Warhammer 40K: Dark Heresy Preview

Owlcat Games invaded the mind-space of gamers with the release of Pathfinder: Kingmaker in 2018, one of many turn-based isometric CRPGs that formed a resurgent wave of the subgenre’s popularity. Owlcat Games may have been capitalizing on a movement started by others, but it’s hard to argue that they haven’t been a primary mover in the space ever since, drifting from Pathfinder after a sequel to release Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader - a game that mixed Owlcat’s turn-based CRPG mechanics and storytelling with the bountiful lore of the grim darkness of the far future. The pairing was apparently fruitful enough to warrant a sequel in the form of Warhammer 40,000: Dark Heresy, and we’re here to share our thoughts on the game’s alpha release.

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The dialog and lore are both top-notch in Dark Heresy, and you’ve plenty of choices, and as an unexpected boon, the game is surprisingly light on technical issues!

Abominable Intelligence

Alright, real talk for a bit - one of the less laudable defining features of Owlcat Games is… well, let’s just say they’re known for shipping with a fair share of technical difficulties, so before we get into the meat of this preview, we figured we might as well address the elephant in the room. In our experience, we’ve experienced technical difficulties for Owlcat Games titles at launch, and an alpha for a game that’s probably a year or so away could be problematic. Despite our concerns, however, the slice of game available to us in the alpha was surprisingly smooth - fourth time’s the charm?

We had the game freeze on us once, but grading on a curve, that’s still massively outperforming expectations. The portion of the game we played appears more or less feature complete, minus an encyclopedia entry in the menu and full voice acting, both of which will be presumably added later. We didn’t encounter any bugs, performance issues, or other technical issues, minus the one aforementioned crash, which was easily resolved by restarting and wasn’t replicable. It’s as smooth a demo as you could hope for, and if the alpha gets expanded later, there’s no reason to believe players should have more than token reservations about it at this point.

With those concerns hopefully addressed, let’s get onto the actual content in this alpha.

An Anonymous Acolyte

Dark Heresy’s alpha starts out presumably at the beginning of Act 1, after whatever content the prologue will have. As it is, you take control of a generic male inquisitor simply named “Acolyte”, an officer with a sniper rifle, joined by three companions. You start out at Lv3 and your gear is, to put it nicely, dreadful. That being the case, you’re probably not getting a lot in the way of character creation, builds, or party-crafting in this demo. You do get to make some rather interesting dialog choices that can change how quests and encounters play out and influence your relationship with various factions, but again, the alpha just doesn’t cover enough ground to get a sweeping view about how these mechanics ultimately play out.

It’s a bit of a shame, as these are some of the more interesting parts of Owlcat games, but it’s clearly outside the scope of this alpha - you’ll just have to make do with what you’ve got. If it’s any consolation, the alpha seems to take place early enough in the game that you probably won’t be able to develop characters much by this point in the game, anyway.

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Level design is much more dense and confident in Dark Heresy, with more verticality, skill checks and interactable objects.

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This fits in with the main conceit of the narrative - as an inquisitor, you’ll be investigating a lot of clues as you explore!

Of Rogue Traders and Inquisitors

While we might not have a long view of how some of these RPG mechanics will play out, we can make some pretty informed guesses. Dark Heresy is very much a successor to Rogue Trader, sharing classes, skills, weapons, menus, and art. Simply put, if you played Rogue Trader, then you should know what to expect, as many of the same mechanics have carried over.

There are some tweaks to the formula; however, perhaps the most interesting of which is the protagonist. In Rogue Trader you were… well, a Rogue Trader, a nigh-on unaccountable sovereign over an interstellar fiefdom, and the game included various elements to help sell this narrative with gameplay - being able to requisition gear with Faction Reputation and Profit Factor instead of buying, giving your own capital ship, and having you deal with claiming and spending resources to fund various proposals.

Dark Heresy casts your protagonist as an inquisitor, ensuring that you’re canonically human and also in a position of authority over the oppressed masses of the Imperium, but while your Inquisitorial symbol might loosen lips (and bowels), you’re not a head of state. You’re back to trading with money and if you have a fortress or ship, or other high-value assets of office, they don’t appear in the alpha. The change in protagonist casts you in similar circumstances while forcing some key story and gameplay changes, the biggest of which is the newfound emphasis on investigations.

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As you collect intel, you’ll compile it in your “Inquisitorial Journal”. This is a single case file - quests are labyrinthine, with many a false lead or contradictory clue.

As you talk to NPCs, advance quests, and explore, you’ll uncover clues that provide leads on various ongoing investigations, all of which are tracked in your inquisitorial journal. This menu category records information you uncover - true or false - and also serves as a digital corkboard, going a long way to selling your profession in this setting. Needless to say, paying attention to dialog is more important than ever, and you’ll also need to scour areas thoroughly and, often, repeatedly to investigate new points of interest as they appear. The odd skill check both while exploring and during conversation can also help you uncover information you may otherwise miss, and, let’s be honest, you’ll probably want to indulge in a bit of save-scumming to try out different options and see how things play out.

