Watch On
Dark Heresy is currently in beta, and Owlcat is keeping everyone informed about the inquisitorial CRPG’s progress via a quarterly update. Said update collates news including the addition of daemonhosts to the enemies we’ll face (if you’ve gone up against them in Darktide you’ll know that’s a big deal), community-voted customization options making it into character creation, and two new companions for us to collect for our squad like grim Pokémon.
The first of them, Laarthyr Cairnareth, is an aeldari corsair you might recruit or defeat depending how friendly to aliens you’re playing it. He’ll be worth having on your team thanks to his psychic powers, which he uses to find paths through the dangers of Warpspace via the labyrinth of tunnels his people use called the Webway. (If you need a guide through 40K’s sea of proper nouns, Lexicanum is your friend.)
The second new companion to be revealed was Saro, a sanctioned psyker who stands in contrast to the defiantly unsanctioned psyker Idira, who was recruited in Owlcat’s previous 40K game, Rogue Trader. Unlike her, Saro’s mutant abilities have been turned to the service of the God-Emperor after a regime of thorough and brutal testing. As Owlcat’s summary of sanctioned psykers puts it, “Their lives are usually short, and their existence is wretched, but their abilities, tempered by sanctioned rituals and an iron will, become a mighty force in the eternal struggle to defend the Imperium.”
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The update also includes some stats based on decisions players made in the beta. Apparently the most popular player-character choice was a Noble Officer from a Hive World, and the faction most befriended via Dark Heresy’s reputation system was the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus. The most-bought item was the melta charge because, as Owlcat says, “Someone clearly likes big kabooms.”
Owlcat recently reassured fans that, while its upcoming Expanse game is more of a cinematic-style RPG, the studio won’t turn its backs on hardcore RPGs. And Dark Heresy sure seems like the kind of build-focused hardcore CRPG Owlcat is known for. It doesn’t have a release date at the moment, and according to our Ted Litchfield, now is actually the time to get disgustingly into the previous game, Rogue Trader.