Welcome.

--- 2021 Addendum ---
This "guide" was written back in 2018 as a way of communicating issues about the game to both players and the developers. The game has been updated since then. I have updated this guide to talk about the changes in the new section "Three years later".

I will leave the original "guide" below so that you can read what issues were there in the history of the game and have a comparison of what changed.
--- End of Addendum ---

Since the steam discussion board for Inquisitor: Martyr is an unmoderated mess (as usual..), I decided to present the wrongdoings of this game in a different manner. I might update this "guide" with replies to comments, and I will announce it in a comment when that happens. Feel free to leave questions and replies.

I see myself as an avid ARPG player, and after Grim Dawn's release, there was somewhat of an empty space for me, which is why I was looking forward to Inquisitor: Martyr's release. I played all of the Neocore's previous Van Helsing games, and even with their flaws, I really liked them, but due to said flaws, I have waited for the full release. I'm not really a fan of the W40K universe, I didn't read the books or play many games with this setting. I bought the game still in EA, few days before the end of Beta, and sadly, since I finished the campaign, it was a train of failures for me.

I will try to describe these failing points and why they shouldn't happen.

To be able to talk about the bad things, we first need to know what the game offers.

So, for your 50,- € you get (taken from the Steam page):

• A STORY-DRIVEN SINGLE PLAYER CAMPAIGN
  That lasts about 20-30 hours of gameplay, depending on your clear speed and difficulty you play.
  
• THE NEXT MILESTONE IN THE EVOLUTION OF ARPGS
  I'll quote the paragraph: "The first Action-RPG set in the grim future of the 41st Millennium takes the genre to its next level: an open-world sandbox game with a persistent universe with a huge variety of missions, tactical, brutal combat encounters in destructible environments and a storyline influenced by the community of players"
  
• TRAVERSE A WHOLE GALACTIC SECTOR
  "Explore the Star Map of the vast Caligari Sector, travel in different subsectors and explore an immense amount of solar systems, visit a growing number of unique points of interests"
  
• FIGHT THE CORRUPTION TOGETHER
  Up to 4-player coop. ONLINE ONLY.
  
• IMPROVE YOUR WEAPONS, CRAFT MISSIONS AND TWEAK YOUR SKILLS
  "Choose your loadout to your advantage for each mission!"
  
• A LIVING, EXPANDING WORLD
  "Warhammer 40,000: Inquisitor – Martyr is an ever-growing, long-lasting experience. Expansions and regular free updates will introduce new enemy factions, new terrain settings, new missions and mission types, new story-driven investigations and new gameplay features. Seasons are big, free updates that will introduce longer story arcs in which players can shape the persistent world of the Caligari sector with their actions."

So, by looking at this description, I see some standard ARPG things: Campaign, check. Different encounters, check. Equipment and crafting, check. Free updates with more content. Sounds good.
Then I see something new - an open world? ARPGs are usually limited with map boundaries and loading screens, well this sounds great!

Now that we know what we bought, let's take a look at what we got.

You start in a forced tutorial, a set of permanent maps with a little story behind them. The maps are small in size and you finish them within 15 minutes of play, and they are all happening on the same place - an old vessel where you transported. Ha, did you think you could travel from map A to map B seamlessly, open world style? Forget it! Loading screen in your face!


Why is this wrong?

• First, there's the obvious immersion failure of accessing view from your inaccessible ship.
  
• If you are not a story person or don't speak english, you skip the dialogues, which makes you blaze through the first missions within few minutes. So you get bombarded by multiple loading screens. A great first-time experience, if you ask me.
  
• But mainly, what happened to the open world promised on the Steam page? It's not just the tutorial, every single map in this game is divided by a loading screen. There is no open world, it's an outright lie, right there on the Steam page!

Solution: At least connect the maps happening on the same planet/on the same ship.
Solution: Remove the lie.

