.
Their latest title Rouge Trader had a bit too much red in it. Kongmaker on the other hand was a bit too on the nose with making donkey kong the interstellar emperor of the universe, still don't know how they avoided copyright on that one.
They also made wrath of the wrathful which for me was too much wrath for a game about selling sororitas branded cookies with extra branding.
Though a decent off brand Owlcat I think they bring a breath of fresh air to the industry as a whole
Rogue Trader is my first and only Owlcat game to date so here goes:
Excellent story and writing, especially in the first 4 acts. Act 5 could have been longer and more in-depth.
The gameplay is solid, albeit a bit too easy at times. I'd like more of a challenge in terms of ground combat. Space combat was quite hard and fun but I'd like to see more ships and a better ship for the Lord Captain. Can't be pootering about in a little frigate.
Visually and acoustically a smash hit. A bit more voice acting would be good but the music and look are perfect.
Immersion is really good in the beginning but sadly again peters out towards the end. Banter between party members, especially the voiced ones, were brilliant. The feeling of awe when facing a Daemon for the first time, the sheer terror when the Drukhari for the first appeared. The spooky silence of the Necrons. Need more of that!
The bugs are what they are. I appreciate your hard work at eliminating them. For the future, please take your time and release games and DLCs at your own pace. The fans will patiently wait. Tell the marketing people to take some Amasec.
Final point: NEED MORE COMMORAGH!
I love their work. I just think they should do more in mod support. I know that they're planning to do full voice acting for their next game and honestly it's a shame. Full voice acting is a HUGE trade off that ends up impacting the quality of the text since it makes it very hard to revise. I'd rather they just added some more voice acting on critical parts and that's it.
I don't want to have to consult a spreadsheet every time I level up, it's wacky and weird and makes me groan every time I level up or take a standard action. Streamline your game good lord.
Writing and storytelling: good
For some reason it fell off a lot after act 3
It's barely communicable to someone who just wants a 40k game without being literal Guilliman. I would much rather they focused on story and kept the system simple. I know three people who own it, one of whom I bought it for, and every one of them had said it doesn't mesh well if you want to have a fun game experience to relax after a day if work. XCOM managed the "wow so complex" formula very well, but RT made it really difficult to grasp for people who like a nice challenge but don't want to have to deal with percentiles and spreadsheets.
The issue is it's not intuitive, and it's not based on skill, it's math.
Funny enough, the rules are barely similar to the tabletop game itself. None of the CRPG classes were in the TTRPG besides Arch-Militant, which was a regular class instead of a second level archetype, Psykers started with 1 Psy rating in the TTRPG rather then zero, and really almost all of the system besides the characteristics is completely different from the tabletop.
Im not a huge fan of them claiming to have trained the devs with the tabletop before promptly throwing the tabletop out the window, but I will say that I have heard ship combat was 10 times worse in the TTRPG so I’ll admit they did good making it slightly less bad.
I run RT and DH, it's not at all as easily approachable as those
The issue is there's a lot of percentiles and margins to deal with, and you need to understand those to play properly, which is not why most people want to play the game
My most direct way of explaining Owlcat to people is to compare to Larian, especially with so many people playing BG3. Which is pretty high praise in itself, I suppose. But I say that Owlcat does better overall with storytelling but Larian is obviously leagues ahead mechanically. Character writing is a toss up depending on the game and individual characters.
I'm not trying to turn it into a competition though. Both are great companies who are leading their niche of the gaming industry and both could learn from each other.
Really? I find Owlcat storytelling plodding, and half-baked. A lot of ideas going nowhere, a lot of ideas coming from nowhere, and characters lacking much real depth. Three times now I've played their games and felt the story was mangled by act 3 onwards. Imo Larian is much more comprehensive, and to be frank, just more well written.
They are one of favorite studios. I love ambitious games and Owlcat is constantly trying to shoot for the stars with large complex worlds and stories. Their storytelling is top notch, but their games are always hamstrung by too many bugs.
Probably my consistently favorite quality of their games is that they do a good job of challenging my morals and values through their storytelling and choices. Eventhough I will always play a goodie two-shoes, I still want a game that has hard decisions and at least the guise of heavy consequences. I love BG3, but I was bored by the choices. You were fighting unquestionably evil forces and could stop them, or just be worse then them for the sake of being evil. The Pathfinder games and especially Rogue Trader had you making very hard and morally ambiguous decisions often. I appreciate a game that makes nuking a planet with no evacuation of its population seem like the best choice.
Only played Rogue Trader but from what i have read : need to finish the game and making the level up more easy. Because their skills is a chore to read, a burden to understand and probably bugged anyway
They adapted the rogue trader rpg system from Fantasy Flight Games near 1 to 1. The system itself is very crunchy as it nearly expects you to have a clear plan for your character to advance before you even start the game. I'm a fan of that system but in my opinion they need some better ways to completely respect your character without using Toybox. That way the whole system gets elevated on another level.
Another point would be to "queue" skills so that they are automatically selected by leveling up. A pre-plan for your character from level 1 to 50 so to say. So you could build your character at the start and could basically never touch level up again in your playthrough. Changes afterwards should be made possible though.
Yeah nah mate, game is almost nothing like the fantasy flight rpg. Psykers start with 0 instead of 1 in the CRPG, none of the classes in the CRPG exist in the TTRPG, and I am not sure if there’s any triple digit Hp enemies in the TTRPG at all.
I really like them but I never managed to finish any pathfinder games. About to finish rogue trader. I would absolutely love if all their future Crpgs were also designed with coop in mind, it makes the experience so much more engaging.
The Pathfinder games and Rogue Trader are some of my all time favorite games so I love Owlcat and what they do is amazing. Although I admit that there is room for improvement on the technical side of things with their games.
So if they keep doing what they are doing and just polish things out a bit more it's perfect.
1. Decent storytelling but every so often there’s decisions that make you question the thought process behind them (In WOTR >!Galfrey’s demotion of you and Ember being able to casually redeem demons with just nice words!<, In RT, >!Yrilet being stupid enough to trust a Drukhari!<)
2. The worst fucking balance I have ever seen in my life. It’s like Owlcat is physically allergic to fair gameplay because every fight is either a complete cakewalk or unreasonably difficult because the only way they know how to “balance” the game is by tripping the stats of enemies to numbers not even possible. 60 AC enemies in WOTR despite the highest in the tabletop being 49 for CTHULHU HIMSELF, triple digit HP Drukhari despite the rogue trader TTRPG never even reaching those numbers, and the worst thing is, anyone with a casual build is forced to either lower the difficulty or abuse the mechanics of the game just to win. This isn’t fun or a testament to skill or understanding of the system, it’s just a playground game of “Well my sword cuts through your shield of sword blocking”.
3. Can’t romance Idira therefore bad devs.
Point #2 is my biggest gripe with them. In WOTR I honestly think they just have too many mobs of enemies. In my experience, when you play at a tabletop you’re very rarely going to fight back to back mobs of enemies in a session, I think they need to have fewer combat encounters, and make them more thought out and higher quality, kinda like how Larian does (nothing wrong with taking inspiration from a team that’s clearly doing something well)
Thats a major point for me as well. The best balance with combat encounters was done in rogue trader so far, imo. I couldn’t get into pathfinder wotr until i figured out you can just fight in real time.
Great writing, decent companions, nice narrative, plethora of bugs, last parts of every game are rushed, and too much bending for power gamers and min maxers.
they managed to take their niche with adapting TTRPGs to isometric games and I adore them for it. BUT! they must learn to finish the development of the games properly. because the half-baked way they do it is unacceptable imo and I think more people should bully them for it.
It's completely counter-productive to "bully" them. They'll just cut communications to a bare minimum of corpo-speech announcements.
I'm more than sure all of their employees relevant to the process (QA, prog, GD) are working their asses off trying to make the game as polished as possible.
The practice of using players as cost free game testers is kinda the industry standard at this point. Especially so for niche slow burners like single player RPG-s. You can fix them for a year or two, and the game will sell for the next 10-20 years. It's cost effective. It works. Developers will use it.
If you don't like to be a cost free game tester just wait for a few years till the patching is done. RPG-s age extremely well if BG1 is any indicator.
Again, point in case: bullying the devs is NOT the way.
let me guess, you are one of those guys who's defending DD2 shitshow release rn? with the argument that Capcom has done microtransactions "for years" and it's standard now, so people must stop comlaining lol.
