Owlcat's Rogue Trader Apology Is the Right Move, But It Shouldn't Have Been Necessary

I remember booting up Warhammer 40K: Rogue Trader on Switch 2 launch day. The loading screens stretched into minutes. The framerate chugged during combat, and text was so small I had to squint. This wasn't a port. It was a cry for help.

So when Owlcat Games announced a "massive update" alongside making all DLC and expansions free, my first reaction wasn't gratitude. It was: finally. Because the Switch 2 version of one of the best CRPGs of the last decade was, by all accounts, one of the console's worst ports. And that's a shame, because underneath the technical wreckage, Rogue Trader is something special.

Let's be clear: Rogue Trader is not for everyone. It's a dense, sprawling, turn-based RPG where you command a ship, explore the Koronus Expanse, and make decisions that would make an Inquisitor blush. It's the kind of game that rewards patience, system mastery, and a tolerance for reading walls of text. I love it. But I also understand why someone might bounce off it.

The Switch 2 port, however, made those barriers insurmountable. Poor performance isn't just an inconvenience—it breaks the immersion that CRPGs rely on. When you're trying to parse a dialogue tree about heretical artifacts and the game stutters every time you scroll, you stop caring about the narrative. You start caring about whether the next patch will fix the audio desync.

Owlcat's response—a massive performance update and all DLC now free—is the right thing to do. It's a mea culpa wrapped in generosity. But it also raises a question: why did it take a disaster for them to do this?

This isn't a new pattern. Remember Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire on consoles? That game launched with a save-corrupting bug that took months to fix. Or Divinity: Original Sin II on Switch, which required a herculean effort from Larian to get running smoothly. CRPGs are notoriously hard to port to weaker hardware, but that doesn't excuse releasing a product that feels like a beta.

The unexpected connection here is to Cyberpunk 2077. Not because of genre or theme, but because of the redemption arc. CD Projekt Red launched a broken game, then spent years fixing it, eventually turning it into something genuinely great. Owlcat is doing the same, albeit on a smaller scale. The difference is that Cyberpunk had the budget to rebuild from the ground up. Owlcat is a smaller studio, and this update feels less like a grand vision and more like triage.

Who is this update for? It's for the people who bought the Switch 2 version on faith, hoping for a portable Rogue Trader experience. It's for the skeptics who waited, who now have a reason to dive in. It's for anyone who believes that a good game deserves a second chance.

But let's not pretend this is a victory lap. Making DLC free is a nice gesture, but it's also a recognition that the base product wasn't worth the price of admission. If Owlcat had shipped a competent port from day one, they wouldn't need to give away content to win back goodwill.

Still, I'm glad they're doing it. Because Rogue Trader is a game worth playing. Its combat is tactical without being tedious. Its writing is sharp, with the kind of grimdark humor that makes 40K bearable. And its systems—colony management, ship combat, alignment choices—are deep enough to justify multiple playthroughs.

So here's my advice: if you have a Switch 2 and you've been curious about Rogue Trader, now is the time. The update is live, the DLC is free, and the game is finally what it should have been at launch. Just don't forget what it took to get here.

Somewhere in the Warp, a tech-priest is nodding sagely.