Ok, so you're in space after the first tutorial map. What can you do in space? Actually, only two things - enter next mission and open your character screen. You cannot open your character screen while in a map. It seems the authors tried to do this game tactical, XCOM style - pick your gear, which gives you the abilities you can use, then enter the next map.
But in an action RPG, it doesn't really work. I see this as a bad thing.
- If you drop a new item, it's very common to check it (and use it) right now, you don't want to wait.
- If you are minmaxing your build, you want to see the results and compare with the other setup.


Why is this wrong?

• It's incredibly annoying!
  This was an issue back in Van Helsing already - everytime you want to test something, you gotta load a Scenario mission. But there, you could at least open the character screen and inventory and swap things on the fly while in the mission, albeit without access to your storage. Here? Wanna swap that frag grenade for a stun grenade? Fakju player, exit mission first. Enjoy your loading screen.
  
• Sadly, I don't see why would I ever switch gear for "tactical" reasons like you do in XCOM. You see, XCOM is a turn-based game. You can plan your turns carefully, without the danger of getting killed by the enemies, they wait for your turn. And there are small numbers in play - hp, accuracy, damage, armor, all in the single digits. Getting that extra 1 hp or removing that 1 armor from the enemy is a big, impactful thing. Moreover, making a mistake on your turn can be fatal, you lose your soldier and his gear, permanently, and doing that repeatedly makes the game unwinnable. That's how it works for XCOM. In ARPGs, tactical doesn't matter.
  In ARPGs, the enemies don't wait, they will hit you all the time, and you will die sometimes. It's part of the game. All the numbers in ARPGs are big, eventually, so switching gear with small differences doesn't change the way you play. And if you die, there are no consequences.
  
• Martyr fails at this setting spectacularly. All characters start at over 3000 HP and the first monsters deal what, 25 damage? No reason to be tactical when you're a bullet sponge. You also don't really care if you use a slow but powerful plasma or fast but weaker autogun, because both are a spammable thing, so the big elite monster will just die either way, and the process and result is the same: I click and hold the mouse button, enemy dies.
  
• Even if you make too many mistakes and die, nothing happens. You just respawn a few meters back. No permanent consequences, no temporary negatives. You just failed a "Don't die" tarot? Who cares! You just run another.

Solution: Add character screen and gear changing while ingame. Make your game a proper ARPG again. XCOM-like doesn't work.

This ties closely with the next thing...

Fast-forward a few levels, you are in the middle of a campaign. You have travelled several planets and locations, faced many loading screens. You fire up the next mission, and suddenly, you're getting destroyed by the enemies! That's because the mission Power Rating just went up.
Power Rating in Martyr comes from your equipment, so it was probably meant to show the overall power of your character's equipment in a single number, much like the first-person game Warhammer: Vermintide 2 does. Martyr also uses this number for mission rating, and compares these two PR numbers. When your PR is higher than the map PR, you deal more dmg and you take less dmg. When your PR is lower, you get negatives.
But playing on a higher difficulty automatically boosts the mission PR into the negatives. And higher difficulty is the only way you get meaningful rewards - decent amount of Credits, Fate and Glory. You also get better loot when playing higher difficulty. You cannot play White or Green difficulty missions and get a steady supply of Relic equipment, for example.


Why is it wrong?

• One stat should not rule everything!
  You see, in Vermintide 2, the PR affects only one stat - a miniscule damage bonus, and the PR of items that drop. No matter your PR, you still take the same amount of damage, and you still deal mostly the same amount of damage. You don't deal less damage if your PR is low. In other words, your equipment stats matter.
  In Martyr, the stats on your items are not important - you have to keep upgrading your items PR in order to be able to keep up with the campaign missions' increasing difficulty. Any itemization stats are basically removed from the equation, because higher PR is better, and it is far better than wearing lower PR items with a specific stat like +% Critical Chance, for example. Higher PR will boost your damage and your survivability much more than any other stat on the items, with the only exception being a few OP relic stats that are getting nerfed.
  Only after you hit the current PR limit (currently at 1500 PR), the items with specific stats start to have an impactful meaning, and only because PR no longer goes up. If the PR limit ever increases, all your items will become irrelevant, because your items will have low PR.
  