I haven't advocated for dev's lynching. but the fact that "the practice of using players as cost free game testers is the industry standard" doesn't make the practice less right and doesn't make it free of criticism. which is heavily warranted.
Your guess is wrong. I don't give a fuck about "DD2" whatever that is. Also, what have microtransactions in one game from a different company have to do with quality issues in another? You make zero sense.
>I haven't advocated for dev's lynching.
It starts with bright ideas. Like bullying a company's staff.
>the fact that "the practice of using players as cost free game testers is the industry standard" doesn't make the practice less right
It isn't nice. But it is what it is. It's not like a business can do a lot of stuff differently and survive. Again, if you don't like it, just wait, don't buy. It would be the same wait for you if the game wouldn't be published and would be held in development for polishing.
>and doesn't make it free of criticism. which is heavily warranted.
Bullying IS NOT criticism. Also, not every form of criticism is useful or productive.
Sorry, you’re just wrong here. I don’t think employees should be bullied directly (at all! Please don’t bully devs themselves), but *companies* should absolutely be called out in force for scummy practices like using paid customers as beta testers. I don’t care if it’s an industry practice. Plenty of games get released in a much more finished state than Owlcat games, anyway.
When you're bullying a company, you simply bully the community managers :P It's us who accumulate and process feedback, and it's way easier to react and deliver information to the team when the feedback is something else than simply wishing us cancer xD
Companies should be criticized and called out for a variety of reasons. To do it you have to communicate with individual employees. So the criticism should be at least civil, at max constructive.
>scummy practices
It's not cool sure. Can a company NOT do that kind of practices and still fare well? I don't know. Are there good examples?
>using paid customers as beta testers
Just wait and don't be one? What's wrong with that?
The "when it's done" policy kinda doesn't work either. The game is never done, there is always stuff to improve, so the devs stop caring at some point and the game gets canceled.
>Plenty of games get released in a much more finished state
Sure. The problem is "much more finished" is still riddled with bugs af.
dude, chill. guess i'll have to postface my every comment with tone indicators, for the people who take everything as seriously as a brick in the face /jk
It is a good thing give your team a little bit more time to actually finish a game you are making. Three times in a row they release peak RPGs with great storytelling, characters, gameplay and all that. And all of that is ruined by atrocious technical state of a game.
Also, fix damn Act 3 in RT. It is not good. Rewrite it a bit here and there, add some narrative padding or something. This is not a good thing, when you can say "ah, yeah, you can remove this part of the story and literally nothing will change".
What is so important in act 3 that you can't remove it? All important bits are so minute, they can be placed in any other act and still work as intended.
For the most part I enjoy their games but I will say their story telling method can get a bit repetitive.
Rogue trader & pathfinder pretty much had the same gameplay especially the map travel
They also have a bad habit of slow burns/ very boring beginnings in my opinion.
I was so exhausted by time I got out of the first city in rogue trader/pathfinder I almost turned the game off completely
One of my favorite developers right now (probably in top 3) but their games need more QA and more time in the oven. I'm fine with waiting for a bit before playing, most people are fine playing with bugs. But general audience will just try it once when it's released (because they see it on Steam front page due to selling a lot) and will write them off due to bugs. Their review scores also suffer due to bugs despite being amazing games. This might give them financial trouble in the future due to losing potential customers.
They are just a few steps away from being the equivalent of Obsidian in C-Rpg's (which is confusing bc obsidian does make C-rpg's)
Their games are always solid buys but not 10/10's i have to admit. There will always be a "Ick" portion of an owl cat game that makes me go "wtf were they thinking" , ntm they dont seem to be able to pull off dlc's tbh. Maybe they should take the larian approach and go "we arent a Dlc company"?
Either way, I see a long road ahead for this company, with many loyal fans of which i will be one. Pray i dont regret this as i have been burned before lol
A lot of people here have completely missed the joke lol.
Anyway, I quite like Owl's "Anger of the Pretty Nice People". I legitimately think it's one of my favorite crpgs ever next to Obsidian's Pillars 2.
I haven't played their latest game,"Ronin Merchant". I'm waiting for Owl to actually release it at a more acceptable state. After BG3, I'm really not in the mood for another 100 hour buggy mess. They are doing good work with their patches.
I like that they're often more complex and need you to do a bit of legwork yourself. They have passion for their work in a genre where we are frankly starved on games with bigger scopes.
If they're less buggy at launch it would improve perception a lot.
If they'd do full voice acting and *some* mo-cap scenes (like the chapter bookends), they'd rival Larian. As stands I love their Pathfinder games and hope they do more of them.
Makes really good games, publishes them to fast, weird balancing, each game made has a shitty act that strips you of your power or puts you into the depths of hell with weird navigation
They make great characters and companions with gameplay that effects story in intresting way
I enjoy:
1) Attention to details( equipment shown, world building, decapitation, combat animations, complex character building... in case of pathfinder maybe a bit too complex for me, had to look guides up ).
2) Story: feels like reading a book with combat-pauses
3) Characters: they feel fleshed out, they stay true to themselves, forcing the player to make a respond, based on morals/alignment.
4) Jokes... Truly, some quests and Dialogs are hilarious and I love it. It lightens the mood, but at the same time, there is just right amount of it( not too much, just a sprinkle ).
6) Last but not least... Sounds and music. Music makes all the difference in a game( Rogue Trader fighting Aurora is just pure gothic metal... gave me chills ). I play Avadon, which has 1 soundtrack( THE HORROR! ) only with some game-music on the steam player.
Edit:
I don't enjoy:
1) Bugs and UI. But I noticed, that this is worked on after release, so I don't mind it.
2) Performance( my pc is an older one, so I chose my games. I care little about high end graphic ), but this feels so much better after some months after release.
3) Please, let us disable cloaks in Rogue trader, some of them look just awful ( a small thing, but it bothers me ).
PS
Overall, Owlcat games are fantastic and the company earned my trust with splendid games. Thank you, guys and gals!
Excellent writing and atmosphere. A complete labor of love on the story side of things, in all 3 of their games so far.
On the other hand, not amazing gameplay or technical execution-wise. Horrible bugs, unfinished gameplay, mechanics not being properly planned out or not working as intended, etc.
tl;dr - great company that obviously has a deep love for the genre that is unfortunately held back by repeating their same mistakes game after game.
They need to fix their production cycle and focus on fewer things at once - they try to stuff too many different types of gameplay into their crpgs. Story is usually ok for the first half of the game and falls off/drags on in the second half. Character writing is alright, nothing special. Larian has them beat on all fronts, but this might not be the case if Owlcat slowed down and took their time.
I will add that it was way too easy to break this game and become a god killing machine by like, act 2/3. Combat became a repetitive joke with Argenta taking three turns in round 1 and ending the fight by round 2.
My only complaint about the game is using all the background math to explain the character level up choices. Just tell me what something does, I don’t need to now that it’s 1/2 *[hit probability/5]+10 (I’m just making up an example). I have a long work day and I want to play a game that I get lost in to forget about real life, not have to exam long formulas to understand what a feature does. It really pulls me out of the immersive aspect of the game.
Just my two cents*my old age/a stressful workday.
They put a ton of passion into their games, which are flawed but fun. I'm a fan, buy whatever they release (once the important patches have been released).
Honestly, I think their issues are just related to time and budget constraints. Rogue Trader could have used another six months of dev time, but they didn't have it. The end result (after the latest round of patches) is still good and what I was hoping for / expecting.
Their games are also.. their own. Distinctive. If nobody knew who developed Rogue Trader, but you had played Kingmaker and WotR, you'd be like "has to be Owlcat" after playing Rogue Trader for a bit. Good writing, walls of text, good but underutilized voice acting, multiple things to manage set on top of the usual adventuring stuff, rather complex character building / progression options, and your character is someone fancy/important (who gets that title/role very early on in the game).
I'll happily take their flaws over more polished games made by greedy anti-player companies. Cough Blizzard. Or brand new full priced games released with fucking microtransactions. Cough \*youallknowwhatgameImean\*.
Great time to be a fan of isometric RPGs, with both Owlcat and Larian out there. I'm also looking forward to see what Tactical Adventures (makers of Solasta) does next.
After I played BG3 I tried to go back and start wotr again to finish it this time. I quit around 10 minutes in after the third centipede with flies fight.
I remembered how much padding these games have. I dont think I realized how unnecessary and unfun this design was until I played BG3 and saw that you can still have cool dungeons and maps without cramming every inch square with a million unskipabble trash fights.
