Baldur’s Gate 3
WHERE TO PLAY
23 years on from the release of the seminal RPG, Baldur’s Gate 2, the third game in the series has been developed by Larian Studios (of Divinity: Original Sin fame). Set over 120 years after the events of the last game, Baldur’s Gate 3 tasks you and your party of heroes to fight off a mind flayer invasion of Faerun, while seeking a way to remove the tadpole in your brain that’s slowly turning you into the enemy…
Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader
Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader is an isometric CRPG that has you delve into the grimdark future of the Warhammer 40k setting. Take control of your own voidship, explore the edges of the Imperium in search of profit and perilous adventure.
After winning Game of the Year at the Game Awards, and taking the number onespot on our very own GOTY, Baldur’s Gate 3 has set a new bar for what it means to be an AAA game. The amount of care and time spent on creatingBaldur’s Gate 3has enamored fans from every corner of the gaming sphere. It’s hard to imagine a game that can come close to Larian’s masterpiece. However, withRogue Trader’s launch, CRPG fans will have another choice on their plate.
So how does Owlcat Games' Rogue Trader stack against the current king of RPGs?Warhammer 40,000fans will be happy to see their favorite grim dark universe represented in a phenomenal CRPG, but does Rogue Trader offer enough to the new crowd of CRPG fans to entice them away from their adventures in the Sword Coast? We’re taking a look at these two games and seeing just how well Rogue Trader can do when it’s compared to the best RPG in recent times.
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Character Customization
Baldur’s Gate 3’s Strengths
Rogue Trader’s Strengths
Winner: Baldur’s Gate 3
Your first step into any modern-day RPG is the character creator. Between these two games, Baldur’s Gate 3 offers the better character creator. You can customize your character’s facial structure, eye color, hair color, highlights, species, and even their genitals. There are far more customizable options in Baldur’s Gate 3 to make sure your character turns out exactly how you want it to. As far as classes are concerned, you can start in whatever class you want, with different subclasses affecting exactly what abilities you have at your disposal. But if you feel like your class is missing something, you can also put skill points into other classes to further customize your skills to your liking.
For lore reasons, you can only play as a human in Rogue Trader and your customization options aren’t as flexible as in Baldur’s Gate 3. However, the customization options are still good enough to create your own avatar in the 40k universe, and the option to upload your own custom portrait adds a nice personal touch to your game. Where Rogue Trader shines is how well they tie your character’s background to their rules. Choices like their home planet, greatest shame, greatest moment, and class have more rules and numbers attached to them for you to play with than Baldur’s Gate does.
Baldur’s Gate 3 has a more generic overarching story. At a glance, Baldur’s Gate 3’s premise starts with your character being forcibly implanted with a tadpole that threatens to transform them into a Mind Flayer. You and your rag-tag party of fellow tadpole-implantees have to race against the clock to get rid of the tadpole before all of you turn into tentacled monstrosities. It’s not a bad story, but it’s not an amazing one either.
But the real strength of Baldur’s Gate’s storytelling isn’t in its overarching plotline; it’s in the little moments between each major event, and the variety of colorful characters that make up the world of Baldur’s Gate. Listening to a bard come to terms with her grief over her teacher’s death, or talking to a demon disguised as a cow and the sheer wealth of choices the player has to react to these situations are what makes adventures in Baldur’s Gate 3 feel truly magical.
Comparatively, Rogue Trader has a more complex overarching story and a stronger hook. You play as an heir to the current head of a Rogue Trader dynasty, a family ordained by the Emperor himself to explore the galaxy and lay claim to anything you find. As you get acquainted with your new position, your crew is betrayed by a close ally and thousands of people lose their lives. You survive the ordeal and inherit the title of Rogue Trader.
With a wounded ship at your command, you have to find a way to save your endangered household and take revenge against the traitors who threatened your life. While the quality of Rogue Trader’s side quests is also well-written, the lack of voice acting and absence of memorable side characters that can match Baldur’s Gate’s caliber put Rogue Trader just a step behind Larian’s RPG.
