During the recent New Game+ Showcase, the developers of Owlcat Games intervened with an interesting video interview to illustrate the mechanics and atmosphere of the anticipated turn-based RPG Warhammer 40,000: Dark Heresy, offering us an overview of how the title will differ from the previous and already highly appreciated Rogue Trader.

The team's goal is to immerse us in an authentic story of the Warhammer universe, where we will have to face internal and external enemies not as an army, but as an authority figure tasked with making difficult choices to allow the Imperium to hold out one more day. These will be narratives in which there are often no good options and there will be no way to escape, forcing us to "get our hands dirty" to achieve our goals.

One of the most significant changes compared to the studio's previous work concerns the management of combat and the game environmenttag. The team has reworked the way cover and lines of sight work, abandoning the "step up" mechanic: this means that if we end the turn behind a wall, we will actually stay behind that wall without extra movement circles that allow us to lean out to shoot, making the initial and final positioning much more tactical and meaningfultag. In addition, the old group-based "Momentum" system has been replaced by a new moral system, designed to be more intimate and personaltag.

The role-playing side will also have a massive impact during firefights, with a greater number of dice rolls that will not depend only on our ballistic skills, but will be significantly influenced by the role-play choices made previouslytag. We will have alternative ways to end the fights without necessarily killing all the enemies, and we will be able to aim at specific parts of the opponents' bodies to disable their movement options or the use of certain skillstag.

Great emphasis will be placed on the investigative component: we will not limit ourselves to reading history through the environment, but we will have to build real cases, collecting and interpreting evidence to discuss with our followers to draw conclusionstag. Being set in Spark, the game will see us involved in power struggles where our decisions about which case to take first will alter the game worldtag. The developers gave the example of an area of the slums threatened by toxic waste: intervening immediately we will only find imminent threats, but visiting the area at an advanced stage the toxic level will have risen, altering the geometry of the level, the combat encounters and the narrative itselftag.

We leave you to the video, enjoy!