• In terms of immersion, it also makes sense.
  I have a max lvl character. If I meet an Alpha Marine at PR 1500, I oneshot him, both his shields and life. Poof! He's a goner. At PR 1750, the identical Marine takes three hits from the identical spell with identical gear. Suddenly, his armor and shields don't go Poof! That is wrong. Either the Alpha Marines are critters, or they are not critters, you can't make them both.

Solution: Remove PR. Missions should have set difficulty based on your difficulty setting, as it was in Van Helsing, not based on some number on your items.

The Steam page states:
TRAVERSE A WHOLE GALACTIC SECTOR
"Explore the Star Map of the vast Caligari Sector, travel in different subsectors and explore an immense amount of solar systems, visit a growing number of unique points of interests"

So, the "exploration" works like this.
You click a system of planets, then you click a planet, then you click a mission icon, then you launch the mission. You get a short description of the solar system and its influencing inhabitants (this has no meaning in the game, you cannot change it, their influence doesn't matter). Then you get a short description of each mission you pick. You do the same thing with the campaign missions, random missions and tarot missions. Every time you fire up a mission, it loads a permanent map layout.
All you can do in the space map is click missions. There are exactly three exceptions - The Medical Station, which offers three quests and one-time augmentations, the Unholy Cathedral, which is a mission with an infinite monster arena, and the Warzone, which is just one mission icon, that opens up a "local" map with more mission icons, all of the same type.


Why is this wrong?

• There is a very limited set of map environments - Space Cathedral, Reskinned Space Cathedral, Battlefield, City Grounds, Infested Islands, Frozen Islands. Perhaps I forgot some. And each comes with a set amount of map layouts. Campaign missions are identical every time you play them, so only the Random and Tarot missions are randomly selected from this pool of layouts, depending on the planet you're on and on the mission type.
  But since all the maps are permanent (there's no randomness in the layout, and minimal randomness in the destructible objects), after a while you will be "exploring" the same small maps over and over again. Sadly, the layouts don't change when you switch to a new solar system, so there is no real variety to visiting a new planet.
  
• You shouldn't get a full minimap layout displayed at the start of a mission, before you even enter the map (just like a few campaign missions do this). There is nothing to explore if it's already explored.

Solution: Fix Warzone. Don't make it a copypasta of one random mission type. Make it interesting, and meaningful to play.
Solution: Fix Random Maps. Create real map randomizer, or dramatically increase the amount of possible layouts.
Solution: Create points of interest to explore. An empty mission with no description and no map layout, ready to be discovered and purged, containing secrets, story pieces from the W40K universe, its history, etc.
Solution: Let new planets have new environments, make it so that all planets are not all the same.

Again from the Store page comes this statement:

A LIVING, EXPANDING WORLD
"Warhammer 40,000: Inquisitor – Martyr is an ever-growing, long-lasting experience. Expansions and regular free updates will introduce new enemy factions, new terrain settings, new missions and mission types, new story-driven investigations and new gameplay features. Seasons are big, free updates that will introduce longer story arcs in which players can shape the persistent world of the Caligari sector with their actions."

Let's have a look at how does the world "live and expand" and how "players can shape the persistent world". There was a week long event called Unholy Incursion, that apparently was meant as a test for these kind of free updates. The explanation was, that a secret investigation revealed that Chaos Marines are interested in this sector. Suddenly, cultists and Marines appeared on the planets in the system, and we are sent to fight them. One planet was automatically destroyed from orbit, and there was nothing we could do about it, this was probably meant as a hint to what would happen should players not save the system.
The players have ran dozens of missions again and again, killing the bad guys over and over, which resulted in "saving the system". The result? Nothing happened, everything remained identical as it was before. We still get random missions on this system, and we got one time reward for participating in the purge. Players who did not participate also got rewarded, because there was a community-wide reward and a cabal-wide (cabals are guilds) reward.


Why is this wrong?