Overall Presentation (UI, Graphics, Voice Acting)
This is where Baldur’s Gate 3 pulls ahead of almost every other CRPG. Other CRPGs like Rogue Trader may have more in-depth mechanics and more numbers to play with, but Baldur’s Gate’s astounding voice acting and breathtaking graphics are what will pull you into its universe. Side characters give fully-voiced performances that makes every one a memorable one. Even the animals are given speaking lines if you have the right spell to speak with them. And as fun as those performances are, they’re overshadowed by theextraordinary talent that breathes life into your party members, like Asterion, Gale, and Lae’zel.
Rogue Trader has some voiced lines, and while the acting is comparable in terms of quality, it lacks the quantity of Baldur’s Gate. But in comparison, the writing behind each dialogue and interaction in Rogue Trader is what will truly keep you immersed in this universe and caring for each of your party members. In many ways, it sometimes feels like a Shakespearean tragedy playing out in space.
As far as UI goes, because of how much information the UI in Baldur’s Gate has to show, it’s surprisingly easy to navigate and gives plenty of information at a glance. In comparison, Rogue Trader’s menus are a little clunky to navigate, and looking for what buff is affecting an enemy or figuring out what a skill does can be hidden just behind an extra keystroke/button press than what you’d be treated to in Baldur’s Gate.
RPG Elements
Owlcat set out to create one of the best CRPGs on the market and, with Rogue Trader, they’ve succeeded. It beautifully blends an engaging story with fun “crunchy” mechanics. Additionally, Rogue Trader never misses a beat when it comes to taking the time to immerse its audience into Warhammer 40k’s deep universe.
Comparatively, Larian’s biggest competitor is the limitless expanse of the human imagination when paired with DnD’s pen-and-paper RPG mechanics. Against a rival like that, Baldur’s Gate 3 has become a surprisingly close contender. Much like on the tabletop, players have the freedom to do almost anything in Baldur’s Gate 3. To name a few examples of what players can do, you can push almost anyone and anything into lava pits, defeat enemies with a random stick you found, crush bosses by dropping an enlarged owlbear on them, and even scale entire castles by building towers of wine barrels. The possibilities are nearly endless, with characters and dialogue even changing based on what crazy action you decide to do.
Rogue Trader lacks that same sense of freedom found in Baldur’s Gate 3, but it makes up for it by having more “crunch,” meaning mechanics that use number crunching or unique game rules. In that way, Rogue Trader offers more engaging gameplay and one of the best CRPG experiences for players to get lost in. However, Baldur’s Gate 3 offers players an entire world to not only explore but express themselves in.
Multiplayer
Rogue Trader is first and foremost a CRPG focused on your role as the titular Rogue Trader.In multiplayer, this means that the host will always be in charge of the major decisions, dialogue, and where to go in each location. Cooperative play lets you assign control of party members to your friends, and later in the campaign, you may create yourown custom Mercenaryfor your friends to control.
As a party member, you can help the Rogue Trader explore, loot, and fight in combat. You can also level up and assign skill points as you please, but be aware this will be saved to the Host’s game. Additionally, in multiplayer, skill checks will not automatically use the highest stat in your party anymore for each check. Instead, the player with the highest stat will have to step up and do the test for the party.
In comparison, Baldur’s Gate 3 offers an immersive and flexible cooperative experience that covers almost all the features found in Rogue Trader and further expands on them. Each player creates their character, and they have true independence when it comes to dialogue options and exploration, meaning they can move as far as they want from the Host, and they’re capable of making decisions in dialogues for themselves. In combat, players can perform their turns at the same time, which speeds up combat and makes it feel more cooperative between multiple players.