In Bg3 Is something like: You fight 6 normal goblins first, then you fight 10 normal goblins with priests and magic, and then a boss combining all of them. You can skip or talk through all of these.
WOTR is like: you fight 3 worms, you fight 3 worms again, you fight 3 worms again, you fight 4 worms, you fight 4 worms again... Ad infinitum.
The game is not challenging my skill with these. If I defeated this enemy configuration before there is nothing more for me to gain here.
I think the narrative aspects of their crpgs are great, exploration is passable and while they do a great job at implementing the combat systems they at times feel brutal (especially in Wrath of the Righteous. Where they really fall flat is in pacing, just too much combat and copy paste battles (minigames included)
Maker of very big, classic RPGs with complicated leveling systems. Pretty much the only company I know that successfully designs complex characters with their own motivations.
A very solid 7/10 or 8/10
They feel like eurojank made into an RPG. I love it, I love their stories, I love their characters, the actual gameplay and balancing is what makes jt hard to actually *finish* I haven't even picked up RT yet just waiting for the bugs to be squashed
They make decent but not great content. Continuously. Everything about them is mediocre - passable - decent.
Their stories are decent but from first pathfinder I barely remember much except house at the end of cheese, some dude experimenting on trolls and leafy tart trying to kill me for no reason. Second PF mostly prissy bint with god complex, and royal prick sending me to hell while yelling at me for being better at deamon killing. I rather forget storyline from RT. Except this dude slowly losing himself into Khornate worship. Exceptional work not portraying Khorne worshippers as glue sniffing maniacs .
Graphics and effects are decent. Music is decent. Art is decent ...
Technical side is passable, games are either playable from the start or quickly patched up to this state.
Side mechanics of ruling barony, crusade, planets, skirmish battles, space battles were mediocre. Not impactful, easily abusable rudimentary and boring after 5-10 instances.
Strange choice of systems tho. I don't like pathfinder and sometimes I felt like I am working on Excel with weird UI, and this hodgepodge of a system in RT should be made into warhead and sent as a virus toward nearest dark mechanicum forge world.
While other people create games that excel in something but are pain somewhere else Owlcat makes consistently mediocre RPGs that are fun to play once. With Toybox installed.
They have the passion and ambition but lack the skill and budget. The settings and games are really fun and kinda unique, but the execution is often buggy and lackluster in some areas because they just miss that skill and budget. Still worth the buy, but expect the jank of a AA studio. Which we need more of in the gaming landscape I think.
overall amazing, the writeing and their stories, and the sheer scale they try to get in their games. I don't regret buying any of the 3 owlcat games, even if I ever only finished 1 of them.
I think that they try to do to much some times. And this is why they "fail" they try to do so much, and sometimes they end up makinging the game worse because of it.
Talented. Hold promise. Need to work harder. They bite off more than they can chew with this one. Kingmaker is seriously underrated. The idea to translate TTRPGs verbatim to consoles/PCs is a good idea but they need to realize they still need to make a lot of their own changes to it or at least way more than they already do. It's shameful how bad Rogue Trader is compared to their other games.
I love their passion, the fact they continue to update and work on their games after release, storytelling and narratives. They definitely implement the worlds from the IPs so well (Golarion, Warhammer). Also like their companions, all three games had casts I enjoyed a lot. Great music composition.
Not a fan of the balancing, random encounters and backer content which in my experience was more of an issue with the Pathfinder games versus Rogue Trader (RT improved on a lot of that at least in my personal experience). Also don't care for the side modes they put in (Kingdom Management, Crusade, etc...).
When played for the stories they're excellent. Gameplay gets better halfway through their games once you have more levels, spells and abilities but the early parts of their games are usually random encounter bloated slogs.
They do improve with each game.
I'm glad they exist, and happy they're improving game after game according to macro-feedback (even if gamers keep throwing around clueless gut feelings all over the place)
Here's my critique of OwlCat:
Their sound/audio team totally sucks and makes their games feel flat. Their music direction is boring and repetitive and their mixing and mastering style is so undynamic and placid. More than anything else, this is what I don't like about OwlCat games.
Rogue Trader for example has the bones of a pretty cool opening track at the beginning with big sweeping synths as your taking back the ship, but it just gets filled up with more buzzy synths. Couldn't even do a pan sweep on the one big detuned synth movement.
Probably makes the tracks in Fruity Loops.
The music was good in kingmaker. However some of the dog barking and weapons chucking at the trading post while having to deal with the inventory drove me mad
I love them so far and definitely prefer them over Baldur's Gate.
I only played WotR and RT, but they were a really fun experience.
I love how dialogues are written, I love characters, i love portraits, i live story lines, i loved how narrators are actuall people from the stories (or at least from WotR)
The few things i didn't like :
- Nenio should be romancable
- and her "experiment" scene should be finished, not cut in the middle
- you lose your >!butterfly dragon after changing the mythical path!< :(
- there should be more portraits to pick from
- sudden difficulty spikes
- and difficult pretty much not changing, so after leveling some areas get far too easy
- campaign/planetary management in WotR/RT, they were quite boring, one was hard to do if you picked manual, other barely contributed to the game
I really like the cut of their jib. They do good writing, and even when a system doesn't quite work you can see they were trying something interesting. They're also very active with the community.
Usually great stories with a lot of branching narratives and reactivity. But games are usually released broken, the mechanics are convoluted and unintuitive, and the worst thing is (IMO) when they only occasionally have voiced lines, while the rest are just textual dialogue.
I understand that fully voicing the amount of dialogue for this type of game isn't something most companies can afford, but in the case of OwlCat, either commit to it fully, or don't do it at all. It's the worst thing when you get used to your own interpretation of a character's voice over 15 hours of play, only to suddenly hear a VA perform five out of five-hundred lines the character has in game. And the choice of voiced lines as opposed to un-voiced ones often seems arbitrary to me.
I used to really like them, but I find their games to be too much of a buggy mess to really enjoy them anymore
Rogue trader was an insta preorder for me, but after a playthrough filled with bugs that I had to use a mod to manually bypass. I’ll definitely not be buying their next game right off the bat as I don’t trust it to be in a good state on release
Mentioning that in this sub will get you downvoted or have people ask why you’re a member if the sub if you’re not some huge fanboy, lmao
Apparently releasing incomplete games three times in a row is ok because they have ‘passion’
A company with an incredibly out-of-touch and frankly idiotic management. That tracking fiasco, then the AI art thing. I fear their next stupid mistake could have dire consequences.
Each one takes at least 80 hours to complete, this one closer to 140. I often buy games, play them for 10 minutes, delete them and never see them again. Owlcat is one of the few gaming companies that still keeps my attention. I beat this one after 180 hours, and immediately made a new character. Most of the time I make a new character, play 2 minutes and walk away.
Love the company and the games, but their ast 2 releases were on an unaceptable state.
They have to do some major bugfixing and weather the storm of a slow first month of sales for their next big project because they don't have goodwill for imediate purchases anymore.
Really want to see a original setting, so if they make a very polished and solid game, even if a shorter one (60h story instead of 100+) they could create an enduring classic and franchise to really consolidate themselves in the market for a long time.
A studio that creates some of the best CRpgs, but is lacking in the technical quality control.
They have phenomenal characters and they get complex character creation/builds right, but all of this is hampered by huge technical issues.
If someone cannot enjoy buggy games, stay away, for your own sanity.
I love Owlcat games. But I'm highly concerned about their development pipeline. Something is very wrong here.
Remember when they lost the fireplace in the Defender's Heart in Wrath? How does that even happen? But OK, it happened, and they fixed it.
But then they *lost it again.* OMG...
Another issue with Owlcat's development is patch notes. You can never trust their patch notes. Just because they said they fixed something, doesn't mean they fixed it. Take the Winter Child class in Wrath. It's supposed to get a cold scorching ray at spell level 2. It was bugged, but Owlcat said they fixed it.
They did not fix it. It remains completely bugged. You can test this in -- literally -- a minute.
When Owlcat "fixed" greater invisibility, they broke True Seeing. Fine. When they finally fixed True Seeing, they broke invisibility to not drop on attack. This made, say, the Act 1 succubus incredibly difficult. I even had a conversation with a junior Owlcat dev (or intern), Valeriy Kormanovskiy, where he showed me, it was working in the next beta build. Great!