• Obviously, if you say that you will add new content with the update, then add no content with the update, it's a lie. Bad thing. Don't do that. The event copypasted a mission type with a selected type of enemies, and the only new thing was the mission icon.
  
• If you want the players to have "new story-driven investigations", it means there should be a story behind them. Like when a saved NPC tells us to go there, or a discovered written text tells us to investigate a planet. Like you tried to do it in the campaign, y'know. Just popping a message telling "there's been this investigation, blah blah, everyone go there blah blah" and ending it there, that's no story, that's just an order for soldiers.
  
• If you state that players can shape the persistent world, there must be some events leading to this shaping, which must be enacted by the players. You didn't let the players choose neither the events nor the possible outcomes, you chose them for the players.
  
• Finally, there must be visible consequences, which actually affect the game world. Without the consequences, there is no reason for the players to participate in the events.

Solution: Add events with consequences. For example, if a planet had a vendor, that sells specific equipment, then the planet dies, you lose the vendor. If a planet had a specific mission type, the mission type will vanish. This is very much tied to adding points of interest to your star map, which currently has NONE.
Solution: Create points of interest with NPCs, gossip, story missions, shops, etc. These can expand on the campaign, be standalone, or be a precursor for future events. Something the players can DO between the grind, to keep them playing your game. I believe there is enough of W40K history to draw content from.
Solution: Add events before events. Choices that players can make, which will determine the nature of a future event, just like you could choose the radical/puritan in the campaign. These new events could or could not affect your morality bar. And most importantly, don't hint or tell players that "selecting option A will have these consequences blah blah".
Solution: Make the world living, for real. Currently it's very much static - static missions on permanent map layouts, grouped on static planets in static solar systems. Where is the liveliness? I never saw a special mission pop out. I never saw a "point of interest". Don't repeat what you are already repeating over and over.

It is 2021 and I have returned to play the game again, 3 years later.
It is time to re-read what I have written and compare my words to the current version of Inquisitor: Martyr.

First fun fact is that this guide somehow disappeared from the list of guides. You can find it if you go through my Profile link, but you can't find it under Inquisitor: Martyr guides. First time my guide got "shadowbanned", but this also means that this new section probably won't be seen, so I'll keep it simple.


The promise of open world and nonsensical tutorial immersion.

Sadly, nothing about this changed at all.
The promise of open world is still there on the store page.
The tutorial is still divided by loading screens and still entails you being trapped onboard the Martyr and being unable to get out, while between the loading screens you are happily looking at the Martyr from onboard your ship.


Inventory access while in a mission, and the idea of gear management and tactical gameplay.

I am happy to see there were big changes here.
- The inventory is now accessible at any time. This makes comparing gear much less of a hassle than it was back in 2018. A very welcome change.
- The tactical aspect is still nonexistant. Your health pool is still crazy high, you are still a bullet sponge and you can still stand in the middle of monsters and fire away.
- However, the game is now much more ARPG-like, because the game became much faster after patch 2.0. There isn't much time for the tactical aspect anymore, and I have to say I like the new focus on action much more.


Power Rating and PR related issues.

I am also very happy to see that Power Rating has been removed.
Mission difficulty is now based on your character level. Items are no longer bound by the PR number. Items of any item level are now good, and you can focus on specific item bonuses from the beginning of the game. A very good change.


Exploration of the world, generation of random missions and repetitiveness.

The core remained the same.
There is still a limited pool of map terrains and limited map layouts that can appear as a mission map. It seems there are now certain special mission objectives (like the hidden missions in Void Crusades), but you uncover them just by regularly clearing the map - the exploration aspect is still basically non-existent.


New content and promises of players' decisions affecting the world.

Sadly, nothing changed here. The new content that is available is good, the campaign now continues further, there are new side mission types, there is the standalone DLC with a fourth class and its own campaign, plus we have investigations and crusades. There's a lot more stuff to do.
But.
No matter what you do, the game world remains the same. There are no events that require you to make a decision, there are no consequences of your actions in the game, and there are no visible changes in the world. This promise remained just that, only a promise.