So dense are these inquisitorial investigations that we spent hours just talking to NPCs and searching areas, getting bits of intel (and EXP) as we investigated leads and pursued clues. Finding a missing sergeant, a local strongman, missing divers and rooting out an objectionable priest occupied our early hours, with various quests and investigations weaving into each other in ways that are almost overwhelming. Politics in Warhammer 40,000 might always end in bloodshed, but the roads that lead to such an inevitable conclusion are labyrinthine indeed, and Dark Heresy does a good job setting itself apart from Rogue Trader narratively and building up your role as an inquisitor in a way that will delight fans of mystery games… and probably make more than a few hardened CRPG veterans seek out guides.

You’ll Miss Random Encounters

While the emphasis on sleuthing is new, the core gameplay of Dark Heresy is moderately tweaked from what it was in Rogue Trader, at best. You’ll be familiar with most of the classes, skills, weapons and other gameplay elements. You still need to track MP and AP with your characters, and your psykers still have to mind Veil Degradation, for example. In some ways, combat has been streamlined - many skills that had to be activated every turn in Rogue Trader are now just toggles, which speeds things up a bit… although changing combat situations mean you’ll still be clicking these toggles on and off.

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Targeted shots can deal extra damage and inflict debuffs, and in light of how nerfed burst fire is, it’s a tool you’ll need to lean on to win fights.

You still have to keep track of cover, line of sight and elevation, but armor now has durability, which presumably was changed to help differentiate heavily armored characters from faster, dodgier ones. Damage reduction still exists, but you can now, with perseverance, shoot through an enemy’s armor with enough fire, reducing the slog of dealing with heavy enemies. Armor can also be repaired with abilities and repair kits, and armor also protects against precision shots and strikes, another innovation by which some weapons can target different body parts, potentially dealing more damage and inflicting various debuffs. Armor regenerates at the end of combat and wounds - inflicted by some attacks or by being downed in combat - recover by a stage automatically after each battle.

Some of these changes serve to make combat a bit easier, in as much as you stand to suffer less attrition between battles, but this is more than countered by encounters now being longer, more difficult and more complex, while also being much rarer. Just about every fight in the Dark Heresy alpha - the few that there are - has some sort of sub-objective that you can or need to focus on to make the battle more manageable. Some battles have hostages you need to save, allies you need to escort, gates you can raise or lower, concentrating characters with volatile psyker auras you need to protect, or enemies who will call reinforcements you need to hunt down.

While this arguably makes encounters more engaging, it comes at a cost: you’ll veer from long, complicated stretches of exploration and dialog to elaborate and time-consuming bouts of combat, giving the game a choppy, uneven feel. Instead of balancing each other out, you’ll go from being sick of combat to sick of investigating in tandem. The limited number of encounters also impedes your ability to get a grip with the core mechanics of the game, familiarize yourself with your characters and perhaps most importantly, accrue new gear and experience. While it probably wasn’t intended, the alpha for Dark Heresy really helped us realize how important smaller-scale encounters were to an RPG’s flow.

That’s not to say the scope, complexity and scarcity of battles are the only gameplay problems in the Dark Heresy alpha. If you had gripes about the crunchier aspects of Rogue Trader, they’ve been fully preserved here. You’ve got an abundance of characteristics, skills and abilities to manage and descriptions that sometimes invoke several of these per ability until the actual effectiveness of an action can be obscured by the overabundant minutiae, which is even further obfuscated by heavy-handed RNG and conditions to the point where it’s hard to know whether you used the wrong action at the wrong time against the wrong enemy with the wrong weapon or if you were just unlucky. We’re not saying RNG is bad or game mechanics should be stupefied, but when each character has 3-6 abilities each (at the start of the game!) that have conditional effectiveness, perhaps something should be simplified so the player can focus on the tactics instead of having to fuss with numerous derived variables per ability.

The Inquisitor’s Report

Dark Heresy shamelessly recycles Rogue Trader’s assets - which we approve of. Lower the cost of development, speed up development time and give the people what they want. But it’d be a lie to say aspects of Rogue Trader weren’t broke or that Dark Heresy universally improves upon its predecessor. The dialog is still snappy (which is good, considering you have to pay extra attention to it!), the inquisitorial investigations give the game a different feel while retaining the core conceit of a human protagonist operating with marginal oversight and undue authority. The lore is certainly on-point and the levels are far more dense and confidently designed. Even the technical issues are marginal, at best! The gameplay is where Dark Heresy stumbles the most, and while we doubt the tedium of sifting through obtuse mechanics can be changed, a lot of the game’s current problems can be fixed by simply stuffing more, smaller encounters into the existing game.

All in all, Owlcat’s next CRPG is an engrossing experience - especially outside of combat - that could use a bit more balancing and tuning once the heretic-burning begins in earnest. We’re keen to see if the complexity of the level and quest design can be maintained over the course of an entire game, and of course, to get a proper feel for the game’s opening hours and character creation.