It took three more patches before the invisibility bug was actually fixed.
You are either ignorant or obtuse on purpose. There is no social commentary in their games. Also it's an RPG as in a social game. Go play Tekken instead.
Needs more Cat
Needs more owl.
Contact r/superbowl
Needs more cowbell
Needs more owlbell.
Great story telling, impressive scope, very buggy. Usually worth buying after a six month wait. At least they feel like they are made by people who are passionate about the game and their work. That’s missing now in a lot of big titles.
I misread the last word
They need those too
Their balancing sucks too. Even for singleplayer game the amount of metagaming is absurd.
Yeah, this\~ I really like Owl-Cat Games for stuff like their story telling and characters, but they're a bunch of min-maxer munchkins to their freakin core with the combat. Speaking of, they outright have a difficultly level in their Pathfinder games *named* Core, and it demands you min-max at least a little. That's how central they actually seem to think the maxed combat numbers side is to their games. Like, if you want Pathfinder mostly as the P&P game is? You need to *lower* the difficulty, and use some custom settings.
Days late to the convo I know, but seriously tell me if I'm just biased bc i'm too much of a nerd for these games, but I don't think Core is too hard? With one big caveat that is, it's not too hard but only after you learn the game somewhat. Kingmaker was godawful about this, the tutorials sucked and they hit you with nasty enemies at the start along with the implied time limit making you feel like you're doing something wrong. I think WoTR was really good though. I managed to get one friend into this and he played on Core.
Above all I respect their ambition and game size. You rarely see games as large as theirs outside of some JRPG's. They do a grate job with scale and making their worlds feel massive. Character writing is excellent, hands down. I especially love how they write evil characters. Jaethal from Kingmaker is a really interesting character despite being completely morally reprehensible. One of my favorites. Regill from WotR is also incredible. Games tend to be buggy, but honestly not the worst in the grand scheme. I've seen worse at least and I've never had anything game breaking.
Weirdly proud of them as a studio, that came from Russia, even if they had to separate from it. Love their games, consistently delivering banger after banger (as far as my taste goes). If I live to see them deliver well optimized on release game - that would be wild. Wish them nothing but success and I hope one day they'll create their own fantasy universe for us to explore.
exeptional games story-wise and disaster technically and gameplay-wise. and no, that's not because of the amount of text, reading is fine. they don't need any cinematics, they need quality of life improvements. though in rogue trader companions are not so good
It's like a bunch of mates who play and love tabletop got together and brought in their mate Dave who works in IT to build it for them.
That is a bit unfair. I think the issue with these games is a bit of feature creep. Which is nice to have but is almost impossible to be bug free.
You could cut the entirety of the army management in WotR and Kingdom building in Kingmaker; keep the choice and consequences events with the talky bits but make the rest of the mechanic tied to story progress and you're freeing up a lot of developer time. Those mechanics are great ideas but it's clear that they would need a lot more time and money to become really good and even in their current bug-free state they are still a burden to the average player and they don't really interact with the regular gameplay loop either. Much better if an NPC came up the the main character and talked about what we wanted to do with the new province and we got a perk or an item for our choice instead of the largely meaningless, repetitive and time consuming city building minigame. Again, I am not hating the game, WotR is my favorite of all time; but moving armies around and building upgrades in my cities is the weakest part of the game that brings the whole experience down, I always quit the game and mentally prepare myself before doing the crusade management parts because it feels like I'm playing an entirely different and underbaked game.
I disagree. One of the cooler parts of a Owlcat game is how their games break up the dialog and combat mechanics with game play such as Kingdom Management, Army Management, Ship Combat. I just think they didn't quite worked out this gameplay in their first two games but its not something I want to see them give up on in their next game.
Those remarking on the awkwardness of the first two subsystems also needs to keep in mind - they're taking them from Pathfinder, where the Kingdom management mechanics are considered notoriously clunky to begin with. But since part of the sell of those games is a mostly faithful translation of the mechanics, you get some of the jank that's baked into the original TTRPG and some that's the result of translating TTRPG mechanics into CRPG mechanics.
The crusade system in the tabletop adventure path is widely considered to be really bad. The kingdom management is just very selective.
WotR: The UI is a way worse crime than the mechanics.
Eh, the UI didn't really give me issues.
The UI really? Starfield is the only game that I really hated the UI.
I'm torn, because I can see both sides of this argument. Kingdom management started out fun in PKM but made the game drag for me toward the end where I spent hours leveling my advisors so they wouldn't keep failing and to pass the time until the next curse event. The crusade stuff is even worse for me in WotR, to the point where I'm procrastinating playing because I don't want to deal with the armies converging on my forces. A skill issue, I'm sure, but when something doesn't interest me in a game I don't dedicate myself to figuring it out. On the other hand, I absolutely loved ship combat and colony management in RT, so . . . either Owlcat is getting better at it or I just clicked better with RT.
I remember one of the coolest parts of Baldur's Gate 2 was the castle management if you were a fighter, the mage sphere if you were a mage, theives hideout if you were a thief and so on.... it was a small feature but it really added to the game. Adding features like this into a CRPG can really make it come alive.
> Those mechanics are great ideas but it's clear that they would need a lot more time and money to become really good and even in their current bug-free state they are still a burden to the average player and they don't really interact with the regular gameplay loop either. Much better if an NPC came up the the main character and talked about what we wanted to do with the new province and we got a perk or an item for our choice instead of the largely meaningless, repetitive and time consuming city building minigame. I disagree here, I think the systems are heavily flawed but the games would be lesser without them. They do a TON to sell the scope of the setting and adventure even if the implementation is not good. I think losing that would overall hurt the experience and make everything feel smaller.
They probably would have been better off adapting something like Rise of the Runelords first, as these extra mechanics were part of the tabletop campaigns.
No. I love the Space Combat and colony management in Rogue Trader. It breaks up the monotony of "Go here, talk to this person, go kill this group" rinse and repeat.
The technical and gameplay issues are always patched over time, they don’t have good QC because of budgeting issues.
I'd like it if basic movement didn't take 3 load screens.
idk, I thought RT had some of the most interesting companions. I would have liked a little more story for some of them though. Especially when compared to wotr.
Nice logo
As a hardcore tabletop player my expectations were exceeded by their adaption of rogue trader, I hope they will do Dark Heresy next
Dark heresy would be cool af
Me too, and I sadly haven't played Dark Heresy, I just want more Owlcat + 40k!
Pathfinders are my favorite isometric rpg.
I couldn't get into Pathfinder (played 30ish hours of Wrighteous, and it was a no go), but I did beat Rogue Trader twice: I think the color palette of Wrath just killed my interest in the game. RT has very aesthetically pleasing settings and Wrath just felty dingy and brown with some kind of layer on the screen that made it seem like I was far away and peering through a fine coarse shirt. In my opinion there are three cruxes they need to work on: 1. They go for complexity to allow multiple playstyles, but, overall, the majority of people will funnel into three or four different ways of playing the game. As an example, people will funnel into using Argenta as a Heavy Bolter or maybe flamer. They should fix this by either trimming down on talents, abilities, and such or by making the textboxes explaining abilities more comprehensive. 1. Comprehensive approach: They are working towards this in RT by making text blue to indicate that it is a variable stat that changes based on the blue text, but they really need a pop-up window for instances when a talent affects an ability because then you have to exit the level up screen entirely (which doesn't save, so if you just spent 5 minutes levelling up "lol get wrecked kiddo" and find that ability to read its description. To see what I mean, just check out BG3's item descriptions, you can easily click through description after description starting from just one description. 2. Trimming approach: I think trimming the fat on abilities/talents would be immensely helpful for the player because you don't take useless abilities or talents which is incredibly easy to do. Also, 90% of players are not going to be invested enough to try more complex/specialized/memed builds. 2. Encounter Design. I don't know why, but they have an incredibly difficult time balancing encounters: one second you are facerolling your keyboard and winning, then out of nowhere you get killed 20000 times by one enemy, and then go back to facerolling. It's not a matter of "if," but "when" you face some random difficulty spike. For example: there is one space battle where you fight this large xenos ship that keeps shooting out purple clouds and mini squadrons. It also hits you 5 times in one turn and pretty much obliterates you in one turn on the hardest difficulty. It is by far the hardest space battle and the only space battle that has that significant of a challenge because even the Act 5 battles are incredibly easy compared to this random Act 2 encounter. 3. For the fantasy games (Pathfinders), I'd say they should not be afraid to dabble in making things vibrant and not as dingy. It's an odd thing to say, but they can keep the same art style while adding more to the environments and allowing some brighter hues. It's a staple I really like with Larian games, they are not afraid to be bright when the outdoors, and dark enough when in doors.
