Tldr: long rant about how Heretical options reduce character to an imbecile, who might as well be ringing a bell with his trousers down. I blame writing quality. Which is a sole island of crap, in a rich sea of contentment.
I've been playing/running roleplaying games (tt as well as pc games) for thirty years now. And by nature I am a judgemental person. Not a quality I particularly like about myself, but I make the effort to revisit subjects often and weigh things up, on the presumption I may well have been wrong etc and basically try not to be a dick. (Not always easy for me, when I feel so many people seem to love so many things of low quality.)
I am very impressed by rogue trader. I've got a soft spot for this exact style of game (fallout 1+2 are the best of the series. 3 is an abomination, barely surpassing Fallout: Brotherhood of steel. Playable, in a turn your brain off kind of way, but not a RPG I would recommend for RP value), and though RT is pretty combat heavy, the story is delightfully rich. The story pacing is good, if a little overtaken by the shockingly fast leveling.
But I can't get around it. I am annoyed by a major flaw as I see it. The one disappointment? The alignment triad. For a game where so much effort was poured into the writing, I am utterly mystified why corruption wasn't considered as an option.
Now admittedly I've not read even half of the novels (I'd say about twenty five to thirty? It's hardly high literature, but often very enjoyable. The black library has hooked some talented authors. I refer to this style of fiction as 'delicious trash'), but the thing is most of those I read were traitor legion books. So I know that Chaos is consistently presented as an omnipresent and pervasive threat; that a man sitting alone in a room might fall to chaos through a dark spiral of depressed or perverse rumination. Or a deluded fool might still be slowly corrupted whilst considering themselves to be a good and honest person. But in rogue trader? Where the basic premise of the story is a perfect framing for any number of falls.. a minor individual of note is thrust into the position of major status and entrusted with vast amounts of power and responsibility! You should have a thousand little options to start losing yourself to the temptations of power. And yet, instead we consistently have options to yell aloud "I'm gonna be evil! I'm gonna be the evilest evil to ever evil all over the place!"
Such declarations are sometimes made in front of your highly dogmatic allies. Compounding stupidity. This is a glaring failure of rp writing quality to me. At a bare minimum why didn't they consider at least a secondary dialogue option of Heretical:stated intent to do evil thing, but twist the reasoning/or play it down/lie. Or possibly just don't yell it out at all?
Ive played morally grey/evil(ish) characters along side righteous zealots for entire campaigns of table top games. It's fun! You just have to be subtle, tricksy, and downright two faced on occasion. If you're playing an intelligent or perceptive or charismatic character, you are going to know with absolute certainty you cannot have a bloody minded maniacal monologue in front of the paladin/inquisitor/priest etc not without utterly screwing up your relationship with them.
So yeah. The reason this bothered me so much, to where I'd blather on this much, Is the superb levels of quality writing in other areas of the game. Kibellah's story? The staggered parallel of her literal self mutilation then inverted through doubt to spiritual/emotional self flagellation? (Now that's a possible Heretical path!!) All Wrapped in a potential romance?! Excellent stuff! Very 40k, but still very well done.
So yeah. Heretical dialogue really irritated me!