Winner: Rogue Trader
While Baldur’s Gate excels through the sheer variety of choices the player can make at any given moment, sometimes you just want to watch big numbers happen or extremely silly abuse of turn-based mechanics. Rogue Traders' combat is where all of its rules, mechanics, and overall fun number-crunching come together with its colorful cast of characters tocreate engaging combat mechanics for the player.
Characters can buff each other to become immortal juggernauts or bullet-spewing machines that can rattle off their entire magazine before an enemy gets a single turn. A good strategy becomes an important asset since cover plays a large role in keeping your team alive. Baldur’s Gate 3 has some variety and complexity to its combat in some situations (like throwing alcohol on an enemy before lighting them on fire), but it still feels like you’re using a group of 4 powerful heroes instead of a well-oiled team that’s actively working together to churn through hordes of enemies.
Additionally, Rogue Trader also has spaceship vs spaceship combat. Players can assign their crewmates to different positions on the ship to help them run more efficiently. Ship vs Ship combat is unique due to each ship being forced to move to its maximum distance every turn, and players can only turn in wide arcs or sharp U-turns. Guns are also reliant on which way your ship is facing to be effective, making it necessary to also plan how you want to position your ship relative to your enemies.
Replayability
Both games encourage players to revisit their worlds with different builds, make different decisions, and test out a different group to survive with. However, Baldur’s Gate 3 holds plenty of replay value because you most likely weren’t able to enjoy every single side story and complete every side quest before finishing the game. Even if you did, it’s still worth it to go back and replay those quests just so you can make a different choice and see how those stories unfold from there.
In comparison, a major point for Rogue Trader’s replayability is its larger diversity of builds across all of its characters to experiment with in new playthroughs. You can makeyour tank more of an assassinthis time, or turn your high DPS caster into more of a support. The fun of these Rogue Trader runs is witnessing the many other ways you can build a heretic-slaying Rube Goldberg machine.
However, despite the many varied builds, Rogue Trader will usually keep your attention for maybe an extra run or two. The freedom in Baldur’s Gate will keep you busy for as long as something sounds entertaining to do, like a run where you decide to eat all the tadpoles, or a run built around bestowing all the blessings of Marvel’s Mjolinir (returning to Thor’s hand, hitting like a truck) to a piece of salami.
Both games bring far more quality to their audience than their base price would suggest. However, Rogue Trader is also from a smaller studio and costs less than Baldur’s Gate. For its $50 price tag, you’re getting an incredible CRPG with plenty of number crunching, fun rules, and an engaging story. Even though it gets outperformed by Baldur’s Gate in several different categories, Rogue Trader is only a small margin behind the DnD-inspired RPG, which is also what justifies its price.
If you want to spend the extra $10 on Baldur’s Gate 3 on PC, you will not be disappointed in the final product. For its price, Rogue Trader will give you more value on consoles, where it’s $20 cheaper than Baldur’s Gate 3.
Overall Winner: Baldur’s Gate 3
Despite Rogue Trader punching well above its $50 price, its opponent is a brilliantly crafted masterpiece that’s discovered a way to bring the limitless potential of the player’s imagination into the digital realm. The inherent freedom, beautiful presentation, and phenomenal side quests found in Baldur’s Gate 3 puts it a good head and shoulders above every other game in its genre.
However, the only weakness Baldur’s Gate 3 has is its combat. The combat is rather simplistic and more about the best ways to manage resources than anything else (with some fights having very creative solutions possible). Rogue Trader has a better combat system because of its XCOM-like mechanics and the variety of skills each character brings to the table. Plus, it has a far stronger overarching story than Baldur’s Gate 3 does.
But to summarize, both of these options are amazing games to own and are two of the best CRPGs you can play right now. If you’re looking for a good CRPG with plenty of numbers and mechanics to play with, you’ll want to jump into Rogue Trader. If you’re more interested in a simple yet astoundingly flexible RPG that’s chalked full of memorable side stories, you’ll want to play Baldur’s Gate 3.
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