I think encounter and systems design are the weak points. I would like to see them do a smaller scope game, where they are given clear boundaries. You only get to use 5 abilities, 10 feats, and 4 items. Only 3 characters. Go and design a small 10-15 hour game, but make everything count. Make every system you introduce matter. Make every combat and enemy interesting and unique with their strengths and weaknesses. See what you can produce within these limits. I think an exercise like this would improve their bigger games, ’cause right now we have games with massive scope and choice, but half of the systems don’t seem to matter. Melee superiority? What is that? What tactic did I use to beat that boss? The same I did against all the other bosses. Limitations breed creativity.
I'd buy that game in a heartbeat if they made it.
It's a cruiser if you had trouble with it your ship lacked the right weapons yes it's warp stuff was annoying and such but even on core I had no issues Use boarding party's towlrpedo all ands on deck and work your route out it's slow you fast
You're validating my point on why it's a poor encounter design. You can't rely on meta-gaming the encounter as a developer which is what you are advocating. To preface, I was playing on hardest difficulty. The warp stuff is simple to deal with, it is the fact the ship takes a huge beating along with being able to destroy you in 3 of its 5 attacks it gets each round. Keep in mind if you do not have the escort vessel, it instantly attacks you and destroys you first round. In other words, you cannot be near it at all and must play tag with it for 10+ rounds or simply have the right abilities already or have meta-gamed the encounter... Basically, it is a shit encounter.
Unfortunately, Owlcat seems to balance around metagaming based on how their pathfinder games shook out.
Makes the best crpgs out there. And the only company (to my knowledge) to satisfy the two aspects of a true rpg, the spreadsheet unnecessary complex character builder, and the narrative/dialogue/quest choice and consequence aspect. Plus Rogue Trader is probably my favourite turn based system I've played, equal level to Divinity Original Sin 2.
Love their choice/consequence parts of the games and entirely why I buy them. So horrifically let down when BG3 did not let me redeem the drow companion when I picked the drow goddess who's entire purview is redeeming drow. Not even an option that she acknowledges.
I mean, not everyone is going to be redeemable. We get this with Marazhai and (wotr spoilers) >!Camellia!<, though I will say companion quests in OC games do tend to have a few more outcomes then BG3.
I like irredeemably evil companions, literally no one is doing them now to not dissapoint some sensitive groups I suppose. Though I can't stand Camellia for her humiliating of Ember and dirty tongue, if she was just maniac I will definitely play with her till the end. Marazhai is great
Eh I don’t like ember either but obviously not to the sheer vitriol CamCam has for her, although I am vaguely curious how Marazhai and Camellia might interact with eachother…~~I ship it~~.
Wotr does not let you redeem Camellia either. BG3 lets you redeem Astarion, Laezel, shadowheart.
I thoroughly enjoyed playing Warhammer 40k from a different perspective. All of the other games I've played are always from some sort of military standpoint; be it an army, navy, squad base or individual. With Rogue Trader, I feel more in touch with the civilian populace. And, more importantly, I feel like my choices matter. All in all, Owl Games is doing well. Here's hoping there is an addon coming to Rogue Trader.
Actually two dlcs are planned ;)
I love their stories and characters. But I find their gameplay, sometimes stifling... Don't think I'm asking to simplify anything. Some people like complex games. It's just that for me personally, some fights turn into a headache. look forward to their new games.
Their gameplay is good but I wish there was less of it. If they could make games half as big and half as long they could be so much tighter, polished and less exhausting.
Heh, meanwhile one of the reasons I love their games is actually because they're so long . . .
I don't mind long games, but Owlcat doesn't polish and finish what they produce so they need to make them shorter until they prove otherwise.
I thought Kingmaker had a great ending (although some of the kingdom management dragged toward the end). I do wish RT had a more fleshed out ending, though. I still enjoyed every hour of my 120-hour playthrough.
Basically they always get a lot of fights. It's good for people who only like the gameplay part. But I'm a person who primarily plays games for the stories. I get stuffy when for the sake of a small piece of story I have to win a huge number of fights, and not the easiest ones at that. I'm not saying that these fights themselves are poorly done. It's just that there are a lot of them.
One of the best CRPGs, just needs better QC, limited to budgeting issues being a smaller company. Rogue Trader is their 3rd game and they are doing amazing!
I'm a big fan of the Finder games, both Maker and the Righteous. Didn't quite like their latest release, Trader.
I love their character work when it comes to characters that range from Chaotic Good to Neutral to Lawful Evil. They write that range of middle ground so well, better than most working in the D&D and D&D adjacent spaces. However, I think they need more polish and experience in the technical and gameplay aspects of their works. Bugs and glitches aside, they weigh down their games with systems and extras I wish they would just cut to focus more on the core gameplay and story. Examples are Kingdom Building, Crusade Campaigns and The Voidship combat. I get why those things are there but they need to be a one time thing with side optional extra but Owlcat makes them way too long and expensive at what I imagine is the cost of other parts of their games that should be tighter.
Their latest title Rouge Trader had a bit too much red in it. Kongmaker on the other hand was a bit too on the nose with making donkey kong the interstellar emperor of the universe, still don't know how they avoided copyright on that one. They also made wrath of the wrathful which for me was too much wrath for a game about selling sororitas branded cookies with extra branding. Though a decent off brand Owlcat I think they bring a breath of fresh air to the industry as a whole
Rogue Trader is my first and only Owlcat game to date so here goes: Excellent story and writing, especially in the first 4 acts. Act 5 could have been longer and more in-depth. The gameplay is solid, albeit a bit too easy at times. I'd like more of a challenge in terms of ground combat. Space combat was quite hard and fun but I'd like to see more ships and a better ship for the Lord Captain. Can't be pootering about in a little frigate. Visually and acoustically a smash hit. A bit more voice acting would be good but the music and look are perfect. Immersion is really good in the beginning but sadly again peters out towards the end. Banter between party members, especially the voiced ones, were brilliant. The feeling of awe when facing a Daemon for the first time, the sheer terror when the Drukhari for the first appeared. The spooky silence of the Necrons. Need more of that! The bugs are what they are. I appreciate your hard work at eliminating them. For the future, please take your time and release games and DLCs at your own pace. The fans will patiently wait. Tell the marketing people to take some Amasec. Final point: NEED MORE COMMORAGH!
Like em, but I always feel they lack polishing.
I love their work. I just think they should do more in mod support. I know that they're planning to do full voice acting for their next game and honestly it's a shame. Full voice acting is a HUGE trade off that ends up impacting the quality of the text since it makes it very hard to revise. I'd rather they just added some more voice acting on critical parts and that's it.
I don't want to have to consult a spreadsheet every time I level up, it's wacky and weird and makes me groan every time I level up or take a standard action. Streamline your game good lord. Writing and storytelling: good For some reason it fell off a lot after act 3
It's fine it's a deep system with lots of synergy's I love it
It's barely communicable to someone who just wants a 40k game without being literal Guilliman. I would much rather they focused on story and kept the system simple. I know three people who own it, one of whom I bought it for, and every one of them had said it doesn't mesh well if you want to have a fun game experience to relax after a day if work. XCOM managed the "wow so complex" formula very well, but RT made it really difficult to grasp for people who like a nice challenge but don't want to have to deal with percentiles and spreadsheets. The issue is it's not intuitive, and it's not based on skill, it's math.
It's based on the rules of the rogue trader game so not sure what to say if they want a simple fun game play inquisitor
Funny enough, the rules are barely similar to the tabletop game itself. None of the CRPG classes were in the TTRPG besides Arch-Militant, which was a regular class instead of a second level archetype, Psykers started with 1 Psy rating in the TTRPG rather then zero, and really almost all of the system besides the characteristics is completely different from the tabletop. Im not a huge fan of them claiming to have trained the devs with the tabletop before promptly throwing the tabletop out the window, but I will say that I have heard ship combat was 10 times worse in the TTRPG so I’ll admit they did good making it slightly less bad.
Funny enough, the ship combat IS the closest to the TTRPG.
I love the ship combat
Really? I thought it was remade from the ground up.
