When Owlcat Games released Warhammer 40k Rogue Trader in December 2023, I wrote about how folks would inevitably compare it to the behemoth Baldur's Gate 3 and be disappointed, and how much of a shame that was. Well, now it's 2026, Owlcat's making Dark Heresy - a seriously exciting CRPG that builds on Rogue Trader's success in almost every way - and, lo and behold, my fellow game journalists can't help but call it 'BG3 but for Warhammer' all over again.
So it goes with era defining masterpieces; they cast long shadows and invite endless comparisons. Baldur's Gate 3 occupies the top spot in our list of the best CRPGs ever made, and there's every chance it's going to stay there for many years to come.
This business of comparing to the Big Dog isn't purely SEO gamesmanship or attention baiting, either - it's just effective communication of complex ideas. If everyone and their granny has played a certain game, it automatically becomes a useful yardstick, because you can say "it works a bit like X in BG3" and know that it'll help your audience understand better than explaining the new feature from scratch.
Game makers don't generally make such comparisons themselves, partly because for them it's a double edged chainsword. Sure, all publicity is good publicity, and having your game mentioned in the same breath as the unquestioned GOAT of its genre can only do your sales a favor. But on the other, er, edge, that hype can drown out the nuances of what makes your game special. At its worst, this 'David vs. Goliath' narrative can create false expectations and end up causing the game to be less celebrated than it deserved, simply because it didn't achieve its foretold, impossible levels of greatness. Remember the Halo Killers? Me neither.
After 15 hours in the Warhammer 40k: Dark Heresy alpha playtest build, I'm confident in saying the 'Warhammer's Baldur's Gate 3' prophecy, once again not made by Owlcat, but once again made and echoed by various online commentators, will not come to pass.
There are gameplay reasons: Dark Heresy's world isn't as detailed or interactive as BG3's was; its character progression, builds, and tactics aren't as polished or approachable; and its graphics, while greatly improved from Rogue Trader, are still nowhere close to the effortless wow factor with which Larian's game enchanted so many D&D newbies.
The final game will be far richer than the alpha I've played, of course - fully voiced dialogue will punch up the immersion a lot, and I can't wait for that. But this is not a skeleton on which a BG3 scale leviathan can be made. Honestly, though, the problem isn't with Dark Heresy - it's absolutely fantastic, and I'll come to that.
No, the problem is the premise. To be the Baldur's Gate 3 of something, you don't just have to be the best videogame ever made about it. You also have to:
- Come after a long period of there being no good videogames about it.
- Be so surprisingly good, in so many ways, that everyone starts wanting more videogames about it.
- Be so monumentally successful that you reach outside of its usual fans and generate renewed interest in the thing itself.
That's what BG3 did for Dungeons & Dragons; it was a shocking, delightful, avenging angel. Dark Heresy can't be that for Warhammer 40k, because 40k doesn't need an avenging angel.
We're already well into a golden age of Warhammer 40k games, with lots more on the way - we don't need rescuing and inspiring, we just need talented, committed developers to keep pushing the envelope and exploring more of the Warhammer 40,000 universe, in new ways. And Dark Heresy is much more interesting than the "BG3 of Warhammer Y/N" concept would suggest, because that's exactly what Owlcat is doing with this game: pushing the gameplay and lore envelope.
It's not in the combat, which generally just adds some polish and quality of life tweaks to Rogue Trader's complex, but superb recipe. It's not in the visuals, which as I mentioned are a ton better, but still nothing to hold an Imperial triumph about. It's not even in the written storytelling; Rogue Trader already wipes the floor with the narrative in any other 40k videogame I've ever played, but the alpha's plotlines felt like a continuation of that, rather than a level up.
Instead, Dark Heresy's genius innovation is in the ludonarrative: the way we experience and interact with the story through play. Rogue Trader was a hero adventure game where we flew around space, explored planets, and battled enemies, because that's a Rogue Trader's job. We discovered its stories and characters mostly via exploration and combat.
Dark Heresy still has all that stuff, but it's wound around a new core way of playing, because this is a detective game. As an acolyte of the Inquisition, our actual job is to investigate mysteries and uncover important truths. Along the way we'll explore interesting places and kill the bad guys, naturally, but it's all in the service of sniffing out clues, piecing them together, and solving the case.
The big question for me, when playing the alpha, was how well it delivered on that promise. I got very excited when a dev diary showed off the Inquisitorial Journal's 'detective pinboard' thing, but it was still perfectly possible the gumshoe stuff would feel tacked on.
I'm pleased to report the opposite is true. The handful of connected 'cases' in the alpha are absolutely central to the experience. It was a genuine joy to go from place to place, person to person, feeling like I was following leads that I myself had dug up.
Despite the inevitable guardrails and checkboxes behind the scenes, Owlcat makes these investigations feel organic and non-linear, creating the impression that your deductions are creating the story as you go. Each new piece of intel, from a rumor shared by a rando NPC to a decrypted dataslate or crime scene recording, becomes a pinned data point on your wall. But not all of them are reliable or even true, and you'll have to connect them together yourself, drawing strings across the board that also might be wrong.
All this meant that, to a surprising extent, every time I had to shoot up some gangers, bribe or intimidate someone, or seek out a hidden area, the most satisfying reward was information, rather than XP, guns, and gear. That's amazing.
The playable alpha is just one slice taken out of the game's first half, of course. To be sure if the whole of Dark Heresy makes good on its promises, I'll have to wait for release and, given Owlcat still hasn't announced a release date, that'll be many months at least.
But I'm going on record now that the most interesting thing about this game won't be whether it counts as Warhammer's Baldur's Gate 3 (it really won't, you know). It'll be the fact that, unlike any 40k videogame before, it'll properly show us the absolute dynamite that Games Workshop's grimy, dark, deeply political sci fi setting can create with the detective genre.
That said, Owlcat: Get Dan Abnett in to write an Eisenhorn DLC and I'll equate Dark Heresy to whatever seminal masterwork you care to name. It can be the Anna Karenina of Grimdark or the International Space Station of isometric RPGs if you like, honestly, just please make it happen.
If that last paragraph has you confused, please read our guide to the best Warhammer 40k books, and then immediately read Eisenhorn. Otherwise, come join the free Wargamer Discord community and let me know your biggest hopes and dreams for Dark Heresy. We don't have a serial killer pinboard in there… yet.