What with the release of Space Marine 2 a few weeks ago, as well as today's release of Void Shadows DLC for Rogue Trader, these sure feel like good days to be a fan of Warhammer 40K games. I've been exploring Void Shadows for almost 10 days now, and I can happily say that it improves/enriches quite a few important aspects of the original game.
The most important of these aspects is the Voidship itself, which now acquires more of a unique character inside the game. This is mainly through a brand new questline introduced by the DLC which involves the existence of a Death Cult in the lower decks of our ship, whose members worship the God-Emperor in a... rather unconventional way, through His status as a god of death. As part of this extensive questline and its main or secondary branches we visit various areas that become available within the Voidship (as well as some new locations in the Koronus Expanse), both on the lower and upper decks, such as the ship's Chapel, the officers' deck or the crypt where the remains of previous Rogue Traders of the Von Valancius dynasty are kept.
Also introduced as a member of the above Death Cult is a new Companion NPC, named Kibellah. She is an assassin who has spent most of her life honing her "art" in the lower decks, and who is first ascending into the world of the higher decks to offer her services as the Lord Captain's bodyguard (and who, as you can easily guess, is also a romanceable companion). Along with Kibellah, the two new character archetypes associated with her, Bladedancer and Executioner, are introduced to the game, both of which serve characters that focus on melee combat and function as close-quarters AOE DPS fighters, something that was missing from the base game.
It goes without saying that, as was the case in the vanilla game, the new quests in Void Shadows are filled with a variety of choices concerning both our tolerance towards the Death Cult and our attitude towards Kibellah herself who, in the context of her personal quest and after her contact with the upper decks for the first time in her life, inevitably goes through an existential crisis of sorts.
In general I found the new quests added by Void Shadows, and the new NPCs introduced as part of them, to be quite well-written. Particularly memorable and interesting is a series of quests (essentially an offshoot of the questline that directly involves the Death Cult) that ends up addressing the class differences between the inhabitants of the lower decks and the officers and other "high-ups" of the upper decks, who are accused of being abusers of power and completely cut off from the miserable living conditions and hardships of the lower decks, to the point of mutiny (as blasphemous as that sounds).
It's worth noting that the new main and side quests blend seamlessly with the vanilla game and start to appear progressively from Chapter 2 onwards. However, I would recommend starting a new game (especially if your current playthrough is after Chapter 2), just to be sure that the new quests will definitely start. As a test, I first tried to check out the new content via old saves of the original character I had completed Rogue Trader with for the purposes of the original review, and saw that several of the new quests never triggered. So I ended up loading one of the new custom saves from Chapter 2 that Owlcat provided to reviewers.
Void Shadows and the extra content it introduces (about 15 hours in total) spread over the game's Chapters, work perfectly either as an enrichment of aspects of the main game that needed to be enriched, or as even more of the quality content that the main game already offered. It's worth mentioning that now, almost 9 months after its initial release and after several patches, the base game is mostly (if not completely) bug-free. The DLC therefore, available now on Steam, GOG and the Epic Store at a price of under 20 Euros, offers an ideal opportunity for someone who was discouraged by bugs in the original release to finally check out Rogue Trader, as well as for returning players who are looking for even more Rogue Trader adventures and extra ways to take out the enemies of humanity in the name of the God-Emperor.
The review code for Void Shadows DLC was provided by Owlcat Games, who we thank.
RATING - 90%
90%
Adding around 15 hours of extra content, Void Shadows is an ideal opportunity both for someone who was discouraged by bugs in the original release to finally check out Rogue Trader, as well as for returning players that seek even more adventures in the Koronus Expanse.
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