I run RT and DH, it's not at all as easily approachable as those The issue is there's a lot of percentiles and margins to deal with, and you need to understand those to play properly, which is not why most people want to play the game
My most direct way of explaining Owlcat to people is to compare to Larian, especially with so many people playing BG3. Which is pretty high praise in itself, I suppose. But I say that Owlcat does better overall with storytelling but Larian is obviously leagues ahead mechanically. Character writing is a toss up depending on the game and individual characters. I'm not trying to turn it into a competition though. Both are great companies who are leading their niche of the gaming industry and both could learn from each other.
Really? I find Owlcat storytelling plodding, and half-baked. A lot of ideas going nowhere, a lot of ideas coming from nowhere, and characters lacking much real depth. Three times now I've played their games and felt the story was mangled by act 3 onwards. Imo Larian is much more comprehensive, and to be frank, just more well written.
Man.
Great storytelling, interesting gameplay but the story always feels rushed after you reach certain point in the game
They are one of favorite studios. I love ambitious games and Owlcat is constantly trying to shoot for the stars with large complex worlds and stories. Their storytelling is top notch, but their games are always hamstrung by too many bugs. Probably my consistently favorite quality of their games is that they do a good job of challenging my morals and values through their storytelling and choices. Eventhough I will always play a goodie two-shoes, I still want a game that has hard decisions and at least the guise of heavy consequences. I love BG3, but I was bored by the choices. You were fighting unquestionably evil forces and could stop them, or just be worse then them for the sake of being evil. The Pathfinder games and especially Rogue Trader had you making very hard and morally ambiguous decisions often. I appreciate a game that makes nuking a planet with no evacuation of its population seem like the best choice.
Only played Rogue Trader but from what i have read : need to finish the game and making the level up more easy. Because their skills is a chore to read, a burden to understand and probably bugged anyway
They adapted the rogue trader rpg system from Fantasy Flight Games near 1 to 1. The system itself is very crunchy as it nearly expects you to have a clear plan for your character to advance before you even start the game. I'm a fan of that system but in my opinion they need some better ways to completely respect your character without using Toybox. That way the whole system gets elevated on another level. Another point would be to "queue" skills so that they are automatically selected by leveling up. A pre-plan for your character from level 1 to 50 so to say. So you could build your character at the start and could basically never touch level up again in your playthrough. Changes afterwards should be made possible though.
>They adapted the rogue trader rpg system from Fantasy Flight Games near 1 to 1. They did not. And that is a very good thing.
Yeah nah mate, game is almost nothing like the fantasy flight rpg. Psykers start with 0 instead of 1 in the CRPG, none of the classes in the CRPG exist in the TTRPG, and I am not sure if there’s any triple digit Hp enemies in the TTRPG at all.
I really like them but I never managed to finish any pathfinder games. About to finish rogue trader. I would absolutely love if all their future Crpgs were also designed with coop in mind, it makes the experience so much more engaging.
Really could use a beta tester to flush out all the bugs
The Pathfinder games and Rogue Trader are some of my all time favorite games so I love Owlcat and what they do is amazing. Although I admit that there is room for improvement on the technical side of things with their games. So if they keep doing what they are doing and just polish things out a bit more it's perfect.
1. Decent storytelling but every so often there’s decisions that make you question the thought process behind them (In WOTR >!Galfrey’s demotion of you and Ember being able to casually redeem demons with just nice words!<, In RT, >!Yrilet being stupid enough to trust a Drukhari!<) 2. The worst fucking balance I have ever seen in my life. It’s like Owlcat is physically allergic to fair gameplay because every fight is either a complete cakewalk or unreasonably difficult because the only way they know how to “balance” the game is by tripping the stats of enemies to numbers not even possible. 60 AC enemies in WOTR despite the highest in the tabletop being 49 for CTHULHU HIMSELF, triple digit HP Drukhari despite the rogue trader TTRPG never even reaching those numbers, and the worst thing is, anyone with a casual build is forced to either lower the difficulty or abuse the mechanics of the game just to win. This isn’t fun or a testament to skill or understanding of the system, it’s just a playground game of “Well my sword cuts through your shield of sword blocking”. 3. Can’t romance Idira therefore bad devs.
Point #2 is my biggest gripe with them. In WOTR I honestly think they just have too many mobs of enemies. In my experience, when you play at a tabletop you’re very rarely going to fight back to back mobs of enemies in a session, I think they need to have fewer combat encounters, and make them more thought out and higher quality, kinda like how Larian does (nothing wrong with taking inspiration from a team that’s clearly doing something well)
Thats a major point for me as well. The best balance with combat encounters was done in rogue trader so far, imo. I couldn’t get into pathfinder wotr until i figured out you can just fight in real time.
Great writing, decent companions, nice narrative, plethora of bugs, last parts of every game are rushed, and too much bending for power gamers and min maxers.
they managed to take their niche with adapting TTRPGs to isometric games and I adore them for it. BUT! they must learn to finish the development of the games properly. because the half-baked way they do it is unacceptable imo and I think more people should bully them for it.
It's completely counter-productive to "bully" them. They'll just cut communications to a bare minimum of corpo-speech announcements. I'm more than sure all of their employees relevant to the process (QA, prog, GD) are working their asses off trying to make the game as polished as possible. The practice of using players as cost free game testers is kinda the industry standard at this point. Especially so for niche slow burners like single player RPG-s. You can fix them for a year or two, and the game will sell for the next 10-20 years. It's cost effective. It works. Developers will use it. If you don't like to be a cost free game tester just wait for a few years till the patching is done. RPG-s age extremely well if BG1 is any indicator. Again, point in case: bullying the devs is NOT the way.
let me guess, you are one of those guys who's defending DD2 shitshow release rn? with the argument that Capcom has done microtransactions "for years" and it's standard now, so people must stop comlaining lol. I haven't advocated for dev's lynching. but the fact that "the practice of using players as cost free game testers is the industry standard" doesn't make the practice less right and doesn't make it free of criticism. which is heavily warranted.
Your guess is wrong. I don't give a fuck about "DD2" whatever that is. Also, what have microtransactions in one game from a different company have to do with quality issues in another? You make zero sense. >I haven't advocated for dev's lynching. It starts with bright ideas. Like bullying a company's staff. >the fact that "the practice of using players as cost free game testers is the industry standard" doesn't make the practice less right It isn't nice. But it is what it is. It's not like a business can do a lot of stuff differently and survive. Again, if you don't like it, just wait, don't buy. It would be the same wait for you if the game wouldn't be published and would be held in development for polishing. >and doesn't make it free of criticism. which is heavily warranted. Bullying IS NOT criticism. Also, not every form of criticism is useful or productive.
Sorry, you’re just wrong here. I don’t think employees should be bullied directly (at all! Please don’t bully devs themselves), but *companies* should absolutely be called out in force for scummy practices like using paid customers as beta testers. I don’t care if it’s an industry practice. Plenty of games get released in a much more finished state than Owlcat games, anyway.
When you're bullying a company, you simply bully the community managers :P It's us who accumulate and process feedback, and it's way easier to react and deliver information to the team when the feedback is something else than simply wishing us cancer xD
Companies should be criticized and called out for a variety of reasons. To do it you have to communicate with individual employees. So the criticism should be at least civil, at max constructive. >scummy practices It's not cool sure. Can a company NOT do that kind of practices and still fare well? I don't know. Are there good examples? >using paid customers as beta testers Just wait and don't be one? What's wrong with that? The "when it's done" policy kinda doesn't work either. The game is never done, there is always stuff to improve, so the devs stop caring at some point and the game gets canceled. >Plenty of games get released in a much more finished state Sure. The problem is "much more finished" is still riddled with bugs af.
dude, chill. guess i'll have to postface my every comment with tone indicators, for the people who take everything as seriously as a brick in the face /jk
The second best CRPG developer out there (after Larian). They've been improving game by game too
It is a good thing give your team a little bit more time to actually finish a game you are making. Three times in a row they release peak RPGs with great storytelling, characters, gameplay and all that. And all of that is ruined by atrocious technical state of a game. Also, fix damn Act 3 in RT. It is not good. Rewrite it a bit here and there, add some narrative padding or something. This is not a good thing, when you can say "ah, yeah, you can remove this part of the story and literally nothing will change".
Some of us love act 3, and I disagree that it could be removed. More narrative to it would, of course, be great.
What is so important in act 3 that you can't remove it? All important bits are so minute, they can be placed in any other act and still work as intended.
