Now I know what people are thinking, it’s one of the most updated games
in the world, there’s always a new product or a new codex or something new and
interesting coming out for this game, it’s a product line that works on the
basis of having new stuff all the time for people to buy and play against each
other.
So it’s as well that Day 23 is about the game I’d like to see an improved version of...
Not updated...
Rogue Trader was one of those games that captured the mood of a
generation when it came out, 1980’s Britain wasn’t the place it is today, there
wasn’t much to look forwards to, things were grim, and to be honest, you’d have
thought that any game that was a bleak reminder of just how dark things were
wouldn’t have been welcome.
You’d have been wrong.
What was brilliant about Rogue Trader was the depth of thought that had
gone into it whilst leaving an amount of the game open for interpretation. The system wasn’t brilliant, in fact I’d go
so far as to say that we never managed to get a whole game in, even when we had
a whole afternoon to go at it, but we never lost in the interest in the game
and the world it was set in.
And that’s why I want to see an improved version, not just an updated
set of rules and a new set of army lists, each one more powerful than the last
so that you have to keep getting more figures just to keep up and make sure
that you have some chance of winning. An
improved version would not necessarily be the commercial viable option, and it is
this reason why I suspect that I’ll never see what I actually want.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s been more of the same things that made
Rogue Trader good over the years, and each one updated again and again,
steadily moving away from the interesting things about the race and going straight
to the cool weapons and invulnerable saves (and of course things that made
invulnerable saves not invulnerable), and so things escalated, as the words on the
back of the first Rogue Trader said, “There is no time for peace, no respite,
no forgiveness, there is only war.”, so the latest editions should read, “There
is no time for background, no development, no balance, there is only profit...”
Maybe I’m just tired of companies doing three things when one would
have sufficed (yes, I saw the hobbit recently), and I know that as long as
there are people who will buy the interesting shininess, so games workshop will
go on producing it, and there will never be a return to the days when we got
something new and had to make something of it ourselves and maybe it’s that
that causes me the problem.
I’m just not inspired by it anymore, not in the way I used to be, and
it’s not that I’ve lost interest in games, it’s that whatever I want to play in
this universe is now there and available for me to buy. There’s nothing I can
wonder about, nothing that I’m not sure of, and in giving me everything I could
ever want to see, the game has taken away the vastness of its own universe and
that darkness out in the warp, those unknown worlds and frontiers, are no
longer out there.
And if they are, you can be sure they’ll be harder to kill than
everything else out there presently...
Just to be sure people buy them...
