With the release date for the first Warhammer 40k Rogue Trader DLC, Void Shadows, fast approaching, we spoke with the developers at Owlcat games to learn how its Death Cult assassins and Genestealer Cult uprisings will mesh with the rest of the sprawling RPG.
The base game of Warhammer 40k Rogue Trader is truly massive, taking around ninety hours from start to finish. Void Shadows promises another fifteen hours of gameplay, a more in-depth exploration of the workings of your colossal void ship, a lethal (and romanceable) Death Cult Assassin companion character, and a sinister plot by a Genestealer Cult.
Genestealers are one of the most dangerous aliens in Warhammer 40k, able to infect unsuspecting human hosts with a ‘genestealer’s kiss’. This subverts the victim’s DNA, converting them to the Genestealers’ cause and causing any children they produce to be born as Genestealer hybrids. Over time a single Genestealer can spawn a huge, and hard to detect, network of hybrid cultists. It’s just your Rogue Trader’s luck that one has taken root in the teeming crew decks of your void ship.
The many different flavors of hybrid make the Genestealer Cults one of the most varied Warhammer 40k factions, and players will have lots of nasty new enemies to splatter. The Owlcat Games dev team tells us to expect three-armed acolytes, even-more-mutant metamorphs, almost-human neophytes, malformed aberrants, and colossal abominants, as well as a psychic Magus mastermind.
There’s also a piece of graffiti in one screenshot that will be familiar to Genestealer Cults players. That may just be an easter-egg, but it could be a hint that a certain gunslinger is going to show up at some point… And since the primogenitor of any Genestealer cult infection grows into a colossal Broodlord, we’ve got all fifteen of our fingers crossed that we’ll face off against one in a boss fight.
What the cult is plotting remains to be seen: they might be after the ship itself, or they could be using your planet-hopping enterprise as a convenient delivery system for their infection. The cult storyline kicks off “from the first act of the game onward… just after the prologue”. The dev team says that players who are “currently later in the game… can still start the storyline from the start and get every bit of content there”.
Assuming you’re going in for a fresh playthrough, you’ll find the new storyline “spread through the whole game”, with “content for the first, second, and fourth acts”. “We’ve put a lot of thought into this system, so people will not miss out”, Owlcat adds.
That includes meshing the DLC’s new companion character, the lethal Assassin Kibellah from the Death Cult of the Bloodspun Web, with the main plot. “She will react in dialogue to things that happen outside of the DLC, her personal quests and romance line”.
There’s no detail on what that romance line might be like, and we have to admit to being curious. The Death Cult assassins are a particularly niche sect within the Imperium of Man, fierce fanatics devoted to the holy arts of murder. Unlike the more famous and state-sponsored Imperial Assassins, Death Cultists treat their craft as a near-religious duty, so we were expecting Kibellah to be married to her lethal trade in the same way as Argenta, the non-romanceable Sister of Battle.
We’re particularly keen to learn how this homicidal killer gets on with the rest of the party. She should be a natural ally with Inquisitorial interrogator Heinrix, and at least share a professional admiration for sadistic Drukhari Marazhai.
All the companions have been updated to have their own reactions and opinions on the events of the DLC: “We can’t say too much, but this ship is their home too at the end of the day” Owlcat says.
The fact that the Death Cult of the Bloodspun Web has been loitering on your ship all this time without once being mentioned might feel like a stretch, if not for the sheer size of imperial vessels. Owlcat is positioning this DLC to really flesh out the inner workings of your vessel, introducing new officers running many different sections of the ship. They have their own problems with the Genestealer cult: and with this being Warhammer 40k, they’re not keen on one another, either.
Void Shadows is set to release on September 24. If you’re curious about it, you’ll find that Rogue Trader is currently available at a deep discount as part of a Humble Bundle, and we can earnestly recommend it: it’s one of the best Warhammer 40k games out there. It is a little light on Space Marines, which puts the new DLC in contention with the Space Marine 2 release at the start of next month…
Source: Wargamer