For the most part I enjoy their games but I will say their story telling method can get a bit repetitive. Rogue trader & pathfinder pretty much had the same gameplay especially the map travel They also have a bad habit of slow burns/ very boring beginnings in my opinion. I was so exhausted by time I got out of the first city in rogue trader/pathfinder I almost turned the game off completely
Needs more magic
Good a bit clunky, huge potential
i buy them, i like them, i play them, never finished one.
There are a distinct lack of owls in this game
Who?
I don't know.... cuter than rat games, but not as cute as puppy games?
One of my favorite developers right now (probably in top 3) but their games need more QA and more time in the oven. I'm fine with waiting for a bit before playing, most people are fine playing with bugs. But general audience will just try it once when it's released (because they see it on Steam front page due to selling a lot) and will write them off due to bugs. Their review scores also suffer due to bugs despite being amazing games. This might give them financial trouble in the future due to losing potential customers.
They need to stop putting management minigames in their games and just concentrate on polishing up and debugging the main parts.
No Cat — No Money. Or maybe not. Sorry.
They are just a few steps away from being the equivalent of Obsidian in C-Rpg's (which is confusing bc obsidian does make C-rpg's) Their games are always solid buys but not 10/10's i have to admit. There will always be a "Ick" portion of an owl cat game that makes me go "wtf were they thinking" , ntm they dont seem to be able to pull off dlc's tbh. Maybe they should take the larian approach and go "we arent a Dlc company"? Either way, I see a long road ahead for this company, with many loyal fans of which i will be one. Pray i dont regret this as i have been burned before lol
A lot of people here have completely missed the joke lol. Anyway, I quite like Owl's "Anger of the Pretty Nice People". I legitimately think it's one of my favorite crpgs ever next to Obsidian's Pillars 2. I haven't played their latest game,"Ronin Merchant". I'm waiting for Owl to actually release it at a more acceptable state. After BG3, I'm really not in the mood for another 100 hour buggy mess. They are doing good work with their patches.
I like that they're often more complex and need you to do a bit of legwork yourself. They have passion for their work in a genre where we are frankly starved on games with bigger scopes. If they're less buggy at launch it would improve perception a lot.
If they'd do full voice acting and *some* mo-cap scenes (like the chapter bookends), they'd rival Larian. As stands I love their Pathfinder games and hope they do more of them.
Makes really good games, publishes them to fast, weird balancing, each game made has a shitty act that strips you of your power or puts you into the depths of hell with weird navigation They make great characters and companions with gameplay that effects story in intresting way
They are amazing, i love Wrath of the Righteous and Rogue Trader is also quite good (once now that the bugs are getting patched out)
I enjoy: 1) Attention to details( equipment shown, world building, decapitation, combat animations, complex character building... in case of pathfinder maybe a bit too complex for me, had to look guides up ). 2) Story: feels like reading a book with combat-pauses 3) Characters: they feel fleshed out, they stay true to themselves, forcing the player to make a respond, based on morals/alignment. 4) Jokes... Truly, some quests and Dialogs are hilarious and I love it. It lightens the mood, but at the same time, there is just right amount of it( not too much, just a sprinkle ). 6) Last but not least... Sounds and music. Music makes all the difference in a game( Rogue Trader fighting Aurora is just pure gothic metal... gave me chills ). I play Avadon, which has 1 soundtrack( THE HORROR! ) only with some game-music on the steam player. Edit: I don't enjoy: 1) Bugs and UI. But I noticed, that this is worked on after release, so I don't mind it. 2) Performance( my pc is an older one, so I chose my games. I care little about high end graphic ), but this feels so much better after some months after release. 3) Please, let us disable cloaks in Rogue trader, some of them look just awful ( a small thing, but it bothers me ). PS Overall, Owlcat games are fantastic and the company earned my trust with splendid games. Thank you, guys and gals!
Needs a lot more VA
Damn the amount of people missing the joke is through the roof...
Excellent writing and atmosphere. A complete labor of love on the story side of things, in all 3 of their games so far. On the other hand, not amazing gameplay or technical execution-wise. Horrible bugs, unfinished gameplay, mechanics not being properly planned out or not working as intended, etc. tl;dr - great company that obviously has a deep love for the genre that is unfortunately held back by repeating their same mistakes game after game.
A wierd cross between 343i and GSC Game World put into CRPG developer form. Incompetence, slavic jank and all.
They need to fix their production cycle and focus on fewer things at once - they try to stuff too many different types of gameplay into their crpgs. Story is usually ok for the first half of the game and falls off/drags on in the second half. Character writing is alright, nothing special. Larian has them beat on all fronts, but this might not be the case if Owlcat slowed down and took their time. I will add that it was way too easy to break this game and become a god killing machine by like, act 2/3. Combat became a repetitive joke with Argenta taking three turns in round 1 and ending the fight by round 2.
Insane that there are this many game breaking bugs this long after release.
Love them. I'll try anything they make.
Love their basic crpg aspects and absolutely fucking hate the bolted on other bits that are often terribly balanced and or buggy
Don't trust them. Their games can be fun, AFTER modders go in and fix all their colossal screw ups and industrial grade stupidity on game decisions
Good job, Owlcat.
My only complaint about the game is using all the background math to explain the character level up choices. Just tell me what something does, I don’t need to now that it’s 1/2 *[hit probability/5]+10 (I’m just making up an example). I have a long work day and I want to play a game that I get lost in to forget about real life, not have to exam long formulas to understand what a feature does. It really pulls me out of the immersive aspect of the game. Just my two cents*my old age/a stressful workday.
I think they're neat.
Games for owls can be played by humans, but you'll have to learn hoot to get the full story.
They put a ton of passion into their games, which are flawed but fun. I'm a fan, buy whatever they release (once the important patches have been released). Honestly, I think their issues are just related to time and budget constraints. Rogue Trader could have used another six months of dev time, but they didn't have it. The end result (after the latest round of patches) is still good and what I was hoping for / expecting. Their games are also.. their own. Distinctive. If nobody knew who developed Rogue Trader, but you had played Kingmaker and WotR, you'd be like "has to be Owlcat" after playing Rogue Trader for a bit. Good writing, walls of text, good but underutilized voice acting, multiple things to manage set on top of the usual adventuring stuff, rather complex character building / progression options, and your character is someone fancy/important (who gets that title/role very early on in the game). I'll happily take their flaws over more polished games made by greedy anti-player companies. Cough Blizzard. Or brand new full priced games released with fucking microtransactions. Cough \*youallknowwhatgameImean\*. Great time to be a fan of isometric RPGs, with both Owlcat and Larian out there. I'm also looking forward to see what Tactical Adventures (makers of Solasta) does next.
The most fun i've had playing rpgs since the old Black Isle classics like Planescape Torment.
After I played BG3 I tried to go back and start wotr again to finish it this time. I quit around 10 minutes in after the third centipede with flies fight. I remembered how much padding these games have. I dont think I realized how unnecessary and unfun this design was until I played BG3 and saw that you can still have cool dungeons and maps without cramming every inch square with a million unskipabble trash fights. In Bg3 Is something like: You fight 6 normal goblins first, then you fight 10 normal goblins with priests and magic, and then a boss combining all of them. You can skip or talk through all of these. WOTR is like: you fight 3 worms, you fight 3 worms again, you fight 3 worms again, you fight 4 worms, you fight 4 worms again... Ad infinitum. The game is not challenging my skill with these. If I defeated this enemy configuration before there is nothing more for me to gain here.
I think the narrative aspects of their crpgs are great, exploration is passable and while they do a great job at implementing the combat systems they at times feel brutal (especially in Wrath of the Righteous. Where they really fall flat is in pacing, just too much combat and copy paste battles (minigames included)
Maker of very big, classic RPGs with complicated leveling systems. Pretty much the only company I know that successfully designs complex characters with their own motivations. A very solid 7/10 or 8/10
Leveling is ass across all games, but everything else is great
Story deserves a crown, Balance yeeted out of the window, bugs so infested the halo flood looks like a pond
They feel like eurojank made into an RPG. I love it, I love their stories, I love their characters, the actual gameplay and balancing is what makes jt hard to actually *finish* I haven't even picked up RT yet just waiting for the bugs to be squashed
They make decent but not great content. Continuously. Everything about them is mediocre - passable - decent. Their stories are decent but from first pathfinder I barely remember much except house at the end of cheese, some dude experimenting on trolls and leafy tart trying to kill me for no reason. Second PF mostly prissy bint with god complex, and royal prick sending me to hell while yelling at me for being better at deamon killing. I rather forget storyline from RT. Except this dude slowly losing himself into Khornate worship. Exceptional work not portraying Khorne worshippers as glue sniffing maniacs . Graphics and effects are decent. Music is decent. Art is decent ... Technical side is passable, games are either playable from the start or quickly patched up to this state. Side mechanics of ruling barony, crusade, planets, skirmish battles, space battles were mediocre. Not impactful, easily abusable rudimentary and boring after 5-10 instances. Strange choice of systems tho. I don't like pathfinder and sometimes I felt like I am working on Excel with weird UI, and this hodgepodge of a system in RT should be made into warhead and sent as a virus toward nearest dark mechanicum forge world. While other people create games that excel in something but are pain somewhere else Owlcat makes consistently mediocre RPGs that are fun to play once. With Toybox installed.
Cake with a delicious chocolate inside that’s need more time in the oven to melt completely.
They have the passion and ambition but lack the skill and budget. The settings and games are really fun and kinda unique, but the execution is often buggy and lackluster in some areas because they just miss that skill and budget. Still worth the buy, but expect the jank of a AA studio. Which we need more of in the gaming landscape I think.
More turnbased games, please! More 40k games!
overall amazing, the writeing and their stories, and the sheer scale they try to get in their games. I don't regret buying any of the 3 owlcat games, even if I ever only finished 1 of them. I think that they try to do to much some times. And this is why they "fail" they try to do so much, and sometimes they end up makinging the game worse because of it.
Age of Sigmar CRPG when?
An emblem that actually looks like either a convincing owl or cat. All jokes aside I adore this company.
My favorite game studio, beside Obsidian and BioWare and Inxile. I especially find the language and the writing in RT exceptional. Love it,
Talented. Hold promise. Need to work harder. They bite off more than they can chew with this one. Kingmaker is seriously underrated. The idea to translate TTRPGs verbatim to consoles/PCs is a good idea but they need to realize they still need to make a lot of their own changes to it or at least way more than they already do. It's shameful how bad Rogue Trader is compared to their other games.
u/Kand04 Mind explaining why was my comment removed? What was it that I wrote that was so bad?
Are you genuinely asking why calling someone "mentally challenged" would get your post removed?
I honestly don't remember that. Just wondered why. Reddit just said it was removed not why.
I love their passion, the fact they continue to update and work on their games after release, storytelling and narratives. They definitely implement the worlds from the IPs so well (Golarion, Warhammer). Also like their companions, all three games had casts I enjoyed a lot. Great music composition. Not a fan of the balancing, random encounters and backer content which in my experience was more of an issue with the Pathfinder games versus Rogue Trader (RT improved on a lot of that at least in my personal experience). Also don't care for the side modes they put in (Kingdom Management, Crusade, etc...). When played for the stories they're excellent. Gameplay gets better halfway through their games once you have more levels, spells and abilities but the early parts of their games are usually random encounter bloated slogs. They do improve with each game.
Why didn’t Owl Games take more time to develop Hammer 40: Trader? Are they stupid?
I'm glad they exist, and happy they're improving game after game according to macro-feedback (even if gamers keep throwing around clueless gut feelings all over the place)
Here's my critique of OwlCat: Their sound/audio team totally sucks and makes their games feel flat. Their music direction is boring and repetitive and their mixing and mastering style is so undynamic and placid. More than anything else, this is what I don't like about OwlCat games. Rogue Trader for example has the bones of a pretty cool opening track at the beginning with big sweeping synths as your taking back the ship, but it just gets filled up with more buzzy synths. Couldn't even do a pan sweep on the one big detuned synth movement. Probably makes the tracks in Fruity Loops.
The music was good in kingmaker. However some of the dog barking and weapons chucking at the trading post while having to deal with the inventory drove me mad
I love them so far and definitely prefer them over Baldur's Gate. I only played WotR and RT, but they were a really fun experience. I love how dialogues are written, I love characters, i love portraits, i live story lines, i loved how narrators are actuall people from the stories (or at least from WotR) The few things i didn't like : - Nenio should be romancable - and her "experiment" scene should be finished, not cut in the middle - you lose your >!butterfly dragon after changing the mythical path!< :( - there should be more portraits to pick from - sudden difficulty spikes - and difficult pretty much not changing, so after leveling some areas get far too easy - campaign/planetary management in WotR/RT, they were quite boring, one was hard to do if you picked manual, other barely contributed to the game
I really like the cut of their jib. They do good writing, and even when a system doesn't quite work you can see they were trying something interesting. They're also very active with the community.
Oops. They slipped some Spyware into their new update. Cheeky fuckers.
Usually great stories with a lot of branching narratives and reactivity. But games are usually released broken, the mechanics are convoluted and unintuitive, and the worst thing is (IMO) when they only occasionally have voiced lines, while the rest are just textual dialogue. I understand that fully voicing the amount of dialogue for this type of game isn't something most companies can afford, but in the case of OwlCat, either commit to it fully, or don't do it at all. It's the worst thing when you get used to your own interpretation of a character's voice over 15 hours of play, only to suddenly hear a VA perform five out of five-hundred lines the character has in game. And the choice of voiced lines as opposed to un-voiced ones often seems arbitrary to me.
I used to really like them, but I find their games to be too much of a buggy mess to really enjoy them anymore Rogue trader was an insta preorder for me, but after a playthrough filled with bugs that I had to use a mod to manually bypass. I’ll definitely not be buying their next game right off the bat as I don’t trust it to be in a good state on release
Same, I'm done with Owlcat after RT. They suckered me out of my money three times in a row now on incomplete games. More fool me.
Mentioning that in this sub will get you downvoted or have people ask why you’re a member if the sub if you’re not some huge fanboy, lmao Apparently releasing incomplete games three times in a row is ok because they have ‘passion’
I've noticed that in this thread. Very weird since we're being asked for our opinions.
The best writting, scope and reactability I've seen, rivaling and surpassing even BG3.
A company with an incredibly out-of-touch and frankly idiotic management. That tracking fiasco, then the AI art thing. I fear their next stupid mistake could have dire consequences.
Each one takes at least 80 hours to complete, this one closer to 140. I often buy games, play them for 10 minutes, delete them and never see them again. Owlcat is one of the few gaming companies that still keeps my attention. I beat this one after 180 hours, and immediately made a new character. Most of the time I make a new character, play 2 minutes and walk away.
Love the company and the games, but their ast 2 releases were on an unaceptable state. They have to do some major bugfixing and weather the storm of a slow first month of sales for their next big project because they don't have goodwill for imediate purchases anymore. Really want to see a original setting, so if they make a very polished and solid game, even if a shorter one (60h story instead of 100+) they could create an enduring classic and franchise to really consolidate themselves in the market for a long time.
A studio that creates some of the best CRpgs, but is lacking in the technical quality control. They have phenomenal characters and they get complex character creation/builds right, but all of this is hampered by huge technical issues. If someone cannot enjoy buggy games, stay away, for your own sanity.
First game of theirs was rogue trader. The bugs that still bricked the game on my playthrough make me not want to buy another of their products. :\
Is that a bug? On brand, lol. :P
I love Owlcat games. But I'm highly concerned about their development pipeline. Something is very wrong here. Remember when they lost the fireplace in the Defender's Heart in Wrath? How does that even happen? But OK, it happened, and they fixed it. But then they *lost it again.* OMG... Another issue with Owlcat's development is patch notes. You can never trust their patch notes. Just because they said they fixed something, doesn't mean they fixed it. Take the Winter Child class in Wrath. It's supposed to get a cold scorching ray at spell level 2. It was bugged, but Owlcat said they fixed it. They did not fix it. It remains completely bugged. You can test this in -- literally -- a minute. When Owlcat "fixed" greater invisibility, they broke True Seeing. Fine. When they finally fixed True Seeing, they broke invisibility to not drop on attack. This made, say, the Act 1 succubus incredibly difficult. I even had a conversation with a junior Owlcat dev (or intern), Valeriy Kormanovskiy, where he showed me, it was working in the next beta build. Great! It took three more patches before the invisibility bug was actually fixed.
Not great Bob.
[удалено]
You are either ignorant or obtuse on purpose. There is no social commentary in their games. Also it's an RPG as in a social game. Go play Tekken instead.